COMPUTATIONAL PREDICTION AND ANALYSIS OF DORSAL-VENTRAL PATTERNING GENE ENHANCERS IN Drosophila melanogaster

Transcriptional enhancers are cis-regulatory elements, non-coding DNA sequences containing multiple activator and repressor binding sites ranging from 200 bp to 1 kb in length and upstream to the promoter or within the first intron of the regulatory gene. A detailed understanding of enhancer mechanism and enhancer evolution is necessary to determine how changes in gene expression in different lineages can lead to novel phenotypes. In the current research, enhancers of genes involved in Dorsal-Ventral (DV) patterning in Drosophila were identified and localized. Since DV patterning is controlled by a combination of transcription factors, viz., dorsal, twist, snail, Zelda and Supressor of Hairless {Su(H)}, the motif data of these proteins were downloaded from the JASPAR database and then used to look for clusters of binding sites in 20 kb flanking regions for these genes with the help of Cluster-Buster software. The output generated was validated using the already available enhancer sequences in Redfly database. It is worth noting that the computationally predicted enhancers of rhomboid (rho) and short gastrulation (sog) show similarity with functionally validated enhancer. Apart from this, new enhancers binding sites were also predicted for the phantom (phm) and heartless (htl) genes.