Genomic strategies to identify mammalian regulatory sequences

With the continuing accomplishments of the human genome project, high-throughput strategies to identify DNA sequences that are important in mammalian gene regulation are becoming increasingly feasible. In contrast to the historic, labour-intensive, wet-laboratory methods for identifying regulatory sequences, many modern approaches are heavily focused on the computational analysis of large genomic data sets. Data from inter-species genomic sequence comparisons and genome-wide expression profiling, integrated with various computational tools, are poised to contribute to the decoding of genomic sequence and to the identification of those sequences that orchestrate gene regulation. In this review, we highlight several genomic approaches that are being used to identify regulatory sequences in mammalian genomes.