Global analysis of gene transcription regulation in prokaryotes

Prokaryotes have complex mechanisms to regulate their gene transcription, through the action of transcription factors (TFs). This review deals with current strategies, approaches and challenges in the understanding of i) how to map the repertoires of TF and operon on a genome, ii) how to identify the specific cis-acting DNA elements and their DNA-binding TFs that are required for expression of a given gene, iii) how to define the regulon members of a given TF, iv) how a given TF interacts with its target promoters, v) how these TF-promoter DNA interactions constitute regulatory networks, and vi) how transcriptional regulatory networks can be reconstructed by the reverse-engineering methods. Our goal is to depict the power of newly developed genomic techniques and computational tools, alone or in combination, to dissect the genetic circuitry of transcription regulation, and how this has the tremendous potential to model the regulatory networks in the prokaryotic cells.