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Updated: Jul 18, 2026
08:12
A Web-Based Workflow for Selecting Gene- and Tissue-Specific Enhancers
Published on: July 18, 2025
VISTA Enhancer Browser--a database of tissue-specific human enhancers
Axel Visel1, Simon Minovitsky, Inna Dubchak
1Genomics Division, MS 84-171, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA.
Nucleic Acids Research
|November 30, 2006
Summary
Researchers identified and validated over 100 human tissue-specific enhancers using comparative genomics and transgenic mice. The VISTA Enhancer Browser provides this crucial data for computational studies of gene regulation.
Area of Science:
- Genomics
- Developmental Biology
- Bioinformatics
Background:
- Distant-acting cis-regulatory elements, or enhancers, are crucial for gene regulation but largely uncharacterized.
- A lack of experimentally validated enhancer collections impedes genome-wide prediction and functional studies.
Purpose of the Study:
- To identify and experimentally validate human enhancer elements.
- To create a comprehensive database of enhancers with defined activities for computational analysis.
Main Methods:
- Comparative genome analysis to identify candidate enhancers.
- In vivo enhancer activity testing in transgenic mice.
- Data compilation into the VISTA Enhancer Browser.
Main Results:
- Over 250 DNA fragments tested, with more than 100 validated as tissue-specific enhancers.
- Detailed reporter gene expression patterns provided for validated enhancers.
- Database includes data on embryonic day 11.5 whole-mount embryo staining.
Conclusions:
- The VISTA Enhancer Browser provides a valuable, experimentally validated resource for studying enhancer function.
- This validated dataset will facilitate computational predictions and downstream functional studies of enhancers.
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