Putative elements in the vicinity of viral transcription initiation sites

1. Animal virus sequences present in GenBank have been aligned according to their mRNA transcription initiation sites and common elements have been searched. 2. Such elements can conceivably serve as recognition sequences to the RNA polymerase and/or other DNA binding proteins involved in the regulation of viral transcription. 3. The distributions of the 64 triplets and 256 quartets with respect to these initiation sites have been examined. 4. In addition to subsets of the TATAAAT sequence, some G-C containing oligomers are frequently present. 5. Sequences of the latter type have been shown to bind the Sp1 protein. 6. The biological data is reviewed and the DNA structural implications are discussed.