BMC Bioinformatics BioMed Central Research article Open Access A multistep bioinformatic approach detects putative regulatory elements in gene promoters Stefania Bortoluzzi1, Alessandro Coppe1, Andrea Bisognin1, Cinzia Pizzi2 and Gian Antonio Danieli*1 Address: 1Department of Biology, University of Padova – Via Bassi 58/B, 35131, Padova, Italy and 2Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova – Via Gradenigo 6/B, 35131, Padova, Italy Email: Stefania Bortoluzzi -
[email protected]; Alessandro Coppe -
[email protected]; Andrea Bisognin -
[email protected]; Cinzia Pizzi -
[email protected]; Gian Antonio Danieli* -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 18 May 2005 Received: 12 November 2004 Accepted: 18 May 2005 BMC Bioinformatics 2005, 6:121 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-6-121 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/6/121 © 2005 Bortoluzzi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Searching for approximate patterns in large promoter sequences frequently produces an exceedingly high numbers of results. Our aim was to exploit biological knowledge for definition of a sheltered search space and of appropriate search parameters, in order to develop a method for identification of a tractable number of sequence motifs. Results: Novel software (COOP) was developed for extraction of sequence motifs, based on clustering of exact or approximate patterns according to the frequency of their overlapping occurrences.