A Strategy for Decoding Endogenous Plant Promoter Sequences

I will present a genome-scale dataset that precisely identifies Transcription Start Sites for a majority of Arabidopsis genes, revealing that plant promoters are not primarily TATA-based and have an unexpected structure composed of many position-specific sequence elements. A pattern recognition based analysis identifies combinations of factors that are likely to lead to transcription initiation.  This analysis allows us to explore the question of what constitutes a 'minimal' endogenous plant promoter.