Kristen K. B. Barthel, Xuedong Liu

The revelation that the human genome encodes only approximately 25,000 genes and thus cannot account for phenotypic complexity has been one of the biggest surprises in the post-genomic era. However, accumulating evidence suggests that transcriptional regulation may be in large part responsible for this observed mammalian complexity. Consequently, there has been a strong drive to locate cis-regulatory regions in mammalian genomes in order to understand the unifying principles governing these regions, including their genomic distribution. Although a number of systematic approaches have been developed, these all discount coding sequence.