PromoSer: a large-scale mammalian promoter and transcription start site identification service

Proximal promoters have a major impact on transcriptional regulation. Studies of the sequence-based nature of this regulation usually require collection of proximal promoter sequences for large sets of co-regulated genes. We report a newly implemented web service that facilitates extraction of user specified regions around the transcription start site of all annotated human, mouse or rat genes. The transcription start sites have been identified computationally by considering alignments of a large number of partial and full-length mRNA sequences to genomic DNA, with provision for alternative promoters. The service is publicly available at http://biowulf.bu.edu/zlab/PromoSer/.