VISTA Enhancer Browser

VISTA Enhancer Browser provides experimentally validated human and mouse enhancers and associated in vivo reporter expression data to identify and characterize distant-acting cis-regulatory elements.

Key Features:

• Experimentally Validated Enhancers: Hosts over 250 DNA fragments tested for enhancer activity, with more than 100 validated as tissue-specific enhancers.
• Comparative Genome Analysis and In Vivo Testing: Employs comparative genome analysis to identify candidate enhancers and assesses their activity using transgenic mouse assays.
• Datasets by Gene, Tissue, and Conservation: Links enhancers to nearby genes, reporter gene expression patterns, tissue specificity, and conservation depth for dataset assembly.
• Visual and Anatomical Data: Provides digital images of whole-mount embryo staining at embryonic day 11.5 along with detailed anatomical descriptions of reporter gene expression.

Scientific Applications:

• Enhancer prediction training sets: Supplies experimentally validated enhancers for computational model training and genome-wide enhancer prediction.
• Functional genomics of tissue-specific expression: Enables analysis of regulatory mechanisms underlying tissue-specific gene expression in human and mouse.

Methodology:

Combines comparative genomics to identify candidate elements with experimental validation of enhancer activity in transgenic mice.