Internet resources for the functional analysis of 5 ' and 3 ' untranslated regions of eukaryotic mRNAs

The elucidation of the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of gene expression is one of the most challenging goals of modern biology. Despite their long having been consid- ered mostly 'junk' DNA, non-coding regions of eukaryotic genomes play crucial roles in the regulation of gene expression. In particular, 5? and 3? untranslated regions (UTR) of eukary- otic mRNAs are involved in many post- transcriptional regulatory pathways that control mRNA localization, stabil- ity and translation efficiency1,2. In order to approach a systematic study of the structural and functional features of UTR sequences, we developed UTRdb.