PRESTA (Promoter EST Association) is  

 1.  Standalone Windows programme 

PRESTA is a Visual Basic 6.0 programme combining user interface, web agent and text analysis functions.

  1. An organism wide search for upstream promoter sequences in GenBank and EMBL databases will result in thousands of entries, most of them without any actual promoter sequence. PRESTA automatically removes most of the unwanted records and assists in quick processing of entries containing genuine promoter sequences.

  2. The immediately downstream transcribed sequence is used for the recovery of matching ESTs clones by a high stringency Blast search. The 5' ends of these ESTs then serve for verifying the transcription start site position.

  3. Tissue source of the respective ESTs cDNA libraries provides information about the promoter activity.

PRESTA requires Microsoft Internet Explorer, preferably version 5.0 or higher. Other third party utilities, including NCBI BlastCl3 client and parts of SEQUALN , are automatically installed with PRESTA. To facilitate the user orientation, the PRESTA package comes with extensive help.


 2.  Searchable public database

PRESTA database

is a searchable database of promoters recently extracted by PRESTA from GenBank and EMBL libraries. Annotation of PRESTA entries is supported by 5' ends ESTs mapping. We did not detect any PRESTA overlap with the current EPD release.

Published result using PRESTA should cite:
Mach, V. (2002) PRESTA: associating promoter sequences with information on gene expression. Genome Biology 3(9) research 0050.1-0050.7

PRESTA web site was created by Ivana Machova and Vaclav Mach , © 2002