Identification and prediction of developmental enhancers in sea urchin embryos.

Background: The transcription of developmental regulatory genes is often controlled by multiple cis-regulatory elements. The identification and functional characterization of distal regulatory elements remains challenging, even in tractable model organisms like sea urchins.

Results: We evaluate the use of chromatin accessibility, transcription and RNA Polymerase II for their ability to predict enhancer activity of genomic regions in sea urchin embryos.