Transcriptional regulation is the mechanism in the cell that controls when and how genes are expressed into proteins. This document gives an overview over current computational approaches that try to predict "motifs" that control the process. Motifs are short degenerate words or patterns within promotor sequences, putative binding sites, which are commonly usually upstream of a gene. The two common approaches in bioinformatics (matching against known representatives and ab initio prediction) are presented. For the latter, we describe algorithmical details of most existing implementations and introduce a tool that could simplify everyday work with these programs.
