Transcription factors have "fingers" that prefeo a certain short, sloppy pattern in the nucleotides "letters" of a DNA sequence, but in many cases we don't know what these patterns are. Our software looks for short sequences of nucleotides that appear more-or-less the same near multiple gene beginnings and which also appear more-or-less the same in the corresponding locations in the genomes of related species. As DNA sequences are huge, ranging from millions to billions of nucleotides, and these sequences are short and only approximately conserved from one site to the next, this is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem and requires lots of computational power.
