The Dragon LEA database offers users the ability to explore results found by Meier et al. (2008) in the Journal of RICE, for further information on the paper please go to the "Team" section.

In eukaryotes, the coordinated transcriptional modulation of large gene sets, which is required to meet changes in development programs or environmental challenges, is dictated by the combinatorial use of cis-regulatory motifs in the promoters of genes. We therefore hypothesise that promoter content similarity can be used to identify groups of co-expressed genes that function coherently during a specific cellular response and developed a new methodology to test this hypothesis. The test is made in rice starting with a group of co-expressed Late Embryogenesis Abundant (LEA) genes. We generated a putative co-expressed LEA gene network by identifying other genes in the rice genome that share the most similar promoter contents. A literature assessment of these genes indicated that many of them could plausibly complement the function of LEA genes and 73.36% of 244 genes predicted by our method were experimentally confirmed to co-express with the LEA genes in maturing rice embryos.