Finding potential regulatory elements in noncoding regions of the human genome is a challenging problem. Analyzing novel sequences for the presence of known transcription factor binding sites or their weight matrices produces a huge number of false positive predictions that are randomly and uniformily distributed. rVista combines database searches with comparative sequence analysis, reducing the number of false positive predictions by ~95% while maintaining a high sensitivity of the search.

G. Loots and I. Ovcharenko, rVista 2.0: evolutionary analysis of transcription factor binding sites, Nucleic Acids Research, 32(Web Server Issue), W217-W221 (2004) Registration not required.