Consensus sequence

All the actual examples shouldn't differ from the consensus by more than a few substitutions, but counting mismatches in this way can lead to inconsistencies.

This kind of mutation will generally make the promoter stronger, and thus the RNA polymerase forms a tighter bind to the DNA it wishes to transcribe and transcription is up-regulated.

These types of mutations down-regulate transcription since RNA polymerase can no longer bind as tightly to the core promoter sequence.

This is a graphical representation of the consensus sequence, in which the size of a symbol is related to the frequency that a given nucleotide (or amino acid) occurs at a certain position.

Sequence logos can be generated using WebLogo, or using the Gestalt Workbench, a publicly available visualization tool written by Gustavo Glusman at the Institute for Systems Biology.