Abstract
Cis-regulatory elements play a number of important roles in determining the fate of messenger RNAs (mRNAs). Due to these elements, mRNAs may be translated with remarkable efficiency, or destroyed with little translation. Untranslated regions cover over a third of a typical human mRNA and often contain a range of regulatory elements. Some elements along with their RNA or protein binding partners are well characterized, though many are not. These require different types of bioinformatic methods for identification and discovery. The most successful techniques combine a range of information and search strategies. Useful information may include conservation across species, prior biological knowledge, known false positives, or noisy high-throughput experimental data. This chapter focuses on current successful methods designed to discover elements with high sensitivity but low false-positive rates.