Analysis of various predicted structural properties of promoter regions in prokaryotic as well as eukaryotic genomes indicates that they have several common features, such as lower stability, higher curvature and less bendability, when compared with their neighboring regions. Based on the difference in stability between neighboring upstream and downstream regions in the vicinity of experimentally determined transcription start sites (TSS), a promoter prediction algorithm (PromPredict) has been developed to identify promoter regions in prokaryotic genomic DNA (Kanhere A and Bansal M 2005a, 2005b).

Ecoprom is a database of predicted E. coli promoter regions corresponding to the Ecocyc annotated TSSs and genes. Promoter prediction has been done over sequences of 1001 nt length (spanning from -500 to +500 with respect to the annotated TSSs), based on DNA stability. Transcription start site (TSS) and gene information for E. coli was downloaded from Ecocyc Database (Version 12.5, updated on 8^th October, 2008) (Keseler et al 2005).