Abstract: Promoter is an indispensable cis-acting element for driving gene expression in transcriptional regulation of higher plants. Different functions of the promoter elements cause diverse driving efficiency and space-time specialty. Identifying the structures and functions of promoter elements contributes to a better understanding of the growth and development progress, multi-stress tolerance, and evolution development of plants. With the development of high-throughput technology, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, the technique of identifying cis-acting element and constructing artificial biological components that meet the design requirements has gradually emerged, providing a foundation for efficient, precise, and diverse gene regulation in molecular breeding. This article aims to reconstruct the application of promoter elements in molecular design, introducing the detailed structure and function of higher plant promoters, as well as the identification methods of cis-acting elements. 27 kinds of 174 currently identified inducible, tissue-specific promoter elements as well as their applications on artificial modification and synthesis of promoters are summarized. Accordingly, the design direction and method are proposed. This review will be helpful for the further functional analyses of promoters in higher plants and their applications on molecular design breeding.

Key words: promoter, cis-acting elements, inducible, tissue-specificity, artificial synthetic promoter