Tissue P systems are distributed parallel computing models inspired by the structure of tissue and the way of communicating substances between two cells or between a cell and the environment. In this work, we consider a variant of tissue P systems, called tissue P systems with promoters, where the application of rules is regulated by promoters. The computational power of such P systems is investigated. Specifically, it is proved that such P systems using only antiport rules of length 2 or using only symport rules of length 1 are able to compute only finite sets of non-negative integers. However, such P systems with one cell and using antiport rules of length 2 and symport rules of length 1 or only using symport rules of length 2 are Turing universal. Moreover, a uniform solution to the SAT problem is provided by tissue P systems with promoters and cell division using only antiport rules of length 2. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.