Dataset Information

Discovering multiple realistic TFBS motifs based on a generalized model.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Identification of transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) is a central problem in Bioinformatics on gene regulation. de novo motif discovery serves as a promising way to predict and better understand TFBSs for biological verifications. Real TFBSs of a motif may vary in their widths and their conservation degrees within a certain range. Deciding a single motif width by existing models may be biased and misleading. Additionally, multiple, possibly overlapping, candidate motifs are desired and necessary for biological verification in practice. However, current techniques either prohibit overlapping TFBSs or lack explicit control of different motifs.

Results

We propose a new generalized model to tackle the motif widths by considering and evaluating a width range of interest simultaneously, which should better address the width uncertainty. Moreover, a meta-convergence framework for genetic algorithms (GAs), is proposed to provide multiple overlapping optimal motifs simultaneously in an effective and flexible way. Users can easily specify the difference amongst expected motif kinds via similarity test. Incorporating Genetic Algorithm with Local Filtering (GALF) for searching, the new GALF-G (G for generalized) algorithm is proposed based on the generalized model and meta-convergence framework.

Conclusion

GALF-G was tested extensively on over 970 synthetic, real and benchmark datasets, and is usually better than the state-of-the-art methods. The range model shows an increase in sensitivity compared with the single-width ones, while providing competitive precisions on the E. coli benchmark. Effectiveness can be maintained even using a very small population, exhibiting very competitive efficiency. In discovering multiple overlapping motifs in a real liver-specific dataset, GALF-G outperforms MEME by up to 73% in overall F-scores. GALF-G also helps to discover an additional motif which has probably not been annotated in the dataset. http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/%7Etmchan/GALFG/

SUBMITTER: Chan TM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2770069 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Discovering multiple realistic TFBS motifs based on a generalized model.

Chan Tak-Ming TM Li Gang G Leung Kwong-Sak KS Lee Kin-Hong KH

BMC bioinformatics 20091007

<h4>Background</h4>Identification of transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) is a central problem in Bioinformatics on gene regulation. de novo motif discovery serves as a promising way to predict and better understand TFBSs for biological verifications. Real TFBSs of a motif may vary in their widths and their conservation degrees within a certain range. Deciding a single motif width by existing models may be biased and misleading. Additionally, multiple, possibly overlapping, candidate motif ...[more]

PMID: 19811641

Similar Datasets

Project description:Computational methods for discovery of sequence elements that are enriched in a target set compared with a background set are fundamental in molecular biology research. One example is the discovery of transcription factor binding motifs that are inferred from ChIP-chip (chromatin immuno-precipitation on a microarray) measurements. Several major challenges in sequence motif discovery still require consideration: (i) the need for a principled approach to partitioning the data into target and background sets; (ii) the lack of rigorous models and of an exact p-value for measuring motif enrichment; (iii) the need for an appropriate framework for accounting for motif multiplicity; (iv) the tendency, in many of the existing methods, to report presumably significant motifs even when applied to randomly generated data. In this paper we present a statistical framework for discovering enriched sequence elements in ranked lists that resolves these four issues. We demonstrate the implementation of this framework in a software application, termed DRIM (discovery of rank imbalanced motifs), which identifies sequence motifs in lists of ranked DNA sequences. We applied DRIM to ChIP-chip and CpG methylation data and obtained the following results. (i) Identification of 50 novel putative transcription factor (TF) binding sites in yeast ChIP-chip data. The biological function of some of them was further investigated to gain new insights on transcription regulation networks in yeast. For example, our discoveries enable the elucidation of the network of the TF ARO80. Another finding concerns a systematic TF binding enhancement to sequences containing CA repeats. (ii) Discovery of novel motifs in human cancer CpG methylation data. Remarkably, most of these motifs are similar to DNA sequence elements bound by the Polycomb complex that promotes histone methylation. Our findings thus support a model in which histone methylation and CpG methylation are mechanistically linked. Overall, we demonstrate that the statistical framework embodied in the DRIM software tool is highly effective for identifying regulatory sequence elements in a variety of applications ranging from expression and ChIP-chip to CpG methylation data. DRIM is publicly available at http://bioinfo.cs.technion.ac.il/drim.

Dataset Information

Discovering multiple realistic TFBS motifs based on a generalized model.

Background

Results

Conclusion

Publications

Discovering multiple realistic TFBS motifs based on a generalized model.

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