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The next generation of transcription factor binding site prediction.

ABSTRACT: Finding where transcription factors (TFs) bind to the DNA is of key importance to decipher gene regulation at a transcriptional level. Classically, computational prediction of TF binding sites (TFBSs) is based on basic position weight matrices (PWMs) which quantitatively score binding motifs based on the observed nucleotide patterns in a set of TFBSs for the corresponding TF. Such models make the strong assumption that each nucleotide participates independently in the corresponding DNA-protein interaction and do not account for flexible length motifs. We introduce transcription factor flexible models (TFFMs) to represent TF binding properties. Based on hidden Markov models, TFFMs are flexible, and can model both position interdependence within TFBSs and variable length motifs within a single dedicated framework. The availability of thousands of experimentally validated DNA-TF interaction sequences from ChIP-seq allows for the generation of models that perform as well as PWMs for stereotypical TFs and can improve performance for TFs with flexible binding characteristics. We present a new graphical representation of the motifs that convey properties of position interdependence. TFFMs have been assessed on ChIP-seq data sets coming from the ENCODE project, revealing that they can perform better than both PWMs and the dinucleotide weight matrix extension in discriminating ChIP-seq from background sequences. Under the assumption that ChIP-seq signal values are correlated with the affinity of the TF-DNA binding, we find that TFFM scores correlate with ChIP-seq peak signals. Moreover, using available TF-DNA affinity measurements for the Max TF, we demonstrate that TFFMs constructed from ChIP-seq data correlate with published experimentally measured DNA-binding affinities. Finally, TFFMs allow for the straightforward computation of an integrated TF occupancy score across a sequence. These results demonstrate the capacity of TFFMs to accurately model DNA-protein interactions, while providing a single unified framework suitable for the next generation of TFBS prediction.

SUBMITTER: Mathelier A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3764009 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BACKGROUND:The elucidation of mammalian transcriptional regulatory networks holds great promise for both basic and translational research and remains one the greatest challenges to systems biology. Recent reverse engineering methods deduce regulatory interactions from large-scale mRNA expression profiles and cross-species conserved regulatory regions in DNA. Technical challenges faced by these methods include distinguishing between direct and indirect interactions, associating transcription regulators with predicted transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), identifying non-linearly conserved binding sites across species, and providing realistic accuracy estimates. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:We address these challenges by closely integrating proven methods for regulatory network reverse engineering from mRNA expression data, linearly and non-linearly conserved regulatory region discovery, and TFBS evaluation and discovery. Using an extensive test set of high-likelihood interactions, which we collected in order to provide realistic prediction-accuracy estimates, we show that a careful integration of these methods leads to significant improvements in prediction accuracy. To verify our methods, we biochemically validated TFBS predictions made for both transcription factors (TFs) and co-factors; we validated binding site predictions made using a known E2F1 DNA-binding motif on E2F1 predicted promoter targets, known E2F1 and JUND motifs on JUND predicted promoter targets, and a de novo discovered motif for BCL6 on BCL6 predicted promoter targets. Finally, to demonstrate accuracy of prediction using an external dataset, we showed that sites matching predicted motifs for ZNF263 are significantly enriched in recent ZNF263 ChIP-seq data. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:Using an integrative framework, we were able to address technical challenges faced by state of the art network reverse engineering methods, leading to significant improvement in direct-interaction detection and TFBS-discovery accuracy. We estimated the accuracy of our framework on a human B-cell specific test set, which may help guide future methodological development.

Project description:Computational prediction of nucleotide binding specificity for transcription factors remains a fundamental and largely unsolved problem. Determination of binding positions is a prerequisite for research in gene regulation, a major mechanism controlling phenotypic diversity. Furthermore, an accurate determination of binding specificities from high-throughput data sources is necessary to realize the full potential of systems biology. Unfortunately, recently performed independent evaluation showed that more than half the predictions from most widely used algorithms are false. We introduce a graph-theoretical framework to describe local sequence similarity as the pair-wise distances between nucleotides in promoter sequences, and hypothesize that densely connected subgraphs are indicative of transcription factor binding sites. Using a well-established sampling algorithm coupled with simple clustering and scoring schemes, we identify sets of closely related nucleotides and test those for known TF binding activity. Using an independent benchmark, we find our algorithm predicts yeast binding motifs considerably better than currently available techniques and without manual curation. Importantly, we reduce the number of false positive predictions in yeast to less than 30%. We also develop a framework to evaluate the statistical significance of our motif predictions. We show that our approach is robust to the choice of input promoters, and thus can be used in the context of predicting binding positions from noisy experimental data. We apply our method to identify binding sites using data from genome scale ChIP-chip experiments. Results from these experiments are publicly available at http://cagt10.bu.edu/BSG. The graphical framework developed here may be useful when combining predictions from numerous computational and experimental measures. Finally, we discuss how our algorithm can be used to improve the sensitivity of computational predictions of transcription factor binding specificities.

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The next generation of transcription factor binding site prediction.

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