Dataset Information

A set of structural features defines the cis-regulatory modules of antenna-expressed genes in Drosophila melanogaster.

ABSTRACT: Unraveling the biological information within the regulatory region (RR) of genes has become one of the major focuses of current genomic research. It has been hypothesized that RRs of co-expressed genes share similar architecture, but to the best of our knowledge, no studies have simultaneously examined multiple structural features, such as positioning of cis-regulatory elements relative to transcription start sites and to each other, and the order and orientation of regulatory motifs, to accurately describe overall cis-regulatory structure. In our work we present an improved computational method that builds a feature collection based on all of these structural features. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by modeling the cis-regulatory modules of antenna-expressed genes in Drosophila melanogaster. Six potential antenna-related motifs were predicted initially, including three that appeared to be novel. A feature set was created with the predicted motifs, where a correlation-based filter was used to remove irrelevant features, and a genetic algorithm was designed to optimize the feature set. Finally, a set of eight highly informative structural features was obtained for the RRs of antenna-expressed genes, achieving an area under the curve of 0.841. We used these features to score all D. melanogaster RRs for potentially unknown antenna-expressed genes sharing a similar regulatory structure. Validation of our predictions with an independent RNA sequencing dataset showed that 76.7% of genes with high scoring RRs were expressed in antenna. In addition, we found that the structural features we identified are highly conserved in RRs of orthologs in other Drosophila sibling species. This approach to identify tissue-specific regulatory structures showed comparable performance to previous approaches, but also uncovered additional interesting features because it also considered the order and orientation of motifs.

SUBMITTER: Lopez Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4143197 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A set of structural features defines the cis-regulatory modules of antenna-expressed genes in Drosophila melanogaster.

López Yosvany Y Vandenbon Alexis A Nakai Kenta K

PloS one 20140825 8

Unraveling the biological information within the regulatory region (RR) of genes has become one of the major focuses of current genomic research. It has been hypothesized that RRs of co-expressed genes share similar architecture, but to the best of our knowledge, no studies have simultaneously examined multiple structural features, such as positioning of cis-regulatory elements relative to transcription start sites and to each other, and the order and orientation of regulatory motifs, to accurat ...[more]

PMID: 25153327

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Project description:BackgroundCis-regulatory modules (CRMs), or the DNA sequences required for regulating gene expression, play the central role in biological researches on transcriptional regulation in metazoan species. Nowadays, the systematic understanding of CRMs still mainly resorts to computational methods due to the time-consuming and small-scale nature of experimental methods. But the accuracy and reliability of different CRM prediction tools are still unclear. Without comparative cross-analysis of the results and combinatorial consideration with extra experimental information, there is no easy way to assess the confidence of the predicted CRMs. This limits the genome-wide understanding of CRMs.DescriptionIt is known that transcription factor binding and epigenetic profiles tend to determine functions of CRMs in gene transcriptional regulation. Thus integration of the genome-wide epigenetic profiles with systematically predicted CRMs can greatly help researchers evaluate and decipher the prediction confidence and possible transcriptional regulatory functions of these potential CRMs. However, these data are still fragmentary in the literatures. Here we performed the computational genome-wide screening for potential CRMs using different prediction tools and constructed the pioneer database, cisMEP (cis-regulatory module epigenetic profile database), to integrate these computationally identified CRMs with genomic epigenetic profile data. cisMEP collects the literature-curated TFBS location data and nine genres of epigenetic data for assessing the confidence of these potential CRMs and deciphering the possible CRM functionality.ConclusionscisMEP aims to provide a user-friendly interface for researchers to assess the confidence of different potential CRMs and to understand the functions of CRMs through experimentally-identified epigenetic profiles. The deposited potential CRMs and experimental epigenetic profiles for confidence assessment provide experimentally testable hypotheses for the molecular mechanisms of metazoan gene regulation. We believe that the information deposited in cisMEP will greatly facilitate the comparative usage of different CRM prediction tools and will help biologists to study the modular regulatory mechanisms between different TFs and their target genes.

Dataset Information

A set of structural features defines the cis-regulatory modules of antenna-expressed genes in Drosophila melanogaster.

Publications

A set of structural features defines the cis-regulatory modules of antenna-expressed genes in Drosophila melanogaster.

Similar Datasets

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