De-Novo Discovery of Differentially Abundant Transcription Factor Binding Sites Including Their Positional Preference

De-Novo Discovery of Differentially Abundant Transcription Factor Binding Sites Including Their Positional Preference: "Author Summary

Binding of transcription factors to promoters of genes, and subsequent enhancement or repression of transcription, is one of the main steps of transcriptional gene regulation. Direct or indirect wet-lab experiments allow the identification of approximate regions potentially bound or regulated by a transcription factor. Subsequently, de-novo motif discovery tools can be used for detecting the precise positions of binding sites. Many traditional tools focus on motifs over-represented in the target regions, which often turn out to be similarly over-represented in the entire genome. In contrast, several recent tools focus on differentially abundant motifs in target regions compared to a control set. As binding sites are often located at some preferred distance to the transcription start site, it is favorable to include this information into de-novo motif discovery. Here, we present Dispom a novel approach for learning differentially abundant motifs and their positional preferences simultaneously, which predicts binding sites with increased accuracy compared to many popular de-novo motif discovery tools. When applying Dispom to promoters of auxin-responsive genes of Arabidopsis thaliana, we find a binding motif slightly different from the canonical auxin-response element, which exhibits a strong positional preference and which is considerably more specific to auxin-responsive genes.

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