A Nucleosome-Guided Map of Transcription Factor Binding Sites in Yeast

Finding functional DNA binding sites of transcription factors (TFs) throughout the genome is a crucial step in understanding transcriptional regulation. Unfortunately, these binding sites are typically short and degenerate, posing a significant statistical challenge: many more matches to known TF motifs occur in the genome than are actually functional. However, information about chromatin structure may help to identify the functional sites. In particular, it has been shown that active regulatory regions are usually depleted of nucleosomes, thereby enabling TFs to bind DNA in those regions. Here, we describe a novel motif discovery algorithm that employs an informative prior over DNA sequence positions based on a discriminative view of nucleosome occupancy. When a Gibbs sampling algorithm is applied to yeast sequence-sets identified by ChIP-chip, the correct motif is found in 52% more cases with our informative prior than with the commonly used uniform prior. This is the first demonstration that nucleosome occupancy information can be used to improve motif discovery. The improvement is dramatic, even though we are using only a statistical model to predict nucleosome occupancy; we expect our results to improve further as high-resolution genome-wide experimental nucleosome occupancy data becomes increasingly available

Metamotifs--a generative model for building families of nucleotide position weight matrices.

BACKGROUND: Development of high-throughput methods for measuring DNA interactions of transcription factors together with computational advances in short motif inference algorithms is expanding our understanding of transcription factor binding site motifs. The consequential growth of sequence motif data sets makes it important to systematically group and categorise regulatory motifs. It has been shown that there are familial tendencies in DNA sequence motifs that are predictive of the family of factors that binds them. Further development of methods that detect and describe familial motif trends has the potential to help in measuring the similarity of novel computational motif predictions to previously known data and sensitively detecting regulatory motifs similar to previously known ones from novel sequence. RESULTS: We propose a probabilistic model for position weight matrix (PWM) sequence motif families. The model, which we call the 'metamotif' describes recurring familial patterns in a set of motifs. The metamotif framework models variation within a family of sequence motifs. It allows for simultaneous estimation of a series of independent metamotifs from input position weight matrix (PWM) motif data and does not assume that all input motif columns contribute to a familial pattern. We describe an algorithm for inferring metamotifs from weight matrix data. We then demonstrate the use of the model in two practical tasks: in the Bayesian NestedMICA model inference algorithm as a PWM prior to enhance motif inference sensitivity, and in a motif classification task where motifs are labelled according to their interacting DNA binding domain. CONCLUSIONS: We show that metamotifs can be used as PWM priors in the NestedMICA motif inference algorithm to dramatically increase the sensitivity to infer motifs. Metamotifs were also successfully applied to a motif classification problem where sequence motif features were used to predict the family of protein DNA binding domains that would interact with it. The metamotif based classifier is shown to compare favourably to previous related methods. The metamotif has great potential for further use in machine learning tasks related to especially de novo computational sequence motif inference. The metamotif methods presented have been incorporated into the NestedMICA suite.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

GRISOTTO: A greedy approach to improve combinatorial algorithms for motif discovery with prior knowledge

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Position-specific priors (PSP) have been used with success to boost EM and Gibbs sampler-based motif discovery algorithms. PSP information has been computed from different sources, including orthologous conservation, DNA duplex stability, and nucleosome positioning. The use of prior information has not yet been used in the context of combinatorial algorithms. Moreover, priors have been used only independently, and the gain of combining priors from different sources has not yet been studied.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We extend RISOTTO, a combinatorial algorithm for motif discovery, by post-processing its output with a greedy procedure that uses prior information. PSP's from different sources are combined into a scoring criterion that guides the greedy search procedure. The resulting method, called GRISOTTO, was evaluated over 156 yeast TF ChIP-chip sequence-sets commonly used to benchmark prior-based motif discovery algorithms. Results show that GRISOTTO is at least as accurate as other twelve state-of-the-art approaches for the same task, even without combining priors. Furthermore, by considering combined priors, GRISOTTO is considerably more accurate than the state-of-the-art approaches for the same task. We also show that PSP's improve GRISOTTO ability to retrieve motifs from mouse ChiP-seq data, indicating that the proposed algorithm can be applied to data from a different technology and for a higher eukaryote.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The conclusions of this work are twofold. First, post-processing the output of combinatorial algorithms by incorporating prior information leads to a very efficient and effective motif discovery method. Second, combining priors from different sources is even more beneficial than considering them separately.</p

PriorsEditor: a tool for the creation and use of positional priors in motif discovery

Summary: Computational methods designed to discover transcription factor binding sites in DNA sequences often have a tendency to make a lot of false predictions. One way to improve accuracy in motif discovery is to rely on positional priors to focus the search to parts of a sequence that are considered more likely to contain functional binding sites. We present here a program called PriorsEditor that can be used to create such positional priors tracks based on a combination of several features, including phylogenetic conservation, nucleosome occupancy, histone modifications, physical properties of the DNA helix and many more

Probabilistic Inference of Transcription Factor Binding from Multiple Data Sources

An important problem in molecular biology is to build a complete understanding of transcriptional regulatory processes in the cell. We have developed a flexible, probabilistic framework to predict TF binding from multiple data sources that differs from the standard hypothesis testing (scanning) methods in several ways. Our probabilistic modeling framework estimates the probability of binding and, thus, naturally reflects our degree of belief in binding. Probabilistic modeling also allows for easy and systematic integration of our binding predictions into other probabilistic modeling methods, such as expression-based gene network inference. The method answers the question of whether the whole analyzed promoter has a binding site, but can also be extended to estimate the binding probability at each nucleotide position. Further, we introduce an extension to model combinatorial regulation by several TFs. Most importantly, the proposed methods can make principled probabilistic inference from multiple evidence sources, such as, multiple statistical models (motifs) of the TFs, evolutionary conservation, regulatory potential, CpG islands, nucleosome positioning, DNase hypersensitive sites, ChIP-chip binding segments and other (prior) sequence-based biological knowledge. We developed both a likelihood and a Bayesian method, where the latter is implemented with a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Results on a carefully constructed test set from the mouse genome demonstrate that principled data fusion can significantly improve the performance of TF binding prediction methods. We also applied the probabilistic modeling framework to all promoters in the mouse genome and the results indicate a sparse connectivity between transcriptional regulators and their target promoters. To facilitate analysis of other sequences and additional data, we have developed an on-line web tool, ProbTF, which implements our probabilistic TF binding prediction method using multiple data sources. Test data set, a web tool, source codes and supplementary data are available at: http://www.probtf.org

High Resolution Genome Wide Binding Event Finding and Motif Discovery Reveals Transcription Factor Spatial Binding Constraints

An essential component of genome function is the syntax of genomic regulatory elements that determine how diverse transcription factors interact to orchestrate a program of regulatory control. A precise characterization of in vivo spacing constraints between key transcription factors would reveal key aspects of this genomic regulatory language. To discover novel transcription factor spatial binding constraints in vivo, we developed a new integrative computational method, genome wide event finding and motif discovery (GEM). GEM resolves ChIP data into explanatory motifs and binding events at high spatial resolution by linking binding event discovery and motif discovery with positional priors in the context of a generative probabilistic model of ChIP data and genome sequence. GEM analysis of 63 transcription factors in 214 ENCODE human ChIP-Seq experiments recovers more known factor motifs than other contemporary methods, and discovers six new motifs for factors with unknown binding specificity. GEM's adaptive learning of binding-event read distributions allows it to further improve upon previous methods for processing ChIP-Seq and ChIP-exo data to yield unsurpassed spatial resolution and discovery of closely spaced binding events of the same factor. In a systematic analysis of in vivo sequence-specific transcription factor binding using GEM, we have found hundreds of spatial binding constraints between factors. GEM found 37 examples of factor binding constraints in mouse ES cells, including strong distance-specific constraints between Klf4 and other key regulatory factors. In human ENCODE data, GEM found 390 examples of spatially constrained pair-wise binding, including such novel pairs as c-Fos:c-Jun/USF1, CTCF/Egr1, and HNF4A/FOXA1. The discovery of new factor-factor spatial constraints in ChIP data is significant because it proposes testable models for regulatory factor interactions that will help elucidate genome function and the implementation of combinatorial control

Transcription factor site dependencies in human, mouse and rat genomes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>It is known that transcription factors frequently act together to regulate gene expression in eukaryotes. In this paper we describe a computational analysis of transcription factor site dependencies in human, mouse and rat genomes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our approach for quantifying tendencies of transcription factor binding sites to co-occur is based on a binding site scoring function which incorporates dependencies between positions, the use of information about the structural class of each transcription factor (major/minor groove binder), and also considered the possible implications of varying GC content of the sequences. Significant tendencies (dependencies) have been detected by non-parametric statistical methodology (permutation tests). Evaluation of obtained results has been performed in several ways: reports from literature (many of the significant dependencies between transcription factors have previously been confirmed experimentally); dependencies between transcription factors are not biased due to similarities in their DNA-binding sites; the number of dependent transcription factors that belong to the same functional and structural class is significantly higher than would be expected by chance; supporting evidence from GO clustering of targeting genes. Based on dependencies between two transcription factor binding sites (second-order dependencies), it is possible to construct higher-order dependencies (networks). Moreover results about transcription factor binding sites dependencies can be used for prediction of groups of dependent transcription factors on a given promoter sequence. Our results, as well as a scanning tool for predicting groups of dependent transcription factors binding sites are available on the Internet.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We show that the computational analysis of transcription factor site dependencies is a valuable complement to experimental approaches for discovering transcription regulatory interactions and networks. Scanning promoter sequences with dependent groups of transcription factor binding sites improve the quality of transcription factor predictions.</p

Apples and oranges: avoiding different priors in Bayesian DNA sequence analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>One of the challenges of bioinformatics remains the recognition of short signal sequences in genomic DNA such as donor or acceptor splice sites, splicing enhancers or silencers, translation initiation sites, transcription start sites, transcription factor binding sites, nucleosome binding sites, miRNA binding sites, or insulator binding sites. During the last decade, a wealth of algorithms for the recognition of such DNA sequences has been developed and compared with the goal of improving their performance and to deepen our understanding of the underlying cellular processes. Most of these algorithms are based on statistical models belonging to the family of Markov random fields such as position weight matrix models, weight array matrix models, Markov models of higher order, or moral Bayesian networks. While in many comparative studies different learning principles or different statistical models have been compared, the influence of choosing different prior distributions for the model parameters when using different learning principles has been overlooked, and possibly lead to questionable conclusions.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>With the goal of allowing direct comparisons of different learning principles for models from the family of Markov random fields based on the <it>same a-priori information</it>, we derive a generalization of the commonly-used product-Dirichlet prior. We find that the derived prior behaves like a Gaussian prior close to the maximum and like a Laplace prior in the far tails. In two case studies, we illustrate the utility of the derived prior for a direct comparison of different learning principles with different models for the recognition of binding sites of the transcription factor Sp1 and human donor splice sites.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We find that comparisons of different learning principles using the same a-priori information can lead to conclusions different from those of previous studies in which the effect resulting from different priors has been neglected. We implement the derived prior is implemented in the open-source library Jstacs to enable an easy application to comparative studies of different learning principles in the field of sequence analysis.</p