Statistical detection of cooperative transcription factors with similarity adjustment

Motivation: Statistical assessment of cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) is a crucial task in computational biology. Usually, one concludes from exceptional co-occurrences of DNA motifs that the corresponding transcription factors (TFs) are cooperative. However, similar DNA motifs tend to co-occur in random sequences due to high probability of overlapping occurrences. Therefore, it is important to consider similarity of DNA motifs in the statistical assessment