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

Abstract

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