DNA Familial Binding Profiles Made Easy: Comparison of Various Motif Alignment and Clustering Strategies

Abstract

Transcription factor (TF) proteins recognize a small number of DNA sequences with high specificity and control the expression of neighbouring genes. The evolution of TF binding preference has been the subject of a number of recent studies, in which generalized binding profiles have been introduced and used to improve the prediction of new target sites. Generalized profiles are generated by aligning and merging the individual profiles of related TFs. However, the distance metrics and alignment algorithms used to compare the binding profiles have not yet been fully explored or optimized. As a result, binding profiles depend on TF structural information and sometimes may ignore important distinctions between subfamilies. Prediction of the identity or the structural class of a protein that binds to a given DNA pattern will enhance the analysis of microarray and ChIP–chip data where frequently multiple putative targets of usually unknown TFs are predicted. Various comparison metrics and alignment algorithms are evaluated (a total of 105 combinations). We find that local alignments are generally better than global alignments at detecting eukaryotic DNA motif similarities, especially when combined with the sum of squared distances or Pearson's correlation coefficient comparison metrics. In addition, multiple-alignment strategies for binding profiles and tree-building methods are tested for their efficiency in constructing generalized binding models. A new method for automatic determination of the optimal number of clusters is developed and applied in the construction of a new set of familial binding profiles which improves upon TF classification accuracy. A software tool, STAMP, is developed to host all tested methods and make them publicly available. This work provides a high quality reference set of familial binding profiles and the first comprehensive platform for analysis of DNA profiles. Detecting similarities between DNA motifs is a key step in the comparative study of transcriptional regulation, and the work presented here will form the basis for tool and method development for future transcriptional modeling studies.

Author Summary

Transcription factors are primary regulators of gene expression. They usually recognize short DNA sequences in gene promoters and subsequently alter their transcription rate. It is known that structurally related transcription factors often recognize similar DNA-binding patterns (or motifs). Comparison of these motifs not only provides insights into the evolutionary process they undergo, but it also has many important practical applications. For example, motifs that are found to be “similar” can be combined to form generalized profiles, which can be used to improve our ability to predict novel DNA signals in the promoters of co-expressed genes, and thus facilitate a more accurate mapping of gene-regulatory networks. However, to date there is no comprehensive platform that will allow for an efficient analysis of DNA motifs. Furthermore, the efficiency of the methods used to assign similarity between DNA motifs has not been thoroughly tested. This paper takes an important first step towards this goal by evaluating available comparison strategies as applied to DNA motifs and by generating an improved familial profile dataset.