MotifAdjuster: a tool for computational reassessment of transcription factor binding site annotations

Abstract

Valuable binding-site annotation data are stored in databases. However, several types of errors can, and do, occur in the process of manually incorporating annotation data from the scientific literature into these databases. Here, we introduce MotifAdjuster http://dig.ipk-gatersleben.de/MotifAdjuster.html, a tool that helps to detect these errors, and we demonstrate its efficacy on public data sets.

Figure 1

Comparison of binding-site conservation, showing the original sequence logos, the consensus sequences for the TFs obtained from the literature [56-61], and the adjusted sequence logos for the data sets of the TFs CpxR, Crp, Fis, Fnr, Fur, Lrp, and NarL. We find in all seven cases that (i) the adjusted sequence logos show a higher conservation than the original sequence logos, (ii) the adjusted sequence logos are more similar to the consensus sequences than to the original sequence logos; and (iii) clear motifs can be recognized in the adjusted sequence logos of the TFs CpxR, Fur, and NarL that could not be recognized in the original sequence logos.

Figure 2

Position of the predicted NarL binding site in the upstream region of torC. The NarL BS TACCCT is located on the forward strand with respect to the target operon torCAD starting at position -209 bp (red color). All positions are relative to the first nucleotide of the start codon of torC. (a) The fragment of the upstream region of the torCAD operon containing the NarL BS predicted by the PWM model trained on the adjusted data set. (b) Histogram of all positions of NarL BSs in the database. The red line indicates the position of the predicted BS.