RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Automated Incorporation of Pairwise Dependency in Transcription Factor Binding Site Prediction Using Dinucleotide Weight Tensors JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 078212 DO 10.1101/078212 A1 Saeed Omidi A1 Erik van Nimwegen YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/28/078212.abstract AB Gene regulatory networks are ultimately encoded by the sequence-specific binding of (TFs) to short DNA segments. Although it is customary to represent the binding specificity of a TF by a position-specific weight matrix (PSWM), which assumes each position within a site contributes independently to the overall binding affinity, evidence has been accumulating that there can be significant dependencies between positions. Unfortunately, due to various methodological challenges, there is currently still no model that incorporates such dependencies in a way that is both general and practical. On the one hand, simple models that only consider nearest-neighbor interactions are easy to use in practice, but fail to account for the distal dependencies that are observed in the data. On the other hand, models that allow for arbitrary dependencies are prone to overfitting, requiring regularization schemes that are difficult to use in practice for non-experts.Here we present a general model for TF binding specificity, called dinucleotide weight tensor (DWT), that implements arbitrary pairwise dependencies between positions in binding sites, rigorously from first principles, and free from any tunable parameters. We implemented a tool-box, available at dwt.unibas.ch, that allows users to automatically perform ‘motif finding’, i.e. the inference of DWT motifs from a set of sequences, binding site prediction with DWTs, and visualization of DWT ‘dilogo’ motifs. We demonstrate the power of the method on a large set of ChIP-seq data-sets, showing that DWTs never overfit, and significantly outperform PSWMs for a substantial fraction of TFs. In addition, we show that the dependencies inferred by the DWTs from ChIP-seq data are corroborated by HT-SELEX data for the same TF, suggesting that DWTs capture inherent biophysical properties of the interactions between the DNA binding domains of TFs and their binding sites.