Bioinformatics and Biology Insights

Transcription factors control gene expression by binding to short specific DNA sequences, called transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), in the promoter of a gene. Thus, studying the spatial distribution of TFBSs in the promoters may provide insights into the molecular mechanisms of gene regulation. I developed a method to construct the spatial distribution of TFBSs for any set of genes of interest. I found that different functional gene clusters have different spatial distributions of TFBSs, indicating that gene regulation mechanisms may be very different among different functional gene clusters. I also found that the binding sites for different transcription factors (TFs) may have different spatial distributions: a sharp peak, a plateau or no dominant single peak. The spatial distributions of binding sites for many TFs derived from my analyses are valuable prior information for TFBS prediction algorithm because different regions of a promoter can assign different possibilities for TFBS occurrence.