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Bioinformatics 2006 22(14):e393-e401; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl245
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Apples to apples: improving the performance of motif finders and their significance analysis in the Twilight Zone

Patrick Ng 1, Niranjan Nagarajan 1, Neil Jones 2 and Uri Keich 1,*

1 Department of Computer Science, Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA
2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego La Jolla, CA, USA

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Motivation: Effective algorithms for finding relatively weak motifs are an important practical necessity while scanning long DNA sequences for regulatory elements. The success of such an algorithm hinges on the ability of its scoring function combined with a significance analysis test to discern real motifs from random noise.

Results: In the first half of the paper we show that the paradigm of relying on entropy scores and their E-values can lead to undesirable results when searching for weak motifs and we offer alternate approaches to analyzing the significance of motifs. In the second half of the paper we reintroduce a scoring function and present a motif-finder that optimizes it that are more effective in finding relatively weak motifs than other tools.

Availability: The GibbsILR motif finder is available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~keich

Contact: Uri Keich, keich{at}cs.cornell.edu


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P. Ng and U. Keich
GIMSAN: a Gibbs motif finder with significance analysis
Bioinformatics, October 1, 2008; 24(19): 2256 - 2257.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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