Exploiting ancestral mammalian genomes for the prediction of human transcription factor binding sites

BACKGROUND: The computational prediction of Transcription Factor Binding Sites (TFBS) remains a challenge due to their short length and low information content. Comparative genomics approaches that simultaneously consider several related species and favor sites that have been conserved throughout evolution improve the accuracy (specificity) of the predictions but are limited due to a phenomenon called binding site turnover, where sequence evolution causes one TFBS to replace another in the same region. In parallel to this development, an increasing number of mammalian genomes are now sequenced and it is becoming possible to infer, to a surprisingly high degree of accuracy, ancestral mammalian sequences. RESULTS: We propose a TFBS prediction approach that makes use of the availability of inferred ancestral mammalian genomes to improve its accuracy. This method aims to identify binding loci, which are regions of a few hundred base pairs that have preserved their potential to bind a given transcription factor over evolutionary time. After proposing a neutral evolutionary model of predicted TFBS counts in a DNA region of a given length, we use it to identify regions that have preserved the number of predicted TFBS they contain to an unexpected degree given their divergence. The approach is applied to human chromosome 1 and shows significant gains in accuracy as compared to both existing single-species and multi-species TFBS prediction approaches, in particular for transcription factors that are subject to high turnover rates. AVAILABILITY: The source code and predictions made by the program are available at http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~blanchem/bindingLoci.