Sequence characteristics define trade-offs between on-target and genome-wide off-target hybridization of oligoprobes

Off-target oligoprobe’s interaction with partially complementary nucleotide sequences represents a problem for many bio-techniques. The goal of the study was to identify oligoprobe sequence characteristics that control the ratio between on-target and off-target hybridization. To understand the complex interplay between specific and genome-wide off-target (cross-hybridization) signals, we analyzed a database derived from genomic comparison hybridization experiments performed with an Affymetrix tiling array. The database included two types of probes with signals derived from (i) a combination of specific signal and cross-hybridization and (ii) genomic cross-hybridization only. All probes from the database were grouped into bins according to their sequence characteristics, where both hybridization signals were averaged separately. For selection of specific probes, we analyzed the following sequence characteristics: vulnerability to self-folding, nucleotide composition bias, numbers of G nucleotides and GGG-blocks, and occurrence of probe’s k-mers in the human genome. Increases in bin ranges for these characteristics are simultaneously accompanied by a decrease in hybridization specificity—the ratio between specific and cross-hybridization signals. However, both averaged hybridization signals exhibit growing trends along with an increase of probes’ binding energy, where the hybridization specific signal increases significantly faster in comparison to the cross-hybridization. The same trend is evident for the S function, which serves as a combined evaluation of probe binding energy and occurrence of probe’s k-mers in the genome. Application of S allows extracting a larger number of specific probes, as compared to using only binding energy. Thus, we showed that high values of specific and cross-hybridization signals are not mutually exclusive for probes with high values of binding energy and S. In this study, the application of a new set of sequence characteristics allows detection of probes that are highly specific to their targets for array design and other bio-techniques that require selection of specific probes.