TFregulomeR reveals transcription factors’ context-specific features and functions

Transcription factors (TFs) are sequence-specific DNA binding proteins, fine-tuning spatiotemporal gene expression. Since genomic occupancy of a TF is highly dynamic, it is crucial to study TF binding sites (TFBSs) in a cell-specific context. To date, thousands of ChIP-seq datasets have portrayed the genomic binding landscapes of numerous TFs in different cell types. Although these datasets can be browsed via several platforms, tools that can operate on that data flow are still lacking. Here, we introduce TFregulomeR (https://github.com/benoukraflab/TFregulomeR), an R-library linked to an up-to-date compendium of cistrome and methylome datasets, implemented with functionalities that facilitate integrative analyses. In particular, TFregulomeR enables the characterization of TF binding partners and cell-specific TFBSs, along with the study of TF’s functions in the context of different partnerships and DNA methylation levels. We demonstrated that TFs’ target gene ontologies can differ notably depending on their partners and, by re-analyzing well characterized TFs, we brought to light that numerous leucine zipper TFBSs derived from ChIP-seq experiments documented in current databases were inadequately characterized, due to the fact that their position weight matrices were assembled using a mixture of homodimer and heterodimer binding sites. Altogether, analyses of context-specific transcription regulation with TFregulomeR foster our understanding of regulatory network-dependent TF functions.