MISCORE: a new scoring function for characterizing DNA regulatory motifs in promoter sequences

Graph Theory-Based Sequence Descriptors as Remote Homology Predictors

Alignment-free (AF) methodologies have increased in popularity in the last decades as alternative tools to alignment-based (AB) algorithms for performing comparative sequence analyses. They have been especially useful to detect remote homologs within the twilight zone of highly diverse gene/protein families and superfamilies. The most popular alignment-free methodologies, as well as their applications to classification problems, have been described in previous reviews. Despite a new set of graph theory-derived sequence/structural descriptors that have been gaining relevance in the detection of remote homology, they have been omitted as AF predictors when the topic is addressed. Here, we first go over the most popular AF approaches used for detecting homology signals within the twilight zone and then bring out the state-of-the-art tools encoding graph theory-derived sequence/structure descriptors and their success for identifying remote homologs. We also highlight the tendency of integrating AF features/measures with the AB ones, either into the same prediction model or by assembling the predictions from different algorithms using voting/weighting strategies, for improving the detection of remote signals. Lastly, we briefly discuss the efforts made to scale up AB and AF features/measures for the comparison of multiple genomes and proteomes. Alongside the achieved experiences in remote homology detection by both the most popular AF tools and other less known ones, we provide our own using the graphical-numerical methodologies, MARCH-INSIDE, TI2BioP, and ProtDCal. We also present a new Python-based tool (SeqDivA) with a friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for delimiting the twilight zone by using several similar criteria.

A Further Study on Mining DNA Motifs Using Fuzzy Self-Organizing Maps

Self-organizing map (SOM)-based motif mining, despite being a promising approach for problem solving, mostly fails to offer a consistent interpretation of clusters with respect to the mixed composition of signal and noise in the nodes. The main reason behind this shortcoming comes from the similarity metrics used in data assignment, specially designed with the biological interpretation for this domain, which are not meant to consider the inevitable noise mixture in the clusters. This limits the explicability of the majority of clusters that are supposedly noise dominated, degrading the overall system clarity in motif discovery. This paper aims to improve the explicability aspect of learning process by introducing a composite similarity function (CSF) that is specially designed for the k -mer-to-cluster similarity measure with respect to the degree of motif properties and embedded noise in the cluster. Our proposed motif finding algorithm in this paper is built on our previous work robust elicitation algorithms for discovering (READ) [1] and termed READ Deoxyribonucleic acid motifs using CSFs (READ(csf)), which performs slightly better than READ and shows some remarkable improvements over SOM-based SOMBRERO and SOMEA tools in terms of F-measure on the testing data sets. A real data set containing multiple motifs is used to explore the potential of the READ(csf) for more challenging biological data mining tasks. Visual comparisons with the verified logos extracted from JASPAR database demonstrate that our algorithm is promising to discover multiple motifs simultaneously.

Information theory applications for biological sequence analysis

Information theory (IT) addresses the analysis of communication systems and has been widely applied in molecular biology. In particular, alignment-free sequence analysis and comparison greatly benefited from concepts derived from IT, such as entropy and mutual information. This review covers several aspects of IT applications, ranging from genome global analysis and comparison, including block-entropy estimation and resolution-free metrics based on iterative maps, to local analysis, comprising the classification of motifs, prediction of transcription factor binding sites and sequence characterization based on linguistic complexity and entropic profiles. IT has also been applied to high-level correlations that combine DNA, RNA or protein features with sequence-independent properties, such as gene mapping and phenotype analysis, and has also provided models based on communication systems theory to describe information transmission channels at the cell level and also during evolutionary processes. While not exhaustive, this review attempts to categorize existing methods and to indicate their relation with broader transversal topics such as genomic signatures, data compression and complexity, time series analysis and phylogenetic classification, providing a resource for future developments in this promising area.

A robust elicitation algorithm for discovering DNA motifs using fuzzy self-organizing maps

It is important to identify DNA motifs in promoter regions to understand the mechanism of gene regulation. Computational approaches for finding DNA motifs are well recognized as useful tools to biologists, which greatly help in saving experimental time and cost in wet laboratories. Self-organizing maps (SOMs), as a powerful clustering tool, have demonstrated good potential for problem solving. However, the current SOM-based motif discovery algorithms unfairly treat data samples lying around the cluster boundaries by assigning them to one of the nodes, which may result in unreliable system performance. This paper aims to develop a robust framework for discovering DNA motifs, where fuzzy SOMs, with an integration of fuzzy c-means membership functions and a standard batch-learning scheme, are employed to extract putative motifs with varying length in a recursive manner. Experimental results on eight real datasets show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the other searching tools such as SOMBRERO, SOMEA, MEME, AlignACE, and WEEDER in terms of the F-measure and algorithm reliability. It is observed that a remarkable 24.6% improvement can be achieved compared to the state-of-the-art SOMBRERO. Furthermore, our algorithm can produce a 20% and 6.6% improvement over SOMBRERO and SOMEA, respectively, in finding multiple motifs on five artificial datasets.