Advances on bioinformatic research in transcription factor binding sites

Abstract

Transcription regulation is carried out by the interactions between transcription factors and their binding sites in DNA. Transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) are short, degenerate nucleotide sequences, and usually are 6-20 bp long. Accurate prediction of TFBSs is a crucial step towards understanding the regulation mechanism of transcription and constructing transcriptional regulatory networks. Currently, high-throughput technologies, such as ChIP-chip, are producing a large amount of data for TFBS study. TFBS prediction using either ChIP-chip data or multiple genome information is becoming a hot topic in bioinformatics. In this review, we summarize experimental techniques for locating TFBS and databases for TFBS study and further statistical survey models for TFBS description and software for TFBS prediction. As a consequence, we believe that bioinformatical and experimental studies of TFBS will promote each other in the future to understand the nature of transcriptional regulation.