PromoterSweep: a tool for identification of transcription factor binding sites

Abstract

There are many tools available for the prediction of potential promoter regions and the transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) harboured by them. Unfortunately, these tools cannot really avoid the prediction of vast amounts of false positives, the greatest problem in promoter analysis. The combination of different methods and algorithms has shown an improvement in prediction accuracy for similar biological problems such as gene prediction. The web-tool presented here uses this approach to perform an exhaustive integrative analysis, identification and annotation of potential promoter regions. The combination of methods employed includes searches in different experimental promoter databases to identify promoter regions and their orthologs, use of TFBS databases and search tools, and a phylogenetic footprinting strategy, combining multiple alignment of genomic sequences together with motif discovery tools that were tested previously in order to get the best method combination. The pipeline is available for academic users at the HUSAR open server http://genius.embnet.dkfz-heidelberg.de/menu/biounit/open-husar/. It integrates all of this information and identifies among the huge number of TFBS predictions those, which are more likely to be potentially functional.