Sequence length limits for controlling false positives in discovering nucleotide sequence motifs

Abstract

In the study of motif discovery, especially the transcription factor DNA binding sites discovery, a too long input sequence would return non-informative motifs rather than those biological functional motifs. This paper gave theoretical analyses and computational experiments to suggest the length limits of the input sequence. When the sequence length exceeds a certain critical point, the probability of discovering the motif decreases sharply. The work not only gave an explanation on the unsatisfying results of the existed motif discovery problems that the input sequence length might be too long and exceed the point, but also provided an estimation of input sequence length we should accept to get more meaningful and reliable results in motif discovery.