Tmod: toolbox of motif discovery

Abstract

Motif discovery is an important topic in computational transcriptional regulation studies. In the past decade, many researchers have contributed to the field and many de novo motif-finding tools have been developed, each may have a different strength. However, most of these tools do not have a user-friendly interface and their results are not easily comparable. We present a software called Toolbox of Motif Discovery (Tmod) for Windows operating systems. The current version of Tmod integrates 12 widely used motif discovery programs: MDscan, BioProspector, AlignACE, Gibbs Motif Sampler, MEME, CONSENSUS, MotifRegressor, GLAM, MotifSampler, SeSiMCMC, Weeder and YMF. Tmod provides a unified interface to ease the use of these programs and help users to understand the tuning parameters. It allows plug-in motif-finding programs to run either separately or in a batch mode with predetermined parameters, and provides a summary comprising of outputs from multiple programs. Tmod is developed in C++ with the support of Microsoft Foundation Classes and Cygwin. Tmod can also be easily expanded to include future algorithms. Tmod is available for download at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~junliu/Tmod/.