MoRAine - A web server for fast computational transcription factor binding motif re-annotation

Abstract

Background: A precise experimental identification of transcription factor binding motifs (TFBMs), accurate to a single base pair, is time-consuming and difficult. For several databases, TFBM annotations are extracted from the literature and stored 5ʹ → 3ʹ relative to the target gene. Mixing the two possible orientations of a motif results in poor information content of subsequently computed position frequency matrices (PFMs) and sequence logos. Since these PFMs are used to predict further TFBMs, we address the question if the TFBMs underlying a PFM can be re-annotated automatically to improve both the information content of the PFM and subsequent classification performance.