Integrated Assessment and Prediction of Transcription Factor Binding

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Abstract
Systematic chromatin immunoprecipitation (chIP-chip) experiments have become a central technique for mapping transcriptional interactions in model organisms and humans. However, measurement of chromatin binding does not necessarily imply regulation, and binding may be difficult to detect if it is condition or cofactor dependent. To address these challenges, we present an approach for reliably assigning transcription factors (TFs) to target genes that integrates many lines of direct and indirect evidence into a single probabilistic model. Using this approach, we analyze publicly available chIP-chip binding profiles measured for yeast TFs in standard conditions, showing that our model interprets these data with significantly higher accuracy than previous methods. Pooling the high-confidence interactions reveals a large network containing 363 significant sets of factors (TF modules) that cooperate to regulate common target genes. In addition, the method predicts 980 novel binding interactions with high confidence that are likely to occur in so-far untested conditions. Indeed, using new chIP-chip experiments we show that predicted interactions for the factors Rpn4p and Pdr1p are observed only after treatment of cells with methyl-methanesulfonate, a DNA-damaging agent. We outline the first approach for consistently integrating all available evidences for TF–target interactions and we comprehensively identify the resulting TF module hierarchy. Prioritizing experimental conditions for each factor will be especially important as increasing numbers of chIP-chip assays are performed in complex organisms such as humans, for which “standard conditions” are ill defined. Transcription factors (TFs) bind close to their target genes for regulating transcript levels depending on cellular conditions. Each gene may be regulated differently from others through the binding of specific groups of TFs (TF modules). Recently, a wide variety of large-scale measurements about transcriptional networks has become available. Here the authors present a framework for consistently integrating all of this evidence to systematically determine the precise set of genes directly regulated by each TF (i.e., TF–target interactions). The framework is applied to the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae using seven distinct sources of evidences to score all possible TF–target interactions in this organism. Subsequently, the authors employ another newly developed algorithm to reveal TF modules based on the top 5,000 TF–target interactions, yielding more than 300 TF modules. The new scoring scheme for TF–target interactions allows predicting the binding of TFs under so-far untested conditions, which is demonstrated by experimentally verifying interactions for two TFs (Pdr1p, Rpn4p). Importantly, the new methods (scoring of TF–target interactions and TF module identification) are scalable to much larger datasets, making them applicable to future studies in humans, which are thought to have substantially larger numbers of TF–target interactions.