OPTIMAL ALGORITHM FOR FINDING DNA MOTIFS WITH
NUCLEOTIDE ADJACENT DEPENDENCY ∗
FRANCIS Y.L. CHIN HENRY C.M. LEUNG M.H. SIU S.M. YIU
Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam
Hong Kong
Abstract: Finding motifs and the corresponding binding sites is a critical and challenging problem in
studying the process of gene expression. String and matrix representations are two popular models to
represent a motif. However, both representations share an important weakness by assuming that the
occurrence of a nucleotide in a binding site is independent of other nucleotides. More complicated
representations, such as HMM or regular expression, exist that can capture the nucleotide
dependency. Unfortunately, these models are not practical (with too many parameters and require
many known binding sites). Recently, Chin and Leung introduced the SPSP representation which
overcomes the limitations of these complicated models. However, discovering novel motifs in SPSP
representation is still a NP-hard problem. In this paper, based on our observations in real binding
sites, we propose a simpler model, the Dependency Pattern Sets (DPS) representation, which is
simpler than the SPSP model but can still capture the nucleotide dependency. We develop a branch
and bound algorithm (DPS-Finder) for finding optimal DPS motifs. Experimental results show that
DPS-Finder can discover a length-10 motif from 22 length-500 DNA sequences within a few
minutes and the DPS representation has a similar performance as SPSP representation.
1 Introduction
A gene is a segment of DNA that can be decoded to produce functional products like
protein. To trigger the decoding process, a molecule, called transcription factor, will
bind to a short region (binding site) preceding the gene. One kind of transcription factor
can bind to more than one binding site. These binding sites usually have similar patterns
and are collectively represented by a motif. Finding motifs and the corresponding binding
sites from a set of DNA sequences is a critical step for understanding how genes work.
There are two popular models to represent a motif, string representation
[4,6,10,11,16,17,19-22] and matrix representation [2,8,12-14]. String representation uses
a length-l string of symbols (or nucleotides) ‘A’, ‘C’, ‘G’ and ‘T’ to represent a motif of
length l. To improve the descriptive power of the representation, IUPAC symbols
[6,20,22] can be introduced into the string to represent choices of symbols at a particular
position (e.g. ‘K’ denotes ‘G’ or ‘T’). Matrix representation further improves the
descriptive power by using position weight matrices (PWMs) or position specific scoring
matrices (PSSMs) to represent a motif. PWMs and PSSMs are matrices of size 4 × l with
the j-th column, which has four elements corresponding to the four nucleotides,
effectively giving the occurrence probability of each of the four nucleotides at position j.
While the matrix representation model appears superior, the solution space for PWMs
∗ The research was supported in parts by the RGC grant HKU 7120/06E.
1
2
and PSSMs is huge, which consists of 4l real numbers, and thus, algorithms generally
either produce a sub-optimal motif matrix [2,8,12,13] or take too long to run when the
motif is longer than 10 [15].
However, both the string and the matrix representations share an important common
weakness: they assume that the occurrence of each nucleotide at a particular position of a
binding site is independent of the occurrence of nucleotides at other positions. This
assumption may not represent the actual situation. According to the analysis of wild-type
and mutant Zif268 (Egr1) zinc fingers by Bulyk et al [5], it gives compelling evidence
that nucleotides of transcription factor binding sites should not be treated independently,
and a more realistic motif model should be able to describe nucleotide interdependence.
Man and Stormo [18] have arrived at a similar conclusion in their analysis of Salmonella
bacteriophage repressor Mnt: they found that interactions of Mnt with nucleotides at
positions 16 and 17 of the 21 bp binding site are in fact not independent.
When there are sufficient number of known binding sites of a transcription factor,
people can use some complex representations, e.g. the hidden Markov model (HMM)
[24], Bayesian network [3] or enhanced PWM [9], to represent nucleotide
interdependence. However, when we want to discover novel motif or describe a motif
with only a few known binding sites, the input data may not contain enough information
for deriving the hidden motif. Chin and Leung overcame the problem by introducing the
SPSP representation [7], a generalized model of string representation and matrix
representation, that can model the adjacent dependency of nucleotides with much less
parameters than HMM and regular expression. Since the SPSP representation is simple, it
can be used to discover novel motifs even if there are only five DNA sequences
containing the binding sites of the transcription factor. However, like other models,
discovering novel motifs in SPSP representation is a NP-hard problem. No efficient
algorithm exists that can guarantee finding the hidden motif in reasonable amount of
time.
After studying the binding sites of real biological data, we found that many motifs
can be described by a simpler model. In this paper, we further simplify the SPSP
representation to the Dependency Pattern Sets (DPS) representation. DPS representation
is a generalized model of string representation, which can model adjacent nucleotide
dependency. Although it has a lower descriptive power than SPSP representation,
experimental results on real biological data showed that it has almost the same
performance as SPSP representation. Besides, since DPS representation uses fewer
parameters to describe a motif, it is possible to find the “optimal” motif in reasonable
amount of time. We have introduced a branch and bound algorithm DPS-Finder that
guarantees finding the “optimal” motif. In practice, DPS-Finder takes only a few minutes
to discover a length-10 motif from 20 length-600 DNA sequences. For other approaches
such as HMM, it may take hours or even days for a dataset of similar size.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the DPS representation
and the scoring function for determine the “optimal” motif in a set of DNA sequences.
We introduce the branch and bound algorithm DPS-Finder in Section 3. Experimental
results on real biological data comparing DPS-Finder with some popular software are
given in Section 4, followed by concluding remarks in Section 5.
2 Problem Definition
2.1 DPS Representation
Motif is an abstract model for a set of binding sites with similar patterns. For example,
the transcription factor CSRE [25], which activates the gluconeogenic structural genes,
can bind to the following binding sites.
CGGATGAATGG
CGGATGAATGG
CGGATGAAAGG
CGGACGGATGG
CGGACGGATGG
Note that there is dependence between the fifth and the seventh symbols, and the
binding sites “CGGATGAATGG” occurs twice in the DNA sequences. The string
representation models these binding sites by the length-11 string “CGGAYGRAWGG”
where ‘Y’ denotes ‘T’ or ‘C’, ‘R’ denotes ‘A’ or ‘G’ and ‘W’ denotes ‘A’ or ‘T’.
However, this representation has a problem that the strings “CGGATGGATGG”,
“CGGATGGAAGG”, “CGGACGAATGG”, “CGGACGAAAGG” and
“CGGACGGAAGG” are also considered as binding sites (false positives). Instead of
modeling the CSRE motif by one string, the SPSP representation uses a pattern P and a
set of score S (negative of logarithm of the occurrence probability) to represent the CSRE
motif as follows.
P = ( CGGA) TGA
⎜⎛
( A)
A
CGG
⎟⎞
⎜⎛
T
⎟⎞ (GG)
and
⎝ ⎠ ⎝ ⎠
- log(0.6)
- log(0.2)
S = ( - log(1) ) ⎛
⎞(
- log(1) ) ⎛
⎞
⎜
( - log(1) )
- log(0.4)
⎟
⎜
- log(0.8)
⎟
⎝
⎠
⎝
⎠
A length-11 string is considered as a binding site of CSRE if it matches with P and
its score (sum of corresponding entries) is at most some threshold, say 3.1. For example,
the score of the binding site “CGGATGAATGG” is -log(1)+ -log(0.6) + -log(1) + -
log(0.8) + -log(1) = 1.05 < 3.1. The score of a non-binding site string
“CGGACGGAAGG” is -log(1)+ -log(0.4) + -log(1) + -log(0.2) + -log(1) = 3.6 > 3.1.
The string “TGGATGAATGG” does not match with P, so it is not a binding site. In this
example, the SPSP representation can model the motif with no false positive.
Although SPSP representation can describe the motif well, it is difficult to determine
the score S for novel motifs (motifs with no known binding site) in real biological data. A
challenge is to have a simpler model, which describes real motifs using fewer parameters
than the SPSP representation while having fewer false positives than string
3
4
representation. We observed that using only the pattern P without S, we already can
describe most real motifs. For example, if we consider those strings matching with P as
binding sites, we only have one false positive “CGGACGGAAGG” (instead of five for
the string representation).
Apart from this, SPSP representation allows a motif having any number of wildcard
pattern sets (positions with more than one possible choice of patterns, i.e. brackets with
more than one pattern in it). For example, the following pattern P is allowed.
A
G T
A
C T
⎛GG⎞
P = C ⎛ ⎞ ⎛ ⎞ ⎛ ⎟⎞ ⎜
TT
⎟
⎝ ⎠
⎝ ⎠ ⎝ ⎠ ⎝ ⎠
( ) ⎜ GT ⎟(
A)
⎜ ⎟(
G)
⎜ ⎟(
A)
⎜ ( GG)
Since the binding sites of a motif should be conserved in most positions, the number of
wildcard pattern sets should be small. We found that allowing at most two wildcard
pattern sets is enough for describing most motifs. Based on the above observations, we
define the Dependency Pattern Sets (DPS) representation as follows.
A DPS representation P contains a list of patterns sets Pi, 1 ≤ i ≤ L, where at
most two are wildcard pattern sets Pi containing 2 to k length-li patterns Pi,j of
symbols ‘A’, ‘C’, ‘G’ and ‘T’, li ≤ lmax where the Hamming distance between
these patterns is at most dmax. Each of the other pattern set Pi contains exactly
one length-li pattern Pi,1 and ∑i l i = l. A length-l string σ = σ1σ2…σL where |σi|
= l i is considered as a binding site of P if σi ∈ Pi, 1 ≤ i ≤ L.
2.2 Scoring Function and Problem Definition
Given a set of DNA sequences T with X length-l substrings bound by the same
transcription factor, we should find many candidate motifs having different number of
binding sites in T. In order to discover the hidden motif, we should have a scoring
function for comparing different motifs. Given two motifs P1 and P2, a naive scoring
function is to count the number of binding sites represented by the motifs, that is, P1 is
more likely to be the hidden motif if P1 have more binding sites than P2 in the set of
sequences T. However, this scoring function has a weakness that it has not considered the
number of possible binding sites for P1 and P2. Consider the following motifs.
( ) CG ( CC)
A
T ( TC)
GT
AT ⎛ ⎞
P = C ⎜ ⎟
1
⎜⎛
⎟⎞ and
⎜ ⎟
⎝ ⎠
⎝ ⎠
AG
⎜⎛
CT
⎟⎞ ⎝ ⎠
P = ( ACG)
(AAA)
Even P1 has slightly more binding sites than P2, we cannot conclude that P1 is more
likely to be the hidden motif because P1 has more possible binding site patterns (3 × 2 =
6 patterns) than P2 (2 patterns). In order to have a fair comparison, given a motif P with b
binding sites in T, we calculate the probability (p-value) that P has b or more binding
sites in T by chance based on a background model. Under the assumption that the hidden
motif should have an unexpectedly large number of binding sites, a motif P with small p-
2
value is likely to be the hidden motif. The p-value of a motif can be calculated as follows
[7].
Let B be the background model for the non-binding region of the DNA sequences T
and B(σ) be the probability that a length-l string σ occurs in a particular position in T. B
can be a Markov Chain or an uniform distribution etc. Given a DPS motif P with w
possible binding sites s1, s2, …, sw, the probability that P has a binding site at a particular
w
position in T is ∑ i= 1 B(
si
) . Assuming the probability that motif P has a binding site at any
positions in T are independent, the probability that P has b or more binding sites in T is
p − value(
P)
=
X
∑⎢⎜⎛⎟⎞ ⎜∑
B(
si
) ⎟ ⎜1
∑
j=
b
⎡ X ⎛
⎣⎝
j ⎠⎝
w
i=
1
j
⎞ ⎛
−
⎠ ⎝
w
i=
1
⎞
B(
si
) ⎟
⎠
Based on the scoring function in Eq(1), we define the motif discovering problem as
follows.
Given a set of DNA sequences T, the background model B and the motif length
l, we want to discover a length-l DSP motif P with the minimum p-value.
3 DPS-Finder Algorithm
In this section, we introduce the DPS-Finder Algorithm for solving the motif discovery
problem described in Section 2. DPS-Finder Algorithm first constructs a l-factor tree [1],
a suffix tree with all nodes of depth > l being removed, to represent all possible motifs in
the input sequences T with different positions of the wildcard pattern sets. For each
possible motif P, it finds the set of patterns in each wildcard pattern set that minimizes pvalue(P)
using a branch and bound approach. Experiments showed that DPS-Finder
Algorithm has to deal in the best case only 25% of the number of cases to be dealt by the
brute force algorithm.
(..)
C
A
A
T
G
G
C
A
(…)
G
C
A
(…) (.)
A
T
G
G
C
A
(.)
G
(..)
(.)
X − j
⎤
⎥
⎦
C
A
T
G
T
G
G
G
G
G
A G
G G
G
C
T G
C G
A
A
G
T G G
A
A A
G
A G
T
G
C
G
2 2 2
(…) (…)
(…)
(…)
(…) G G
Figure 1. The 8-factor tree of the sequences “CA(…)(…)GGATGGCA(…)(…)GG”. For examples, the pattern
“(CA)(…)(…)”, “(A)(…)(…)(G)” and “(…)(…)(GG)” occur twice in the sequences.
(…) G
A
(…)
(..)
(…)
(…)
5
(1)
6
3.1 Factor Tree Representation
In order to discover the optimal motif, we should consider all possible positions (C(2 + l
– 2lmax, 2) = O(l 2 )) of the wildcard pattern sets. For example, when the motif length l is 8
and the maximum wildcard pattern length lmax is 3, the length-8 substring
“CGCAGGTG” (binding site of the AC transcription factor) can be a binding site of
motifs in the following formats, (…)(…)(TG), (…)(A)(…)(G), (…)(AG)(…),
(C)(…)(…)(G), (C)(…)(G)(…) and (CG)(…)(…), where (…) represents a wildcard
pattern set of length 3. Note that motifs with wildcard pattern shorter than 3 or with one
wildcard pattern set only have also been considered in the above formats. For example,
(…)(AGG)(..) and (…)AGGTG are special case of the motif (…)(AG)(…). When we
find the optimal motif in form of (…)(AG)(…), we have also considered motifs in form
of (…)(AGG)(..) and (…)AGGTG. Since it takes O(l) time to convert a length-l
substring to a motif and there are X length-l substrings in T, brute force method takes
O(Xl 3 ) time to get the list of O(Xl 2 ) possible forms of motif.
However, when a motif of a substring is considered, we can easily get another motif
for the adjacent substring by shifting one symbol. For example, when the motif
(CG)(…)(…) of the substring “CGCAGGTG” in the input sequence
“…CACGCAGGTGGG…” is considered, by shifting one symbol, we will get another
motif (G)(…)(…)(G) for the substring “GCAGGTGG”. When we represent the input
sequence in the form of “…CACGCAGGTGGG…”, each length-8 sliding window
containing the two length-3 brackets represents one possible motif. Based on this
observation, DPS-Finder Algorithm constructs a generalized l-factor tree [1] of O(l 2 )
(represent the O(l 2 ) motifs for a length-l substring) length-O(X) sequences (input
sequences with some positions represented by brackets) to represent the O(Xl 2 ) possible
motifs. A l-factor tree is a suffix tree [23] of height l where each path from the root to a
leaf represents a length-l substring occurring in the input sequence. Figure 1 shows a
factor tree of height-8 for the sequence “CA(…)(…)GGATGGCA(…)(…)GG”. Since
constructing the generalized l-factor tree takes O(Xl 2 ) time [1] only, DPS-Finder
Algorithm speeds up the process by a factor of O(l) when compares with the brute force
algorithm.
3.2 Branch and Bound Approach
Each leaf of the l-factor tree represents a candidate motif. These candidate motifs may
not be in DPS representation because they may have more than k patterns in their
wildcard pattern sets. Therefore, giving a candidate motif P, we have to reduce the
number of patterns in each of its wildcard pattern set to at most k and at the same time, to
minimize the p-value. Although this problem is NP-hard when the value of k is large (see
Appendix), in practice we usually consider motifs with small k (e.g. k = 4) and finding
the optimal motif is still feasible.
When refining a candidate motif P to a motif P’ in DSP representation with the
minimum p-value(P’), we perform a depth-first-search to check all possible combinations
of patterns in the two wildcard pattern sets of P. We first pick two patterns, each forms a
wildcard pattern set of P. Then we pick more patterns for P’ until k patterns have been
selected for each wildcard pattern set. In the selection process, we consider patterns with
increasing order of p-values. After picking a new pattern Pi, the additional number of
binding sites covered by P’ is upper bounded by the number of binding sites covered by
Pi. Therefore, in many cases, we can stop picking new patterns because the p-value of the
refined motif P’ must not be smaller than the suboptimal motif we have already found.
Apart from applying a branch and bound approach on refining each candidate motif
P, we also apply similar approach on checking the O(Xl 2 ) candidate motifs. We first
refine those candidate motifs with two patterns, each forms a wildcard pattern set,
covering the largest number of binding sites. Since the number of binding sites covered
by a candidate motif is upper bounded by the total number of binding sites covered by
the top-k patterns in its wildcard pattern sets, many candidate motifs can be pruned out.
4 Experimental Results
We compared the performance of some popular motif discovering algorithms, i.e.
Weeder [19], MEME [13] and SPSP-Finder [7], with DSP-Finder on the yeast data set in
SCPD [25]. SCPD contains information of the motif patterns and the binding sites for a
set of transcription factors of yeast. For each transcription factor, we chose the 600 base
pairs in the upstream of those genes bound by the transcription factor as the input
sequences T. Given the motif length, the four algorithms were used to discover the
hidden motif in T.
Weeder and MEME used string representation and matrix representation to model a
motif respectively. Both of them could not model the nucleotide dependency in motifs.
SPSP-Finder, used the SPSP representation, can model the nucleotide dependency in
motifs. However, all these algorithms applied a heuristic approach which cannot
guarantee finding the “optimal” motifs.
In the experiments, DSP-finder used an order-0 Markov chain calculated based on
the input sequence to model the non-binding regions. The width of a wildcard pattern set
was at most 3 (lmax = 3), the Hamming distance between patterns in a wildcard pattern set
was at most 1 (d = 1) and there were at most 4 patterns in a wildcard pattern set. The
experimental results were shown in Table 1. All algorithms finished in 10 minutes for
each dataset. Note that we have not listed out those motifs which could not be discovered
by any of the algorithms.
In general, SPSP-Finder and DSP-Finder has better performance than the other
algorithms because they can model nucleotide dependency. DSP-Finder performs better
than SPSP-Finder when finding motif of MCM1 because DSP-Finder guarantees finding
the motif with the lowest p-value while SPSP-Finder is trapped in local minimum.
DSP-Finder performs worse than MEME and SPSP-Finder in two cases, the
HAP2/3/4 and SFF datasets. For the HAP2/3/4 dataset, there was nucleotide dependency
between the fifth and the sixth nucleotides. However, since the Hamming distance
7
8
between the possible patterns is 2, DSP-Finder could not discover the motif in our setting
(d = 1). DSP-Finder could not discover the motif of SFF while MEME was successful
because there were no strong bias at most positions of this motif. In these cases, a matrix
representation can model the motif better than a string representation, i.e. Weeder also
fails in this case.
Table 1. Experimental results on yeast data.
Name Pattern Weeder MEME SPSPFinder DPSFinder
13nt
ACE2
ACGAGGCTTACCG
GCTGGT
-
-
-
-
(ACGA)(GGC T)(TACC)(G)
(GCTG)(GT)
(A)(CGA)(G GC)(TTACCG)
GCA GGT
( )( )
GCT CGT
ADR1 TCTCC - TCTCC (TCTC)(C)
⎛
⎜
⎝
⎞
⎟
⎠
TCC
(TC) TTC
TGC
G
GTA
AP1 TTANTAA - - (TTA) ( )(TAA)
(TTA) ( )(A)
C
CTA
A
⎜ C⎟
CCBF CNCGAAA CACGAAA - ( C)
( CGAA)(A)
G
⎜
⎟
T
CPF1 TCACGTG CACGTG TCACGTG CACG)(TA)
CSRE CGGAYRRAWGG - - ( ) ( GG)
⎛
⎝
⎞
⎠
CAC GAA
( )( )(A)
CGC
CAA
⎛ TCA ⎞ GTG
( ⎜ CCA⎟(C)
( )
⎛
⎞
TGA
A
( CGGA)
⎜ TAA⎟
( A)
⎜ ⎟ T
CGG
⎝
⎠
⎜
⎝
GCA
⎟
⎠
GAG
⎛ AAT⎞
ATG ( ) ⎜ AAA⎟(GG)
(CGG)
ATA
GCT
TTG
CuRE TTTGCTC TTTGCTCA ( TTT)
( ) ( C)
(T) ( )(CTC)
TCG
GTG
CTT
GATA CTTATC CTTATC - ( CTTA)(
TC)
( )(ATC)
CTA
TC
HAP2/3/4 CCAATCA - - ( CCAA)
⎜ TG⎟(
A)
⎜ ⎟
CC
A
GGT ACC
LEU CCGNNNNCGG CCGGGACCGG CCGGAACCGG ( CGG) ( ) ( ACCG)(
G)
(CC) ( )( )(GG)
G
GGG CCC
AC
⎛ GA⎞
⎛ ⎞
TA A
MAT2 CRTGTWWWW CATGTAATTA - ⎜ GT ⎟
⎜ ⎟
( AATT)
⎜ ⎟
( )
TC C
TA
⎜
⎟
⎝ ⎠
TG
MCM1 CCNNNWWRGG CCCGTTTAGG CCTAATTAGG -
⎛
⎝
⎝
⎞
⎠
⎠
⎜
⎝
-
AAG
⎟
⎠
GTA ATT
( )( )
(CAT)
GTT
⎛
⎜
⎝
AAA
(CCTA) AAC
AAT
SFF GTMAACAA - GTCAACAA - -
⎛ GCCC⎞
AGCG
TTC
UASCAR TTTCCATTAGG - - ( T)
⎜ TCAC⎟(
TT)
⎜ ⎟ ( )
(AT) ( )(CAT)(TAG)
AGGA
TGC
TCCA
Motifs of transcription factors that cannot be found by any algorithms were not shown in this table. ‘M’ stands
for ‘A’ or ‘C’, ‘N’ stands for any nucleotide. ‘R’ stands for ‘A’ or ‘G’, ‘W’ stands for ‘A’ or ‘T’, ‘Y’ stands for
‘C’ or ‘T’.
5 Conclusion
In this paper, we introduced the DPS representation to capture the nucleotide dependency
in a motif, which is simpler than the SPSP representation. We also developed a branch
and bound algorithm DPS-Finder to locate the optimal DPS motif. Experimental results
on real biological datasets show that DPS-Finder is efficiency and the DPS representation
⎝
⎠
⎞⎛
⎟⎜
⎟⎜
⎠⎝
AAT
GGG
TGG
AGG
⎞
⎟
⎠
9
10
is powerful enough to capture most of the real motifs. Further directions include
extending the model and the algorithm to local motif pairs or non-linear motifs.
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Appendix
In this section, we prove that the Candidate Motif Refinement Problem is NP-hard.
Candidate Motif Refinement (CMR) Problem: given a motif P, reducing the
size of P’s wildcard pattern sets to at most k with the minimum p-value.
We prove it by reducing the Balanced Complete Bipartite Subgraph problem, which is
NP-hard, to this problem.
Balanced Complete Bipartite Subgraph (BCBS) Problem: given a bipartite
graph G = (V,E) and a positive integer k, we want to determine if there are two
disjoint subsets V1, V2 ⊆ V such that |V1|
= |V2| = k and u ∈ V1
, v ∈ V2
implies
that { u, v}
∈ E .
Given a BCBS Problem, we construct a motif P as follows: Let lmax be the smallest
integer such that 4 lmax ≥ k|V|. Each vertex vi of G is represented by a unique length-lmax
string s(vi). The candidate motif P is a length-2lmax pattern with exactly two wildcard
pattern sets, each contains length-lmax string s(vi), representing the vertices in one partite
of G. There are |E| length-2lmax input DNA sequences T. s(vi)s(vj) is an input DNA
sequence if and only if { vi , v j}
∈ E .
Under the restriction that the size of the wildcard pattern sets is at most k, the refined
motif P’ has the minimum p-value when the concatenation of each pair of patterns in the
two wildcard pattern sets of size k exists in the input DNA sequences T (i.e. P’ has
exactly k 2 binding sites). Therefore, the BCBS problem can be solved by solving the
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CMR problem and check if refined motif P’ has exactly k 2 binding sites.
∎
