Protein−DNA binding in the absence of specific base-pair recognition

Until now, it has been reasonably assumed that specific base-pair recognition is the only mechanism controlling the specificity of transcription factor (TF)−DNA binding. Contrary to this assumption, here we show that nonspecific DNA sequences possessing certain repeat symmetries, when present outside of specific TF binding sites (TFBSs), statistically control TF−DNA binding preferences. We used high-throughput protein−DNA binding assays to measure the binding levels and free energies of binding for several human TFs to tens of thousands of short DNA sequences with varying re- peat symmetries. Based on statistical mechanics modeling, we iden- tify a new protein−DNA binding mechanism induced by DNA se- quence symmetry in the absence of specific base-pair recognition, and experimentally demonstrate that this mechanism indeed gov- erns protein−DNA binding preferences. Four custom protein binding microarray (PBM) experiments of human transcription factors were performed. Briefly, the PBMs involved binding his-tagged transcription factors c-Myc, Max, and Mad1(Mxd1) to double-stranded 180K Agilent microarrays in order to determine their binding specificity for GTCACGTGAC DNA binding sites flanked by repetitive DNA elements with different symmetries and correlation length scales. Briefly, we represent three categories of 36-bp sequences: 1) 28800 probes centered at a GTCACGTGAC site and flanked by repetitive elements (probe names starting with Ariel_); 2) Unbound probes (or negative controls); and 3) Bound probes, which correspond to randomly selected genomic regions bound in vivo by c-Myc, Max, or Mad2 (ChIP-seq P < 10^(-10) in HeLaS3 or K562 celld (ENCODE)), which contain at least two consecutive 8-mers with universal PBM E-score > 0.4 (Munteanu and Gordan, LNCS 2013). Each DNA sequence represented on the array is present in 6 replicate spots. We report the gcPBM signal intensity for each spot (raw files) as well as the median intensity over the 6 replicate spots (normalized data). The PBM protocol is described in Berger et al., Nature Biotechnology 2006 (PMID 16998473).