Functional Characterization of Variations on Regulatory Motifs

Transcription factors (TFs) regulate gene expression through specific interactions with short promoter elements. The same regulatory protein may recognize a variety of related sequences. Moreover, once they are detected it is hard to predict whether highly similar sequence motifs will be recognized by the same TF and regulate similar gene expression patterns, or serve as binding sites for distinct regulatory factors. We developed computational measures to assess the functional implications of variations on regulatory motifs and to compare the functions of related sites. We have developed computational means for estimating the functional outcome of substituting a single position within a binding site and applied them to a collection of putative regulatory motifs. We predict the effects of nucleotide variations within motifs on gene expression patterns. In cases where such predictions could be compared to suitable published experimental evidence, we found very good agreement. We further accumulated statistics from multiple substitutions across various binding sites in an attempt to deduce general properties that characterize nucleotide substitutions that are more likely to alter expression. We found that substitutions involving Adenine are more likely to retain the expression pattern and that substitutions involving Guanine are more likely to alter expression compared to the rest of the substitutions. Our results should facilitate the prediction of the expression outcomes of binding site variations. One typical important implication is expected to be the ability to predict the phenotypic effect of variation in regulatory motifs in promoters.