Tissue significances tests on DNA binding sequence motifs for human genes

Abstract

DNA binding sequence motifs are becoming increasingly important in the analysis of gene regulation, disease diagnosis and drug design. Although so far there are amount of tools available to discover these kinds of motifs, little was done to identify the biological functions, especially in tissue or cell type specific contributions, of those motifs. In this paper we used an integrated pipeline to discover sequences motifs for the promoter regions of human genes. Then we distinguished two types of motifs: tissue rich motifs (TRM) and tissue even motifs (TEM), using hypotheses test approaches including Bayesian hypothesis, Binomial distribution and traditional z-test.We finally got 233 overlapped TRMs and 56 TEMs. Most of those motifs are validated against JASPAR databases.