Deciphering the language of transcription factors
Transcription factors are proteins that bind to DNA to promote or suppress protein production. Since almost all diseases involve disruption of the protein-production process, transcription factors are promising biological targets for drugs — and could even serve as drugs themselves.But there are likely thousands of transcription factors in humans, each of which might bind to the genome at tens of thousands of different locations. Previously, there was no cost-effective way to figure out exactly where transcription factors bind — which exact DNA letters in a given stretch of genome each of them attaches to. Biologists thus relied on approximate methods to identify the general vicinity of binding sites.In the August issue of the online journal PLoS Computational Biology, a team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory presented a new analytic technique that identifies binding sites with much greater accuracy. As a consequence, the researchers were able...