Predicting transcription factor affinities to DNA from a biophysical model

Theoretical efforts to understand the regulation of gene expression are traditionally centered around the identification of transcription factor binding sites at specific DNA positions. More recently these efforts have been supplemented by experimental data for relative binding affinities of proteins to longer intergenic sequences. The question arises to what extent these two approaches converge. In this paper, we adopt a physical binding model to predict the relative binding affinity of a transcription factor for a given sequence.