Context-dependent DNA recognition code for C2H2 zinc-finger transcription factors

Modeling and identifying the DNA-protein recognition code is one of the most challenging problems in computational biology. Several quantitative methods have been developed to model DNA-protein interactions with specific focus on the C(2)H(2) zinc-finger proteins, the largest transcription factor family in eukaryotic genomes. In many cases, they performed well. But the overall the predictive accuracy of these methods is still limited. One of the major reasons is all these methods used weight matrix models to represent DNA-protein interactions, assuming all base-amino acid contacts contribute independently to the total free energy of binding.