MotEvo: integrated Bayesian probabilistic methods for inferring regulatory sites and motifs on multiple alignments of DNA sequences

Probabilistic approaches for inferring transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) and regulatory motifs from DNA sequences have been developed for over two decades. Previous work has shown that prediction accuracy can be significantly improved by incorporating features such as the competition of multiple transcription factors (TFs) for binding to nearby sites, the tendency of TFBSs for co-regulated TFs to cluster and form cis-regulatory modules and explicit evolutionary modeling of conservation of TFBSs across orthologous sequences. However, currently available tools only incorporate some of these features, and significant methodological hurdles hampered their synthesis into a single consistent probabilistic framework.