Analysis of Relevance and Redundance on Topoisomerase 2b (TOP2B) Binding Sites: A Feature Selection Approach

Abstract

Topoisomerases are proteins that regulate the topology of DNA by introducing transient breaks to relax supercoiling. In this paper we focus our attention on Topoisomerases 2 (TOP2), which generate double-strand DNA breaks that, if inefficiently repaired, can seriously compromise genomic stability. It is then important to gain insights on the molecular processes involved in TOP2-DNA binding. In order to do this, we collected genomic and epigenomic information from publicly available high-throughput sequencing projects and systematically quantified them within experimentally measured TOP2 binding sites. We then applied feature selection techniques in order to both increase the performance of classification and to gain insight on the particular properties that can be of biological relevance. Results obtained allowed us to identify a core set of predictive chromatin features that faithfully explain TOP2 binding.