Searching maximal degenerate motifs guided by a compact suffix tree

Abstract

Compared to a mismatched consensus motif, a degenerate consensus motif is more suitable for modeling position-specific variations within motifs. In the literature, the state-of-art methods using degenerate consensus motifs for de novo motif finding use a naïve enumeration algorithm, which is far from efficient. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to extract maximal degenerate consensus motifs from a set of sequences based on a compact suffix tree. Our algorithm achieved a time complexity about times lower than that of a naïve enumeration, where is the average length of source sequences. To demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, we applied it to finding transcription factor binding sites. It is validated on a popular benchmark proposed by Tompa. The executable files of our algorithm can be accessed through http://hpc.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/bioinfo . © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.