This article is part of the supplement: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual MCBIOS Conference. Systems Biology: Bridging the Omics .

Proceedings

MTAP: The Motif Tool Assessment Platform

Daniel Quest^1,2 , Kathryn Dempsey¹ , Mohammad Shafiullah¹ , Dhundy Bastola¹ and Hesham Ali^1,2

¹College of Information Science & Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha NE, USA

²Department of Pathology and Microbiology, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha NE. 68182-0694, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Bioinformatics 2008, 9(Suppl 9):S6doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-S9-S6

Published:	12 August 2008

Abstract

Background

In recent years, substantial effort has been applied to de novo regulatory motif discovery. At this time, more than 150 software tools exist to detect regulatory binding sites given a set of genomic sequences. As the number of software packages increases, it becomes more important to identify the tools with the best performance characteristics for specific problem domains. Identifying the correct tool is difficult because of the great variability in motif detection software. Consequently, many labs spend considerable effort testing methods to find one that works well in their problem of interest.

Results

In this work, we propose a method (MTAP) that substantially reduces the effort required to assess de novo regulatory motif discovery software. MTAP differs from previous attempts at regulatory motif assessment in that it automates motif discovery tool pipelines (something that traditionally required many manual steps), automatically constructs orthologous upstream sequences, and provides automated benchmarks for many popular tools. As a proof of concept, we have run benchmarks over human, mouse, fly, yeast, E. coli and B. subtilis.

Conclusion

MTAP presents a new approach to the challenging problem of assessing regulatory motif discovery methods. The most current version of MTAP can be downloaded from http://biobase.ist.unomaha.edu/ webcite