T-Gene

Improved target gene prediction. Abstract Motivation Identifying the genes regulated by a given transcription factor (its “target genes”) is a key step in developing a comprehensive understanding of gene regulation. Previously we developed a method for predicting the target genes of a transcription factor (TF) based solely on the correlation between a histone modification at the TF’s binding site and the expression of the gene across a set of tissues. That approach is limited to organisms for which extensive histone and expression data is available, and does not explicitly incorporate the genomic distance between the TF and the gene. Results We present the T-Gene algorithm, which overcomes these limitations. T-Gene can be used to predict which genes are most likely to be regulated by a TF, and which of the TF’s binding sites are most likely involved in regulating particular genes.