Artificial ants deposit pheromone to search for regulatory DNA elements.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Identification of transcription-factor binding motifs (DNA sequences) can be formulated as a combinatorial problem, where an efficient algorithm is indispensable to predict the role of multiple binding motifs. An ant algorithm is a biology-inspired computational technique, through which a combinatorial problem is solved by mimicking the behavior of social insects such as ants. We developed a unique version of ant algorithms to select a set of binding motifs by considering a potential contribution of each of all random DNA sequences of 4- to 7-bp in length.

Results

Human chondrogenesis was used as a model system. The results revealed that the ant algorithm was able to identify biologically known binding motifs in chondrogenesis such as AP-1, NFkappaB, and sox9. Som

SUBMITTER: Liu Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1586019 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature