Bioinformatic Analysis of Transcription Factor Binding Sites

Navid Al Hossain, Regan Conrad

Predicting the location of protein binding sites within a genome is a difficult task, but is an integral part of furthering our understanding of gene regulation.

Navid’s project focused on analyzing the correlation between the frequency of binding sites within raw sequence data and the bioinformatically predicted ‘strength’ of these binding sites. His work has been instrumental in the experimental design and continued collaboration between the Dresch group in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department, the Drewell lab in Biology, and the Spratt lab in Chemistry.

Regan’s project focused on analyzing bioinformatic predictions of binding sites within core promoter regions from Drosophila melanogaster to investigate potential nucleotide dependencies and improve the predictive power of these algorithms.