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Updated: Aug 20, 2026

High Sensitivity Measurement of Transcription Factor-DNA Binding Affinities by Competitive Titration Using Fluorescence Microscopy
Published on: February 7, 2019
MONKEY: identifying conserved transcription-factor binding sites in multiple alignments using a binding site-specific
Alan M Moses1, Derek Y Chiang, Daniel A Pollard
1Graduate Group in Biophysics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. amoses@berkeley.edu <amoses@berkeley.edu>
Abstract:
We introduce a method (MONKEY) to identify conserved transcription-factor binding sites in multispecies alignments. MONKEY employs probabilistic models of factor specificity and binding-site evolution, on which basis we compute the likelihood that putative sites are conserved and assign statistical significance to each hit. Using genomes from the genus Saccharomyces, we illustrate how the significance of real sites increases with evolutionary distance and explore the relationship between conservation and function.
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