An Algorithm for Motif Discovery with Iteration on Lengths of Motifs

Analysis of DNA sequence motifs is becoming increasingly important in the study of gene regulation, and the identification of motif in DNA sequences is a complex problem in computational biology. Motif discovery has attracted the attention of more and more researchers, and varieties of algorithms have been proposed. Most existing motif discovery algorithms fix the motif's length as one of the input parameters. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to identify the optimal length of the motif and the optimal motif with that length, through an iteration process on increasing length numbers. For each fixed length, a modified genetic algorithm (GA) is used for finding the optimal motif with that length. Three operators are used in the modified GA: Mutation that is similar to the one used in usual GA but is modified to avoid local optimum in our case, and Addition and Deletion that are proposed by us for the problem. A criterion is given for singling out the optimal length in the increasing motif's lengths. We call this method AMDILM (an algorithm for motif discovery with iteration on lengths of motifs). The experiments on simulated data and real biological data show that AMDILM can accurately identify the optimal motif length. Meanwhile, the optimal motifs discovered by AMDILM are consistent with the real ones and are similar with the motifs obtained by the three well-known methods: Gibbs Sampler, MEME and Weeder.