Analysis of computational footprinting methods for DNase sequencing experiments

DNase-seq allows nucleotide-level identification of transcription factor binding sites on the basis of a computational search of footprint-like DNase I cleavage patterns on the DNA. Frequently in high-throughput methods, experimental artifacts such as DNase I cleavage bias affect the computational analysis of DNase-seq experiments. Here we performed a comprehensive and systematic study on the performance of computational footprinting methods. We evaluated ten footprinting methods in a panel of DNase-seq experiments for their ability to recover cell-specific transcription factor binding sites. We show that three methods--HINT, DNase2TF and PIQ--consistently outperformed the other evaluated methods and that correcting the DNase-seq signal for experimental artifacts significantly improved the accuracy of computational footprints. We also propose a score that can be used to detect footprints arising from transcription factors with potentially short residence times.