Profiling transcription factor activity dynamics using intronic reads in time-series transcriptome data

Activities of transcription factors (TFs) are temporally modulated to regulate dynamic cellular processes, including development, homeostasis, and disease. Recent developments of bioinformatic tools have enabled the analysis of TF activities using transcriptome data. However, because these methods typically use exon-based target expression levels, the estimated TF activities have limited temporal accuracy. To address this, we proposed a TF activity measure based on intron-level information in time-series RNA-seq data, and implemented it to decode the temporal control of TF activities during dynamic processes. We showed that TF activities inferred from intronic reads can better recapitulate instantaneous TF activities compared to the exon-based measure. By analyzing public and our own time-series transcriptome data, we found that intron-based TF activities improve the characterization of temporal phasing of cycling TFs during circadian rhythm, and facilitate the discovery of two temporally opposing TF modules during T cell activation. Collectively, we anticipate that the proposed approach would be broadly applicable for decoding global transcriptional architecture during dynamic processes.