BindCompare: a novel integrated protein-nucleic acid binding analysis platform

Advanced genomic technologies have generated thousands of protein-nucleic acid binding datasets that have the potential to identify testable gene regulatory network (GRNs) models governed by combinatorial associations between factors. Transcription factors (TFs), and RNA binding proteins (RBPs) are nucleic-acid binding proteins regulating gene expression and are key drivers of GRN function. However, the combinatorial mechanisms by which the interactions between specific TFs and RBPs regulate gene expression remain largely unknown. To identify possible combinations of TFs and RBPs that may function together, developing a tool that compares and contrasts the interactions of multiple TFs and RBPs with nucleic acids to identify their common and unique targets is necessary. Therefore, we introduce BindCompare, a user-friendly tool that can be run locally to predict new combinatorial relationships between TFs and RBPs. BindCompare can analyze data from any organism with known annotated genome information and outputs files with detailed genomic locations and gene information for targets for downstream analysis. Overall, BindCompare is a new tool that identifies TFs and RBPs that co-bind to the same DNA and/or RNA loci, generating testable hypotheses about their combinatorial regulation of target genes.

BindCompare is an open-source package that is available on the Python Packaging Index (PyPI, https://pypi.org/project/bindcompare/) with the source code available on GitHub (https://github.com/pranavmahabs/bindcompare). Complete documentation for the package can be found at both links.