Prediction of Transcription Factor Binding Sites Using Genetic Algorithm

Identification of transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) from the upstream region of genes remains a highly important and unsolved problem particularly in higher eukaryotic genomes. In this paper, we propose a new approach to predict TFBS. This approach uses position weight matrix (PWM) to represent binding sites and uses genetic algorithm (GA) to search the best matrix. A new coding method so called multiple-variable coding is proposed in GA. We apply it on two transcription factors rebl and mgl. The result shows that this approach can find most of the known sites, which indicates that this method is very effective