Modeling evolutionary fitness for DNA motif discovery

The motif discovery problem consists of finding over-represented patterns in a collection of sequences. Its difficulty stems partly from the large number of possibilities to define both the motif space to be searched and the notion of over-representation. Since the size of the search space is generally exponential in the motif length, many heuristic methods, including evolutionary algorithms, have been developed. However, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the adequate evaluation of motif quality, especially when comparing motifs of different lengths. We propose an evolution strategy to solve the motif discovery problem based on a new fitness function that simultaneously takes into account (1) the number of motif occurrences, (2) the motif length, and (3) its information content. Experimental results show that the proposed method succeeds in uncovering the correct motif positions and length with high accuracy.

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