Title
DiffLogo: a comparative visualization of sequence motifs.
Abstract
For three decades, sequence logos are the de facto standard for the visualization of sequence motifs in biology and bioinformatics. Reasons for this success story are their simplicity and clarity. The number of inferred and published motifs grows with the number of data sets and motif extraction algorithms. Hence, it becomes more and more important to perceive differences between motifs. However, motif differences are hard to detect from individual sequence logos in case of multiple motifs for one transcription factor, highly similar binding motifs of different transcription factors, or multiple motifs for one protein domain.Here, we present DiffLogo, a freely available, extensible, and user-friendly R package for visualizing motif differences. DiffLogo is capable of showing differences between DNA motifs as well as protein motifs in a pair-wise manner resulting in publication-ready figures. In case of more than two motifs, DiffLogo is capable of visualizing pair-wise differences in a tabular form. Here, the motifs are ordered by similarity, and the difference logos are colored for clarity. We demonstrate the benefit of DiffLogo on CTCF motifs from different human cell lines, on E-box motifs of three basic helix-loop-helix transcription factors as examples for comparison of DNA motifs, and on F-box domains from three different families as example for comparison of protein motifs.DiffLogo provides an intuitive visualization of motif differences. It enables the illustration and investigation of differences between highly similar motifs such as binding patterns of transcription factors for different cell types, treatments, and algorithmic approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1186/s12859-015-0767-x
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Sequence analysis, Sequence logo, Sequence motif, Position weight matrix, Binding sites
Sequence logo,Protein domain,Biology,Sequence motif,Position weight matrix,Motif (music),Bioinformatics,Genetics,Consensus sequence,DNA microarray,Sequence analysis
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
1
1471-2105
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
16
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Martin Nettling1103.02
Hendrik Treutler2241.93
Jan Grau313210.64
J. Keilwagen411010.26
Stefan Posch5253.60
Ivo Grosse640437.14