Abstract
Motivation: In yeast, methionine and phosphate metabolism are regulated by the complexes Met4p/Met28p/Cbf1p and Pho4p, respect- ively. The binding sites for these factors share a common core CACGTG. We evaluate our capability to discriminate phosphate- and methionine-responding genes on the basis of putative regulatory elements, despite the similarity between Met4p/Met28p/Cbf1p and Pho4p consensus.Results: We scanned upstream regions of methionine, phosphate and control genes with position-specific weight matrices for Pho4p, Met4p/Met28p/Cbf1p and Met31p/Met32p, and applied discriminant analysis to classify genes according to matrix matching scores. This analysis showed that matrix scores provided a good discrimination between phosphate, methionine and control genes. The optimal para- meters have then been used to predict phosphate and methionine regulation at a genome scale. The genome-scale analysis predicts 37 genes as methionine-regulated and 40 as phosphate-regulated. We compare the predictive results with high throughput data and discuss the difference.Availability: The programs for sequence retrieval and analysis, as well as the complete data and results, are available on the website on regulatory sequence analysis tools (http://rsat.scmbb.ulb.ac.be/rsat/).