In yet another coup for a research concept known as "big data," researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a computerized algorithm to understand the complex and rapid choreography of hundreds of proteins that interact in mindboggling combinations to govern how genes are flipped on and off within a cell
The researchers used 238 data sets generated by the ENCODE project to study the specific DNA sequences bound by each of the 128 trans-acting factors. But these factors aren't monogamous; they bind many different sequences in a variety of protein-DNA combinations. Xie, Boyle and Snyder designed a machine-learning algorithm to analyze all the data and identify which trans-acting factors tend to be seen together and which DNA sequences they prefer