Analysis of optimized DNase-seq reveals intrinsic bias in transcription factor footprint identification

These authors contributed equally to this work. DNase-seq is a powerful technique for identifying cis-regulatory elements across the genome. We studied the key experimental parameters to optimize the performance of DNase-seq. We found that sequencing short 50-100bp fragments that accumulate in long inter-nucleosome linker regions is more efficient for identifying transcription factor binding sites than using longer fragments. We also assessed the potential of DNase-seq to predict transcription factor occupancy through the generation of nucleotide-resolution transcription factor footprints. In modeling the sequence-specific DNaseI cutting bias we found a surprisingly strong effect that varied over more than tw