Finding TF motifs enriched in series of ATAC-seq peaks (using fimo?)

Hi all,

I have a series of peaks located in a .txt file (chr / start / end) and would like to know if there are tf motifs enriched in each of the individual peaks.

For eg, I am looking for an output that will eventually look something like this:

chr | start   | end    | tf motif 
1   | 100024  | 100288 | GATA1
1   | 153313  | 155590 | RUNX1
.
.
.

Where each row is a unique peak and the tf motif is the most significantly enriched.

I downloaded the JASPAR2022 core collection to get a set of PWMs for different TFs, which I then concatenated in to a single .meme file (following this post: Finding individual motif occurrences with FIMO from the MEME suite) and have started using the FIMO command line tool. However I can only figure out how to query a single fasta sequence at a time?

fimo --parse-genomic-coord /path/to/meme/combined.meme input.fa

Is there a way to do this such that I can query all 15,000 peaks at once, instead of doing them individually?

Thanks in advance.

meme atac-seq tf fimo motif

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written 3.2 years ago by octopuslegs11 •

3 answers

A basic scenario for running FIMO: https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/questions/2467/where-to-download-jaspar-tfbs-motif-bed-file/2491#2491

This approach lets you generate a BED file containing genomic regions within a given reference genome, which are putative TF binding sites ("FIMO hits").

This BED file can be mapped via bedmap or bedops etc. to retrieve TF site calls located within peaks or other genomic regions, e.g.,

bedmap --echo --echo-map-id-uniq --delim '\t' peaks.bed fimoHits.bed > answer.bed

Make sure chromosome name schemes match between BED files, in order to do set operations. Your peaks might be using Ensembl's scheme (1, etc.), while the output from FIMO in my example will generate UCSC names (chr1, chr2, etc.). An awk preprocessing step can fix things in either file. It might also be helpful to run sort-bed on your peaks to ensure they are sorted before operations.

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written 3.2 years ago by Alex Reynolds

Thanks - this is exactly what I was looking for! I appreciate your help.

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written 3.2 years ago by octopuslegs11 •

I corrected my answer. The usage scenario of FIMO I documented will generate a BED file of potential TF sites, not consume it.

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written 3.2 years ago by Alex Reynolds

Ok, this makes more sense. Thank you!

Out of curiosity, is it "better" to do it this way (ie scanning the entire genome for TF motifs, then getting the intersect with my peaks) as opposed to generating a fasta sequence for each of the 15000 peaks individually, and then scanning that for TF motifs? I guess another issue would be deciding what to use as the background model if I were to follow this latter route.

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written 3.2 years ago by octopuslegs11 •

If those are the regions you're interested in, then use those regions and create the background from them.

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written 3.2 years ago by jared.andrews07

I would do a whole-genome FIMO scan, using the reference genome (with UCSC blacklisted regions removed, say) as a background, generally. This takes slightly longer but creates a set of FIMO hits I can bedmap against any number of regions/peaks/whatever, whenever I need to. But it may depend on what you're trying to do. If you're just doing a one-off query, then the above advice is probably fine. If you might do this again on other sets of peaks, then a whole-genome set of hits may be a useful resource.

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written 3.2 years ago by Alex Reynolds

Got it, this makes sense. Thanks again for your advice!

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written 3.2 years ago by octopuslegs11 •