Computational Approaches for Predicting the Binding Sites and Understanding the Recognition Mechanism of Protein-DNA Complexes

Protein-DNA recognition plays an important role in the regulation of gene expression. Understanding the influence of specific residues for protein-DNA interactions and the recognition mechanism of protein-DNA complexes is a challenging task in molecular and computational biology. Several computational approaches have been put forward to tackle these problems from different perspectives: (i) development of databases for the interactions between protein and DNA and binding specificity of protein-DNA complexes, (ii) structural analysis of protein-DNA complexes, (iii) discriminating DNA-binding proteins from amino acid sequence, (iv) prediction of DNA-binding sites and protein-DNA binding specificity using sequence and/or structural information, and (v) understanding the recognition mechanism of protein-DNA complexes. In this review, we focus. on all these issues and extensively discuss the advancements on the development of comprehensive bioinformatics databases for protein-DNA interactions, efficient tools for identifying the binding sites, and plausible mechanisms for understanding the recognition of protein-DNA complexes. Further, the available online resources for understanding protein-DNA interactions are collectively listed, which will serve as ready-to-use information for the research community.