Sequence biases in CLIP experimental data are incorporated in protein RNA-binding models

Abstract

We report a newly-identified bias in CLIP data that results from cleaving enzyme specificity. This bias is inadvertently incorporated into standard peak calling methods [1], which identify the most likely locations where proteins bind RNA. We further show how, in downstream analysis, this bias is incorporated into models inferred by the state-of-the-art GraphProt method to predict protein RNA-binding. We call for both experimental controls to measure enzyme specificities and algorithms to identify unbiased CLIP binding sites.