The MEME Suite allows the biologist to discover novel motifs in collections of unaligned nucleotide or protein sequences, and to perform a wide variety of other motif-based analyses.

The MEME Suite supports motif-based analysis of DNA, RNA and protein sequences. It provides motif discovery algorithms using both probabilistic (MEME) and discrete models (MEME), which have complementary strengths. It also allows discovery of motifs with arbitrary insertions and deletions (GLAM2). In addition to motif discovery, the MEME Suite provides tools for scanning sequences for matches to motifs (FIMO, MAST and GLAM2Scan), scanning for clusters of motifs (MCAST), comparing motifs to known motifs (Tomtom), finding preferred spacings between motifs (SpaMo), predicting the biological roles of motifs (GOMo), measuring the positional enrichment of sequences for known motifs (CentriMo), and analyzing ChIP-seq and other large datasets (MEME-ChIP).

The MEME Suite is comprised of a collection of tools that work together, as shown below. Not all the tools are available as webservices, so to get the full power of the MEME Suite you will need to download and install a local copy of the software. To see what has changed recently you can peruse the release notes.

Table of Contents:


Motif Discovery
MEME Find ungapped motifs in unaligned DNA, RNA or protein sequences. Sample
MEME-ChIP Comprehensive motif analysis of large nucleotide datasets such as those from ChIP-seq or CLIP-seq experiments. Sample
DREME Find short, ungapped motifs in large sets of DNA or RNA sequences. Also allows discriminative motif analysis using a set of control sequences. Sample
GLAM2 Find gapped motifs in DNA or protein sequences. It has a tutorial. Sample
Motif Enrichment Analysis
AME Motif Enrichment Analysis: find known DNA or RNA motifs that are relatively enriched in the input sequences compared to shuffled version of those sequences or control sequences. Sample
CentriMo Local Motif Enrichment Analysis: Find motifs that are enriched in local regions in equal-length sequences. Sample
SpaMo Motif Spacing Analysis: Find known motifs that occur with preferred spacings relative to a primary motif in a set of DNA sequences. Sample
GOMO Genome Ontology Motif Enrichment: Identify possible roles (Gene Ontology terms) for DNA binding motifs. Sample
Motif Search
FIMO Search a sequence database for occurrences of known motifs. This program treats each motif independently and reports all putative motif occurrences below a specified p-value threshold. Sample
MAST Search a sequence database for occurences of known motifs. This program assumes exactly one occurrence of each motif per sequence, and each sequence in the database is assigned a p-value, based on the product of the p-values of the individual motif occurrences in that sequence. Sample
MCAST Search a sequence database for clusters of known motifs. mcast employs a motif-based hidden Markov model, using a star topology and a novel scoring algorithm. The motifs may appear in any order. Sample
MOTIPH Search a set of aligned sequences for conservered matches to motifs. In addition to the aligned sequences and the motifs, this program requires a maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree estimating the evolutionary relationships and distances among the sequences. Sample
GLAM2Scan Search for occurences of gapped motifs, discovered by GLAM2. Sample
Motif Comparison
Tomtom Find motifs that are similar to a given DNA or RNA motif by searching a database of known motifs. Sample
Additional Primary Tools
AMA Print the Average Motif Affinity score of each sequence in a database. The score is calculated by averaging the likelihood ratio scores for all feasible binding events to the given sequence and to its reverse strand.
Motif Format Conversion Scripts Foreign Motif Formats
beeml2meme Convert an BEEML matrix file to MEME format.
chen2meme Convert a CHEN matrix file to MEME format.
elm2meme Convert a ELM tab separated file to MEME format.
iupac2meme Convert an IUPAC string to MEME format.
jaspar2meme Convert a directory of JASPAR files to MEME format.
matrix2meme Convert count or frequency matrices to MEME format.
meme2meme Convert and merge multiple MEME formatted files.
nmica2meme Convert a nestedMICA (BioTiffin/XMS) matrix file to MEME format.
priority2meme Convert a PRIORITY matrix file to MEME format.
rna2meme Convert a FASTA file with short RNA sequences into motifs for DNA they might bind in MEME format.
scpd2meme Convert an SCPD matrix file to MEME format.
sites2meme Convert files containing sites into MEME format.
taipale2meme Convert a tab-separated file exported from a spreadsheet of Taipale results to MEME format.
tamo2meme Convert a TAMO matrix file to MEME format.
transfac2meme Convert a TRANSFAC matrix file to MEME format.
uniprobe2meme Convert a UNIPROBE matrix file to MEME format.
File Format Conversion Utilities
clustalw2fasta Convert a Clustalw multiple alignment into FASTA format.
clustalw2phylip Convert a Clustalw multiple alignment into Phylip format.
glam2format Convert glam2 motifs to standard alignment formats.
obo2dag Convert a Gene Ontology OBO file into a GO DAG file.
Other Utilities
alphtype Classify a string passed as a command line argument as an instance of the DNA or protein alphabet.
ama-qvalues Add q-values to AMA output.
ceqlogo Create motif logos.
compute-prior-dist Compute the distribution of priors in a MEME PSP format file. Sample
create-priors Compute priors and their distribution from raw scores in a Wiggle format file.
dust Mask low-complexity regions in DNA sequences in a FASTA file to N characters.
fasta-center Output the central portion of each sequence in a FASTA file of sequences.
fasta-dinucleotide-shuffle Shuffle the letters in each sequence in a file of FASTA file of nucleotide sequences, preserving the dinucleotide frequencies.
fasta-get-markov Estimate a Markov model from a FASTA file of sequences.
fasta-hamming-enrich Compute the relative enrichment of a regular expression in two sets of sequence, where the shortest Hamming distance is used to classify sequences.
fasta-grep Find matches to a Perl regular expression in a FASTA file of sequences.
fasta-io Read and write FASTA files.
fasta-shuffle-letters Shuffle the letters in each sequence in a file of FASTA file preserving k-mer frequencies. This makes use of uShuffle.
fasta-subsample Extract a random selection of the sequences in a FASTA file. Can also subsample the sequences themselves.
fitevd Fit an extreme value distribution to data.
gendb Generate sequences from a Markov model.
getsize Print statistics about or (higher-order) shuffle sequences read from a FASTA file.
glam2mask Mask glam2 motifs out of sequences so that weaker motifs can be found.
gomo_highlight Identify GO terms which are implied by other GO terms, allowing the most specific GO terms to be highlighted in the conversion to html.
meme2alph Extract the sequence alphabet definition from a MEME or DREME file (any format).
meme-get-motif Extract specified motifs from a MEME text (.txt) format file.
meme-rename Easily rename MEME Suite HTML files to unique names incorporating the path name (rather than "meme.html").
pmb_bf Calculate the statistical power of phylogentic motif models.
psp-gen Generate position-specific priors from positive (likely to contain a feature of interest) and negative (unlikely to contain a feature of interest) sequences for use as an additional input to MEME.
purge Remove highly similar members of a set of sequences.
qvalue Compute q-values from p-values.
reconcile-tree-alignment Given a tree and an alignment, identify the intersection of the sets of sequence IDs and leaf labels. Trim the extra sequences and leaves and print the resulting alignment and tree.
reduce-alignment Extract specified columns from a multiple alignment.
remove-alignment-gaps Remove from an alignment all columns that correspond to a gap in a specified species.
shadow Perform phylogenetic shadowing on a given DNA alignment, using a given tree.
update-sequence-db Create or update the sequence databases for a MEME Suite web server.
File Formats
MEME Motif The motif format which is supported by the MEME Suite.
Alphabet Definition A method for defining custom alphabets.
Background Model Background frequencies for DNA or protein sequences.
Position-Specific Priors (PSP) Priors (weights) on each position in each input sequence that can bias the search for motifs by MEME.
Dirichlet Mixtures A Dirichlet mixture file specifies residues' tendencies to align with one another, and is the basis for scoring columns of aligned residues in MEME and GLAM2.
FASTA Sequence DNA or protein sequences.
ClustalW Alignment A multiple alignment of DNA or protein sequences.
Foreign Motif Formats Motif formats that can be converted into MEME motifs using the motif format conversion scripts available when you install the MEME Suite on your own computer.
GLAM2 Alphabet A custom sequence alphabet for GLAM2. This can be used to provide alternate alphabets other than the standard DNA and protein.
GO DAG A file format which stores the structure of the Gene Ontology so it can be used to improve GOMO output.
GOMO Output The file format output by the GOMO tool.
Guides and Tutorials
Web Service Access How to access MEME Suite web services from Perl or Python scripts.
Installation How to install a local copy of the MEME Suite.
Release notes A list of changes included in the latest release.

Maintenance and development of the MEME Suite is funded by grant R01 GM103544 from the National Institutes of Health.

The MEME Suite web portal also receives support from Google.


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