The binding patterns of TFs are not uniform, and we can correlate both inter-and intra-species measures of negative selection with the overall information content of motif positions. The selection on some motif positions is as high as protein coding exons (Figure 1F, Luke Ward and Manolis Kellis, personal communication). These aggregate measures across motifs show that the binding preferences found in the population of sites are also relevant to the per-site behavior. By developing a per-site metric of population effect on bound motifs, we found that highly constrained bound instances across mammals are able to buffer the impact of individual variation57.
