【Scientific Research News】The team of Professor Guo Anyuan of the School of Life Sciences, Huazhong University of Science and Technology released the fourth edition of the animal transcription factor database

Transcription factor is the most important regulator of DNA transcription into RNA, which is involved in and affects almost all biological processes
.
Accurate identification, classification and annotation of transcription factors is an important prerequisite and basis for
studying transcription factor function and gene expression regulation.
Professor Guo Anyuan's team has built the Animal Transcription Factor Database (AnimalTFDB) in 2010, which has been continuously maintained and updated for more than 10 years
.
Continuous updating, accurate and complete data and an easy-to-use interface have made AnimalTFDB an authoritative international resource in the field of transcription factor research, with millions of visits and nearly 700 citations
per year.

On October 21, 2022, the journal Nucleic Acids Research published online the fourth edition of the animal transcription factor database (AnimalTFDB 4.
0) (http://bioinfo.
life.
hust.
edu.
cn/AnimalTFDB4/) of Professor Guo Anyuan's team in the School of Life Sciences
。 Professor Guo Anyuan, School of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Hu Hui, assistant researcher of Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, are co-corresponding authors, and Shen Wenkang, doctoral student of the School of Life Sciences, and Chen Siyi, postdoctoral fellow of Tongji Medical College Affiliated Union Hospital, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, are the co-first authors
of the paper.

Figure 1 article information

Figure 2 AnimalTFDB 4.
0 workflow

In the latest fourth edition of AnimalTFDB, the authors identified and classified more than 270,000 transcription factors and more than 150,000 transcription cofactors in 183 animals, doubling the amount of data compared to the previous version
.
Among them, transcription factors are divided into 73 families according to their DNA-binding domains, and transcription cofactors are divided into 82 families
according to their function.
The authors also provide detailed gene annotations on all transcription factors and transcription cofactors, including: gene phenotype, interaction, homology information, transcription factor binding sites, gene pathways, post-translational modification sites, autophagy regulation, gene mutations and their gene expression in various tissues or diseases, providing rich resources
for studying the function of transcription factors and gene expression regulation.

AnimalTFDB provides many useful online tools, including transcription factor prediction (batch prediction of whether the user-input sequence is a transcription factor), transcription factor binding site prediction (batch prediction of transcription factor binding sites on DNA sequences), and BLAST (which can compare the user-entered sequence with all transcription factor sequences in the database).

In addition, the new version of AnimalTFDB also adds a batch search function, users can upload a list of genes or proteins to search the database in
batches.

The research was supported by the National Key R&D Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province and other projects, and the computing work was supported
by the high-performance computing public service platform of the Network and Computing Center of Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

References: Wen-Kang Shen, Si-Yi Chen, Zi-Quan Gan, Yu-Zhu Zhang, Tao Yue, Miao-Miao Chen, Yu Xue, Hui Hu, An-Yuan Guo, AnimalTFDB 4.
0: a comprehensive animal transcription factor database updated with variation and expression annotations, Nucleic Acids Research, 2022; , gkac907, https://doi.
org/10.
1093/nar/gkac907