Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Department of Chemical Pathology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jun 8;7(1):3022. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-02404-w.
Transcription factors (TFs) are well-known important regulators in cell biology and tissue development. However, in mouse, one of the most widely-used model species, currently the vast majority of the known TFs have not been functionally studied due to the lack of sufficient annotations. To this end, we collected and analyzed the whole transcriptome sequencing data from more than 30 major mouse tissues and used the expression profiles to annotate the TFs. We found that the expression patterns of the TFs are highly correlated with the histology of the tissue types thus can be used to infer the potential functions of the TFs. Furthermore, we found that as many as 30% TFs display tissue-specific expression pattern, and these tissue-specific TFs are among the key TFs in their corresponding tissues. We also observed signals of divergent transcription associated with many TFs with unique expression pattern. Lastly, we have integrated all the data, our analysis results as well as various annotation resources to build a web-based database named mTFkb freely accessible at http://www.myogenesisdb.org/mTFkb/ . We believe that mTFkb could serve as a useful and valuable resource for TF studies in mouse.
转录因子（TFs）是细胞生物学和组织发育中众所周知的重要调控因子。然而，在作为最广泛使用的模式生物之一的小鼠中，由于缺乏足够的注释，目前绝大多数已知的 TFs 尚未进行功能研究。为此，我们收集和分析了来自 30 多种主要小鼠组织的全转录组测序数据，并利用表达谱对 TFs 进行注释。我们发现 TFs 的表达模式与组织类型的组织学高度相关，因此可以用来推断 TFs 的潜在功能。此外，我们发现多达 30%的 TFs 表现出组织特异性表达模式，而这些组织特异性 TFs 是其相应组织中的关键 TFs 之一。我们还观察到与许多具有独特表达模式的 TFs 相关的转录分歧信号。最后，我们整合了所有的数据、分析结果以及各种注释资源，构建了一个名为 mTFkb 的基于网络的数据库，可在 http://www.myogenesisdb.org/mTFkb/ 上免费访问。我们相信 mTFkb 可以作为小鼠 TFs 研究的有用且有价值的资源。
