TRANSFAC^® Release 7.0 - Documentation

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Preface

TRANSFAC^® is a database on eukaryotic cis-acting regulatory DNA elements and trans-acting factors. It covers the whole range from yeast to human.

TRANSFAC^® started 1988 with a printed compilation (Nucleic Acids Res. 16: 1879-1902, 1988) and was transferred into computer-readable format in 1990 (BioTechForum - Advances in Molecular Genetics (J. Collins, A.J. Driesel, eds.) 4:95-108, 1991). The basic structures of Table 1 and 2 of the compilation were taken as the core of the emergent database. The aim of the early compilation as well as of the TRANSFAC^® database is

I	to guide through a meanwhile overwhelming amount of data in a field which is connected to nearly all areas of modern molecular biology;
II	to map the regulatory sites in the individual genes and, ultimately, in the genome(s) as a whole;
III	to develop a tool for the identification of regulatory elements in newly unravelled genomic sequences;
IV	to provide a basis for a more comprehensive understanding of how the genome governs transcriptional control.

The TRANSFAC^® data have been generally extracted from the original literature, occasionally they have been taken from other compilations (Faisst and Meyer, Nucleic Acids Res. 20:3-26, 1992; Dhawale and Lande, Nucleic Acids Res. 21:5537-5546, 1994) which is appropriately indicated. Thus, the main responsibility for the correctness of the data is up to the authors, while we have to assume any responsibility for correctly extracting their publications. In a long term, a direct submission system should be envisaged similar to that established for depositing sequence data in the sequence data libraries.