TRANSFAC 3.1

[Edgar Wingender]

The new release 3.1 of the TRANSFAC database is now available at the 
following WWW site:

http://transfac.gbf-braunschweig.de

(Wingender et al., 1997, Nucleic Acids Res. 25:265-268). 

TRANSFAC is a database on eukaryotic transcription factors and their 
binding sites. As new features, it now includes the complete amino acid 
sequences of the transcription factors (FACTOR table) and links to the 
Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD) in its SITE table. Moreover, the data 
volume has increased comprising now 2080 FACTOR and 4362 SITE entries.

As a new search option, you may retrieve factors by their molecular weight.
Moreover, you will find a SRS5 version which offers additional retrieval 
options for the TRANSFAC tables, for EMBL, SwissProt, PIR, 
 (for this, we 
give credit to Thure Etzold, EBI, Hinxton).

As for release 3.0, there are also extensive links with TRRD (Transcription 
Regulatory Regio Database) and COMPEL (Composite Elements Database), 
maintained at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (ICG, Novosibirsk, 
Russia: N. A. Kolchanov/A. Kel et al.).

The sequence information contained in the SITE table is used by 
PatternSearch 1.0 for interactive sequence scanning for potential TF 
binding sites.

An updated library of matrices for transcription factor binding sites will 
be provided very soon which can be used for sequence analysis with 
MatInspector release 2.0 (Quandt et al., 1995, Nucleic Acids Res. 
23:4878-4884). 
This tool is available at 
	http://transfac.gbf-braunschweig.de/cgi-bin/matSearch/matsearch.pl
or at
http://www.gsf.de/BIODV/matinspector.html
(Thomas Werner and coworkers).

Please, forward this mail to your colleagues which may be interested in 
using these tools

On behalf of the TRANSFAC team:
Edgar Wingender
Thomas Heinemeyer

GBF - Braunschweig, February 28, 1997




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Dr. Edgar Wingender
Molecular Bioinformatics of Gene Regulation
GBF
Mascheroder Weg 1
D-38124  Braunschweig
Germany

Phone    49 - 531 - 6181-427
FAX       49 - 531 - 6181-266