Transcription Factors (TFs)

In the last years post-transcriptional regulation (PTR) of gene expression has been increasingly recognized to be a powerful and general determinant of the quantitative changes in proteomes, and therefore a driving force for cell phenotypes. By means of networks of trans-factors on one hand, and cis-elements found primarily in untranslated regions (UTRs) of mRNA on the other hand, mRNA availability to translation and translation rates are tightly controlled and can be rapidly tuned according to the changing state of the cell.

Molecular networks are the basis of biological processes. Such networks can be decomposed into smaller modules, also known as network motifs. These motifs show interesting dynamical behaviors, in which co-operativity effects between the motif components play a critical role in human diseases. We have developed a motif-searching algorithm, which is able to identify common motif types from the cancer networks and signal transduction networks (STNs).

Chromosomal translocation (CT) is of enormous clinical interest because this disorder is associated with various major solid tumors and leukemia. A tumor-specific fusion gene event may occur when a translocation joins two separate genes. Currently, various CT databases provide information about fusion genes and their genomic elements. However, no database of the roles of fusion genes, in terms of essential functional and regulatory elements in oncogenesis, is available.

The serial analysis of chromatin occupancy technique (SACO) promises to become a widely used method for the unbiased genome-wide experimental identification of loci bound by a transcription factor of interest. We describe the first web-based automatic tool, termed sequence tag analysis and reporting tool (START), for processing SACO data generated by experiments performed for the yeast, fruit fly, mouse, rat or human genomes.