Animaltfdb: a comprehensive animal transcription factor database. Nucleic Acids Res

Transcription factors (TFs) are proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences, thereby playing cru-cial roles in gene-expression regulation through controlling the transcription of genetic information from DNA to RNA. Transcription cofactors and chro-matin remodeling factors are also essential in the gene transcriptional regulation. Identifying and annotating all the TFs are primary and crucial steps for illustrating their functions and understand-ing the transcriptional regulation. In this study, based on manual literature reviews, we collected and curated 72 TF families for animals, which is cur-rently the most complete list of TF families in animals. Then, we systematically characterized all the TFs in 50 animal species and constructed a com-prehensive animal TF database, AnimalTFDB. To better serve the community, we provided detailed annotations for each TF, including basic informa-tion, gene structure, functional domain, 3D structure hit, Gene Ontology, pathway, protein–protein inter-action, paralogs, orthologs, potential TF-binding sites and targets. In addition, we collected and annotated transcription cofactors and chromatin re-modeling factors. AnimalTFDB has a user-friendly web interface with multiple browse and search func-tions, as well as data downloading. It is freely avail-able a