The 20th In Silico Megabank Research Seminar will be held on Tuesday, December 18. This Time, we will be welcoming Dr. Edgar Wingender, University Medical Center Göttingen as our lecturer, and he will be speaking on “Construction and analysis of gene regulatory networks.”

・Date/Time: December 18(Tues.) 17:00‐18:30
・Venue: Conference Room 1 (2F), Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization    http://www.megabank.tohoku.ac.jp/english/info/access.html
・Title: Construction and analysis of gene regulatory networks: The continuation of the TRANSFAC concept
・Lecturer: Edgar Wingender（Dept. of Bioinformatics, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany）
・Language:　English

・Abstract:
The database TRANSFAC, which represents sequence-specific regulatory DNA-protein interactions in their different aspects, became a gold-standard in the field of gene expression analysis during the last twenty years. It has provided the basis for approaches to detect potential transcription factor binding sites in genomic sequences, which have been systematically exploited to generate transcriptional networks. It could be shown that combining this approach of pattern-based TFBS prediction with a multi-genome conservativity analysis enables to identify a set of highly relevant TF-target interactions.

The systematic collection of transcription factors (TFs) also helped establish a comprehensive classification of TFs according to their DNA-binding domains. This classification (TFClass) has been recently updated and profoundly revised (http://tfclass.bioinf.med.uni-goettingen.de/). It proved useful in identifying groups of paralogous TFs among which information about DNA-binding specificities and predicted target genes can be passed on to the paralogs. The networks obtained by such “paralogous expansion” provided a suitable basis for reconstructing tissue-specific transcription networks with interesting features.

The transcriptional networks thus constructed have been extended to gene regulatory networks by including micro-RNAs as another important player, both with regard to their targets (TF- and non-TF genes), as well as their own transcriptional regulation by TFs. Comparing the tissue-specific gene regulatory networks of a number of different tissues exhibited typical properties for individual and groups of tissues.

・Organizer: Takako Takai