Which are the most well-known transcription factors in human? (interested in their GO terms)

Question

[R.Blues]

Hello everyone,

I am sorry for bothering you, but I am in need of some help, and I could not find anything in the forum that could, explicitly, help me.

I need a list of some of the most well-described transcription factors in human and their associated GO terms (about 10 or 20), I would like to know also if they are tissue-specific or not, but I can take a look in any database. However, I am far from being a biologist, and I am not sure of how to search them.

I could try searching in the GO database, looking for the TFs with more annotations, but that does not have to mean that they are well-known, well described, right? Also I could try to search by publications, looking for the more mentioned TFs, but... has anybody a clue about what should I do?

Thank you very much, indeed and kind regards,

[Ram]

Have you tried navigating KEGG? It is an amazing source for gene interactions, and has data on TFs. Personally, I use the UCSC Genome browser with TFBS and HMR tracks enabled to view TFs in my region of interest and then use BioBase/TransFac to get details on the TFs of interest.

Answer 1

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

It depends on what you call well described. I would take it to mean the most characterized proteins, in which case, this is generally the ones that have been worked on most and often the ones discovered first. To find these, I would search for transcription factors mentioned in "old" papers e.g. papers from the 1980s and moving forward in time until you have enough TFs. Another approach is that TFs that have been characterized to some extent are usually given some sort of meaningful name so you could first exclude all TFs that don't have a "proper" name. You could also look into wikigenes for TFs that have the highest number of references. From memory, here is a short list of TFs that have been studied for ever: JUN/FOS, C/EBP, CREB, estrogen and other steroids receptors, E2F1/DP, MYC/MAX, MYB, HOX genes, NF-kappa B. There are also the general TFs that are part of the transcription machinery (gene symbol like GTF* e.g. GTF3A)