What Is The Relationship Betwwen Tf Name And Gene Name？

Question

[kate]

What is the relationship betwwen TF name and gene name? For example, one of genes in yeast named "ACE2", if the product of this gene is a transcription factor which can regulate the expression of other genes. Is that mean this transcription factor also named "ACE2"?

Answer 1

[Niek De Klein]

No it's (usually) not called the same. The protein product of the ACE2 gene in yeast is called Ace2p. You can find this with the following steps (which works for any gene-protein annotated on NCBI): When you take ACE2's gene page from ncbi: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/850822 (found it by searching ACE2 yeast in Gene: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/?term=ACE2%20yeast), you can go to General protein information. This gives a protein ID: NP_013232.1. Now, searching NCBI protein with that ID gives you: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/NP_013232.1.

It's better to work with identifiers than with the names.

Answer 2

[seidel]

I would say that the relationship between TF name and gene name depends on context. In general, Transcription Factor names and the corresponding gene name are often the same in normal parlance. In some organisms, like yeast, there are well defined conventions for referring specifically to the gene (all uppercase, often with italics) or to the protein product (lower case with the first letter capitalized, often ending with the letter p), or the mutant gene (all lower case gene letters). However (unfortunately?) these conventions are not shared by all organisms (e.g. drosophila gene names, or zebrafish, or c. elegans, or....). Working with identifiers, if you can agree on an authority, is perhaps the most specific way to refer to individual molecular objects, but they're not very nice for using in a sentence or communicating (unless you're trying to be painfully specific about an individual molecule).

For example, if I were to tell you in the hallway, "Ace2 is an interesting transcription factor. You should knock out the Ace2 gene and find it's targets." I would be referring to both the gene and the protein with the same name, and you would know exactly what I meant. It certainly sounds a lot better than, "NP_013232.1 is an interesting transcription factor, you should knockout out YLR131C and find it's targets."