TOBFAC: the database of tobacco transcription factors

Background Regulation of gene expression at the level of transcription is a major control point in many biological processes. Transcription factors (TFs) can activate and/or repress the transcriptional rate of target genes and vascular plant genomes devote approximately 7% of their coding capacity to TFs. Global analysis of TFs has only been performed for three complete higher plant genomes – Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), poplar (Populus trichocarpa) and rice (Oryza sativa). Presently, no large-scale analysis of TFs has been made from a member of the Solanaceae, one of the most important families of vascular plants. To fill this void, we have analysed tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) TFs using a dataset of 1,159,022 gene-space sequence reads (GSRs) obtained by methylation filtering of the tobacco genome. An analytical pipeline was developed to isolate TF sequences from the GSR data set. This involved multiple (typically 10–15) independent searches with different versions of the TF family-defining domain(s) (normally the DNA-binding domain) followed by assembly into contigs and verification. Our analysis revealed that tobacco contains a minimum of 2,513 TFs representing all of the 64 well-characterised plant TF families. The number of TFs in tobacco is higher than previously reported for Arabidopsis and rice.