Integração de dados e desenvolvimento de métricas escalável para análise de fatores de transcrição

Abstract

Currently there are several tools proposed for analysis of Transcription Factors (TF), such as TFCheckpoint, JASPAR, SSTAR, GTRD, Enrichr. However, none of these tools offer a complete experience in assessing the reliability of TF, checking if an analyzed protein is a TF and its association with the target gene. Over time, numerous databases were built, all of them with rich information, but the intrinsic complexity of the data, the volume of information, problems of nomenclature of the genes and several other factors led these tools to do not offer a complete spectrum of analyses. On the other hand, working with a large volume of data requires advanced computer skills. However, the general public interested in analyzing these data are professionals from the biological areas, forming a barrier since the academic formation of this area does not offer in its curricular components programming disciplines. From this situation, this work aims to create a web tool exclusively for the analysis of TFs. In this way, the Transcription Factor Analysis Tools (TFAT) was conceived and developed, containing the integration of different databases and a set of scripts to manipulate this information, along with the crucial parameters defined by the user in the analysis. The core of this tool is the analysis to identify the key TFs in the modulation of gene transcription, namely the enrichment of the regulatory TFs of a user-submitted gene list, which through the components of the tool, consults its database, identifies the TFs that are associated with those genes and computes the p-value of enrichment. In addition, the tool verifies TF reliability, makes available predictions, and converts items from a list to the Entrez Gene's GeneID or Symbol. Another feature of this work is the use of TF reliability applied throughout the tool. This degree of reliability takes into account evidences from different databases, experiments, predictions and other characteristics of TFs. This reliability feature has a standard mode and a userdefined parameter mode, which allows full customization through filters in the queries and analysis control for the end user.