Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

A large gap remains between the amount of knowledge in scientific literature and the fraction that gets curated into standardized databases, despite many curation initiatives. Yet the availability of comprehensive knowledge in databases is crucial for exploiting existing background knowledge, both for designing follow-up experiments and for interpreting new experimental data. Structured resources also underpin the computational integration and modeling of regulatory pathways, which further aids our understanding of regulatory dynamics. We argue how cooperation between the scientific community and professional curators can increase the capacity of capturing precise knowledge from literature. We demonstrate this with a project in which we mobilize biological domain experts who curate large amounts of DNA binding transcription factors, and show that they, although new to the field of curation, can make valuable contributions by harvesting reported knowledge from scientific papers. Such community curation can enhance the scientific epistemic process.Database URL: http://www.tfcheckpoint.org. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

Gene regulatory network assembly and analysis requires high-quality knowledge sources that cover functional aspects of the various components of the gene regulatory machinery. A multiplicity of resources exists with information about mammalian transcription factors (TFs); yet, only few of these provide sufficiently accurate classifications of the functional roles of individual TFs, or standardized evidence that would justify the information on which these functional classifications are based. We compiled the list of all putative TFs from nine different resources, ignored factors such as general TFs, mediator complexes and chromatin modifiers, and for the remaining factors checked the available literature for references that support their function as a true sequence-specific DNA-binding RNA polymerase II TF (DbTF). The results are available in the TFcheckpoint database, an exhaustive collection of TFs annotated according to experimental and other evidence on their function as true DbTFs. TFcheckpoint.org provides a high-quality and comprehensive knowledge source for genome-scale regulatory network studies. The TFcheckpoint database is freely available at www.tfcheckpoint.org