hTFtarget:A Comprehensive Database for Regulations of Human Transcription Factors and Their Targets

Transcription factors(TFs)as key regulators play crucial roles in biological processes.The identification of TF-target regulatory relationships is a key step for revealing functions of TFs and their regulations on gene expression.The accumulated data of chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing(ChIP-seq)provide great opportunities to discover the TF-target regulations across different conditions.In this study,we constructed a database named hTFtarget,which integrated huge human TF target resources(7190 ChIP-seq samples of 659 TFs and high-confidence binding sites of 699 TFs)and epigenetic modification information to predict accurate TF-target regulations.hTFtarget offers the following functions for users to explore TF-target regulations:(1)browse or search general targets of a query TF across datasets;(2)browse TF-target regulations for a query TF in a specific dataset or tissue;(3)search potential TFs for a given target gene or noncoding RNA;(4)investigate co-association between TFs in cell lines;(5)explore potential coregulations for given target genes or TFs;(6)predict candidate TF binding sites on given DNA sequences;(7)visualize ChIP-seq peaks for different TFs and conditions in a genome browser.hTFtarget provides a comprehensive,reliable and user-friendly resource for exploring human TF-target regulations,which will be very useful for a wide range of users in the TF and gene expression regulatiol community.hTFtarget is available at bttp://bioinfo.life.hust.edu.cn/hTFtarget.