| DBTBS was originally released in 1999 as a reference database of published transcriptional regulation events in Bacillus subtilis, one of the best studied bacteria. It is essentially a compilation of transcription factors with their regulated genes as well as their recognition sequences, which were experimentally characterized and reported in literature. This database contains the information of 114 transcription factors, including sigma factors, and 633 promoters of 525 genes. The number of references cited in the database increases from 291 to 378. It also supports a function to find putative transcription factor binding sites within input sequences by using our collection of weight matrices and consensus patterns. Furthermore, though preliminarily, DBTBS now aims to contribute to comparative genomics by showing the presence or absence of potentially orthologous transcription factors and their corresponding cis-elements on the promoters of their potentially orthologous regulated genes in 50 eubacterial genomes. |
| Oct. 25, 1999: | Recovery of the server at U. Tokyo |
| Sep. 1, 2000: | First Public Release |
| Nov. 6, 2000: | Release 2.0 (search function; extensive updates of data) |
| Nov. 7, 2000: | Release 2.1 (new promoter table) |
| Sep. 6, 2001: | Release 2.2 (list of predicted regulons) |
| Aug. 26, 2003: | Release 3 (Phylogenetic profile) |
| Feb. 29, 2004: | Release 3.1 (Move the tables of phylogenetic profile and minor data update) |
| Oct. 31, 2004: | Release 3.2 (Data update) |
| Dec. 14, 2004: | Release 3.3 (Fixed some data mistakes) |
| Jan. 14, 2005: | Release 3.4 (Fixed some data mistakes) |
| We are grateful to the members of the Japanese B. subtilis genomics project for their help to survey the recent papers with respect to the DNA-binding proteins. We also thank John D. Helmann and Hideto Takami for providing us with their sequence data; Ikuo Uchiyama for a table of orthologous genes between B. subtilis and B. halodurans; Yukiko Nakanishi for the assistance; and the B. stearothermophilus Genome Sequencing Project funded by NSF EPSCoR Program for releasing unfinished sequence data. This work was supported in part by Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology from Science and Technology Agency. KY, YF, and KN were also supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas from the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture of Japan. |