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FlyTF (http://www.flytf.org) is a database of computationally predicted and/or experimentally verified site-specific transcription factors (TFs) in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The manual classification of TFs in the initial version of FlyTF that concentrated primarily on the DNA-binding characteristics of the proteins has now been extended to a more fine-grained annotation of both DNA binding and regulatory properties in the new release. Furthermore, experimental evidence from the literature was classified into a defined vocabulary, and in collaboration with FlyBase, translated into Gene Ontology (GO) annotation. While our GO annotations will also be available through FlyBase as they will be incorporated into the genes' official GO annotation in the future, the entire evidence used for classification including computational predictions and quotes from the literature can be accessed through FlyTF. The FlyTF website now builds upon the InterMine framework, which provides experimental and computational biologists with powerful search and filter functionality, list management tools and access to genomic information associated with the TFs.

We present a manually annotated catalogue of site-specific transcription factors (TFs) in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. These were identified from a list of candidate proteins with transcription-related Gene Ontology (Go) annotation as well as structural DNA-binding domain assignments. For all 1052 candidate proteins, a defined set of rules was applied to classify information from the literature and computational data sources with respect to both DNA-binding and transcriptional regulatory properties. We propose a set of 753 TFs in the fruit fly, of which 23 are confident novel predictions of this function for previously uncharacterized proteins.