Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Domain-specific databases are essential resources for the biomedical community, leveraging expert knowledge to curate published literature and provide access to referenced data and knowledge. The limited scope of these databases, however, poses important challenges on their infrastructure, visibility, funding and usefulness to the broader scientific community. CollecTF is a community-oriented database documenting experimentally validated transcription factor (TF)-binding sites in the Bacteria domain. In its quest to become a community resource for the annotation of transcriptional regulatory elements in bacterial genomes, CollecTF aims to move away from the conventional data-repository paradigm of domain-specific databases. Through the adoption of well-established ontologies, identifiers and collaborations, CollecTF has progressively become also a portal for the annotation and submission of information on transcriptional regulatory elements to major biological sequence resources (RefSeq, UniProtKB and the Gene Ontology Consortium). This fundamental change in database conception capitalizes on the domain-specific knowledge of contributing communities to provide high-quality annotations, while leveraging the availability of stable information hubs to promote long-term access and provide high-visibility to the data. As a submission portal, CollecTF generates TF-binding site information through direct annotation of RefSeq genome records, definition of TF-based regulatory networks in UniProtKB entries and submission of functional annotations to the Gene Ontology. As a database, CollecTF provides enhanced search and browsing, targeted data exports, binding motif analysis tools and integration with motif discovery and search platforms. This innovative approach will allow CollecTF to focus its limited resources on the generation of high-quality information and the provision of specialized access to the data.Database URL: http://www.collectf.org/. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

The influx of high-throughput data and the need for complex models to describe the interaction of prokaryotic transcription factors (TF) with their target sites pose new challenges for TF-binding site databases. CollecTF (http://collectf.umbc.edu) compiles data on experimentally validated, naturally occurring TF-binding sites across the Bacteria domain, placing a strong emphasis on the transparency of the curation process, the quality and availability of the stored data and fully customizable access to its records. CollecTF integrates multiple sources of data automatically and openly, allowing users to dynamically redefine binding motifs and their experimental support base. Data quality and currency are fostered in CollecTF by adopting a sustainable model that encourages direct author submissions in combination with in-house validation and curation of published literature. CollecTF entries are periodically submitted to NCBI for integration into RefSeq complete genome records as link-out features, maximizing the visibility of the data and enriching the annotation of RefSeq files with regulatory information. Seeking to facilitate comparative genomics and machine-learning analyses of regulatory interactions, in its initial release CollecTF provides domain-wide coverage of two TF families (LexA and Fur), as well as extensive representation for a clinically important bacterial family, the Vibrionaceae.