Transcription regulatory networks are composed of interactions
between transcription factors and their target genes. Whereas
unicellular networks have been studied extensively, metazoan
transcription regulatory networks remain largely unexplored.
Caenorhabditis elegans provides a powerful model to study such
metazoan networks because its genome is completely sequenced and
many functional genomic tools are available. While C. elegans
gene predictions have undergone continuous refinement, this is
not true for the annotation of functional transcription factors.
The comprehensive identification of transcription factors is
essential for the systematic mapping of transcription regulatory
networks because it enables the creation of physical
transcription factor resources that can be used in assays to map
interactions between transcription factors and their target
genes. By computational searches and extensive manual curation,
we have identified a compendium of 934 transcription factor
genes (referred to as wTF2.0).