Submitted to the faculty of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Science in the School of Informatics, Indiana University September 2005 / Study of the transcriptional regulation of lymphocyte development has advanced greatly in the past 15 years. Owing to improved techniques and intense interest in the topic, a great many interactions between transcription factors and their target genes have been described. For these B and T cells, a more clear picture is beginning to emerge of how they start with a common progenitor cell, and progressively restrict potential to give many different types of terminally differentiated cells. As B and T cells develop they both follow a roughly similar path that involves early stepwise progression to later stages where multiple developmental options are available. To progress in the developmental regime they share requirements for proper anatomical location and successful rearrangements of the germ line DNA to give the plethora of antibodies and T cell receptors seen in the immune system. Because the amount of information is quickly becoming more than can be assimilated by researchers, a knowledge gap has opened between what is known about the transcription factor activities during this process and what any one individual can recall. To help fill this gap, we have created the LymphTF Database. This database holds interactions between individual transcription factors and their specific targets at a given developmental time. It is our hope that storing the interactions in developmental time will allow for elucidation of regulatory networks which guide the process. Work for this project also included construction of a custom data entry web page that automates many tasks associated with populating the database tables. These tables have also been related in multiple ways to allow for storage of incomplete information on transcription factor activity. This is done without having to replace existing records as details become available. The LymphTF DB is a relational MySQL database which can be accessed freely on the web at http://www.iupui.edu/~tfinterx/.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:IUPUI/oai:scholarworks.iupui.edu:1805/622 |
| Date | 26 July 2006 |
| Creators | Childress, Paul |
| Source Sets | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 2430976 bytes, application/msword |
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