Why are there gene entries in TRANSFAC® that lack any information on their regulation, e.g. site links?
Some of these genes have been entered into TRANSFAC® because they code for transcription factors themselves. But the larger part of these gene entries are genes that have not been entered for TRANSFAC® (initially), but for some of our other databases, like TRANSCompel® or S/MARt DBTM, for which we use the same gene table, because one of the original purposes of the gene table was to allow inter-linking between these databases. Such gene entries without any link to site or factor are not counted in the TRANSFAC® statistics. In the DR field of the site table, the format is supposed to be ‘EMBL: accession number; identifier (first site position: last site position)’. But there are over 100 instances in the site table where either first site position or last site position or both are negative. What does this mean? Negative numbers for the positions of the site within the EMBL sequence means that the site is found on the complementary strand. Thus, both first position and last position shou
