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Summary: BioMed Central
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BMC Genomics
Open AccessResearch article
Coding limits on the number of transcription factors
Shalev Itzkovitz1,2, Tsvi Tlusty2 and Uri Alon*1,2
Address: 1Dept. Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel and 2Dept. Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann
Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
Email: Shalev Itzkovitz - shalev.itzkovitz@weizmann.ac.il; Tsvi Tlusty - tsvi.tlusty@weizmann.ac.il; Uri Alon* - uri.alon@weizmann.ac.il
* Corresponding author
Abstract
Background: Transcription factor proteins bind specific DNA sequences to control the
expression of genes. They contain DNA binding domains which belong to several super-families,
each with a specific mechanism of DNA binding. The total number of transcription factors encoded
in a genome increases with the number of genes in the genome. Here, we examined the number
of transcription factors from each super-family in diverse organisms.
Results: We find that the number of transcription factors from most super-families appears to be
bounded. For example, the number of winged helix factors does not generally exceed 300, even in
very large genomes. The magnitude of the maximal number of transcription factors from each
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