We have improved the ontology and annotations related to transcription factors, in collaboration with the GREEKC consortium (https://www.greekc.org/) (Gaudet et al., Gene Ontology guidelines for transcription factor activity annotation, in preparation, and Lovering et al., A GO catalog of human DNA-binding transcription factors, in preparation). GO now more clearly distinguishes the specific molecular functions of sequence-specific DNA-binding TFs, co-factors, and general TFs. This work is aimed at defining a gold-standard set of TF annotations for human and is being extended to other species, as a first pass via the review of more than 200 PANTHER families (3) by PAINT annotation (16).
