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Does Transcription Factor Can Also Repress The Expression Of Genes

Hi all,

Transcription factors usually increase the transcription of genes. I wonder whether they also can repress the transcription of genes or not ?

gene transcription-factor transcriptome

Usually they're called "transcriptional repressors" in that case. Look up CTCF for the canonical example. There are likely other examples where whether the factor enhances or represses transcription is context-dependent, but such an example isn't coming immediately to mind.

jack, I don't see any bioinformatics related problem in you question.
Next time you can ask similar question in http://biology.stackexchange.com/ ("Biology Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for biology researchers") as they should answer in more detail.

This question does not pertain to bioinformatics and is strictly a biology question -- please refer to the comment from Pgibas above. I am therefore closing the question.

1 answer

There are certainly examples of transcription factors that regulate genes in response to a stimulus, and the binding of the factor to the genome correlates to both up and down regulated genes.

There is an excellent paper from the Lis and Kraus labs that used a relatively recent technique, GRO-seq to monitor transcription in breast cancer cells genome wide in response to estrogen signalling. The authors employed a novel (in my opinion) hidden Markov model to identify transcripts, including those not yet annotated. This paper is one such example of a factor whose binding correlates to both increased and decreased transcription with similar kinetics, though the mechanism through which a factor may be both negative and positive, seemingly simultaneously, is unclear.

The paper may be of interest from a biological, technical, and analytical perspective

Lis and Kraus paper

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