TFound: A Software to Map Cis-Regulatory Elements in Yeast

Transcription factors (TFs) are responsible for regulating the rate of transcription of genes in all organisms. These factors can be represented computationally by position weight matrices (PWM). TFound was developed to allow the detailed visualization of predicted binding sites of transcription factors in multiple sequences based on the PWMs, by using the graphic user interface (GUI). The tool was loaded with the genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and PWMs from the YeTFaSCo database (http://yetfasco.ccbr.utoronto.ca/), also allowing the insertion of new sequences and PWMs. Thus, the user is allowed to load custom PWMs and genomes to perform easily mining and visualization of binding site motifs of cis-regulatory elements of interest, permitting an efficient way to inspect DNA assembly projects for complex synthetic circuits. This work describes the functionality of the current version of the tool, which is coded in Python and is freely available at the repository https://github.com/adri4nogomes/TFound.