PredicTF: a tool to predict bacterial transcription factors in complex microbial communities

Abstract

Transcription Factors (TFs) are proteins that control the flow of genetic information by regulating cellular gene expression. Here we describe PredicTF, a first platform supporting the prediction and classification of novel bacterial TF in complex microbial communities. We evaluated PredicTF using a two-step approach. First, we tested PredictTF’s ability to predict TFs for the genome of an environmental isolate. In the second evaluation step, PredicTF was used to predict TFs in a metagenome and 11 metatranscriptomes recovered from a community performing anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) in a bioreactor. PredicTF is open source pipeline available at https://github.com/mdsufz/PredicTF.