YEASTRACT (Yeast Search for Transcriptional Regulators And Consensus Tracking) is a curated repository of approximately 175.000 regulatory associations between transcription factors (TF) and target genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, based on more than 1580 bibliographic references. It also includes the description of 310 specific DNA binding sites shared among 183 characterized TFs. Further information about each Yeast gene has been extracted from the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) as per the latest release, from Mar 06, 2019. For each gene the associated Gene Ontology (GO) terms and their hierarchy in GO was obtained from the GO consortium as per the OBO flat file from Mar 19, 2019. Currently, YEASTRACT maintains a total of 69.043 terms from GO. The nucleotide sequences of the promoter and coding regions for Yeast genes were obtained from SGD. All the information in YEASTRACT is updated regularly to match the latest data from SGD, GO consortium, RSA Tools and recent literature on yeast regulatory networks.

Facilities are also provided to enable the exploitation of the gathered data when solving a number of biological questions, as exemplified in the Tutorial. YEASTRACT allows the identification of documented or potential transcription regulators of a given gene and of documented or potential regulons for each transcription factor. It also renders possible the comparison between DNA motifs and the transcription factor binding sites described in the literature. The system also provides a useful mechanism for grouping a list of genes (for instance a set of genes with similar expression profiles as revealed by microarray analysis) based on their regulatory associations with known transcription factors.

YEASTRACT provides a set of queries to search and retrieve important biological information from the gathered data and to predict transcription regulation networks in yeast from data emerging from gene-by-gene analysis or global approaches.

P.T. Monteiro, J. Oliveira, P. Pais, M. Antunes†, M. Palma, M. Cavalheiro, M. Galocha, C.P. Godinho, L.C. Martins, N. Bourbon, M.N. Mota, R.A. Ribeiro, R.Viana, I. Sá-Correia, M.C. Teixeira (2020) YEASTRACT+: a portal for cross-species comparative genomics of transcription regulation in yeasts Nucleic Acids Research, 48(D1):D642-D649 doi:10.1093/nar/gkz859
M.C. Teixeira, R. Viana, M. Palma, J. Oliveira, M. Galocha, M.N. Mota, D. Couceiro, M.G. Pereira, M. Antunes, I.V. Costa, P. Pais, C. Parada, C. Chaouiya, I. Sá-Correia, P.T. Monteiro (2023) YEASTRACT+: a portal for the exploitation of global transcription regulation and metabolic model data in yeast biotechnology and pathogenesis Nucleic Acids Research, 51(D1):D785-D791 doi:10.1093/nar/gkac1041