STREAM - Static Thermodynamic REgulAtory Model of transcription, is a bioinformatics application for researchers, who want to model the transcriptional regulation of a specific gene and predict its transcriptional output in different situations.

Introduction

STREAM is the first publicly available framework for modeling, visualizing, and predicting the regulation of the transcription rate of a target gene.

Understanding transcriptional regulation of a gene in detail is a crucial step towards uncovering and ultimately utilizing the regulatory grammar of the genome. Modeling transcriptional regulation using thermodynamic equations has become an increasingly important approach towards this goal.

Given the concentration of a set of transcription factors as well as the transcription factor binding sites in a regulatory DNA region and the concentration of the target gene, STREAM will optimize its parameters to generate a model that best fits the input data. This trained model can then be used to

• validate that the given set of TFs is able to regulate the target gene and
• predict the transcription rate under different conditions (e.g. different tissues, knockout/additional TFs or mutated/missing TFBS).

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Screenshot

Specification

STREAM is implemented in Java and is provided as an platform independet .jar file.

STREAM currently uses the thermodynamic model introduced by Reinitz et al.¹, but the framework is flexible and can be used in conjunction with other models implemented in Java. STREAM offers several optimization methods including gradient descent and simulated annealing for adjusting the internal parameters of the model to best fit the user's input data.

STREAM can be executed using a graphical user interface (GUI) as well as via the command-line. The GUI offers the same functionality (e.g., multistart options of the optimization or automatic cross-validation evaluation) as the command-line tool, but in an intuitive and dialogue-based fashion. Both the command-line and the GUI version can save the current result and settings of the program into a ".stream'' file, which makes saving and modifying previous experiments simple.

Publication

Bauer, D.C. and Bailey, T.L, STREAM - Static Thermodynamic REgulAtory Model for transcriptional regulation. Bioinformatics, in submission.

More

More information about the program and its background as well as the usage is available here. You can also contact Denis C. Bauer and Timothy L. Bailey from there.

References

(1) John Reinitz, Shuling Hou, and David H. Sharp. Transcriptional Control in Drosophila. Complexus, 1:54–64, 2003.