Transcriptional regulation by sequence-specific transcription factors (TFs) is mediated, in significant part, by the post-translational modifications (PTMs) of the TFs. PTMs serve as ‘molecular switchboards’ that map upstream signaling events to the downstream transcriptional events.

PTM-Switchboard is designed to catalog known cases of TF-PTMs affecting gene transcriptions. The current version 1.0 is limited to the model organism S. cerevisiae (budding yeast). PTM-Switchboard differs from existing molecular pathway databases in that, instead of using pairwise interactions as a primary data type, it stores triplets of genes such that the ability of one gene (the TF) to regulate a target gene is dependent on a third gene (the modifying enzyme). We refer to this as the Modifier-Transcription Factor-Gene triplet, or in short, the MFG triplet. The database is currently populated with experimentally characterized examples of MFG triplets manually curated from the literature. In addition to providing a framework for searching and analyzing the data, the database can also serve to benchmark computational methods for identifying novel MFG triplets. In the future, the database will be expanded to mammalian organisms, and will also include triplets predicted from text-mining and model-based computational approaches.