STREAM: Static Thermodynamic REgulAtory Model of transcription

MOTIVATION Understanding the 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. Here, we present stream, the first publicly available framework for modeling, visualizing and predicting the regulation of the transcription rate of a target gene. Given the concentrations of a set of transcription factors (TFs), the TF binding sites (TFBSs) in a regulatory DNA region, and the transcription rate 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 (a) validate that the given set of TFs is able to regulate the target gene and (b) to predict the transcription rate under different conditions (e.g. different tissues, knockout/additional TFs or mutated/missing TFBSs). AVAILABILITY The platform independent executable of stream, as well as a tutorial and the full documentation, are available at http://bioinformatics.org.au/stream/. stream requires Java version 5 or higher.