Anti-FOXL1 polyclonal antibody

Dysregulation of Forkhead box (Fox) transcription factor family genes was previously shown to lead to congenital disorders, diabetes mellitus, and carcinogenesis, and recent reports suggested that several Fox genes play important roles in the pathogenesis of liver fibrosis. The present study was initiated to determine the expression profiles of the Fox genes in normal Balb/c mouse liver and their dynamic expression changes during fibrogenesis induced by experimental bile duct ligation (BDL). RT-PCR was employed to detect 18 FOX family members including FOXO1, FOXO3, FOXM1, and FOXL1 in normal mouse liver. FQ-PCR was performed to analyze the dynamic mRNA expression changes of nine inflammation- or proliferation-related FOX family genes in BDL mice. Results showed that all the 18 Fox genes were expressed in the normal mouse liver, among which the expression of FOXO1 and FOXO3 were found to be the highest. The inflammation and proliferation-related FOX family genes were found to be dynamically changed during BDL-induced liver injury with reduced FOXO1 and enhanced FOXOL1 and FOXM1, indicating their potential involvement in the pathogenesis of liver fibrosis. This is the first systematic evaluation of hepatic expression of FOX genes in both normal and BDL mice.

Transcription factors are trans-acting proteins that interact with specific nucleotide sequences known as transcription factor binding site (TFBS), and these interactions are implicated in regulation of the gene expression. Regulation of transcriptional activation of a gene often involves multiple interactions of transcription factors with various sequence elements. Identification of these sequence elements is the first step in understanding the underlying molecular mechanism(s) that regulate the gene expression. For in silico identification of these sequence elements, we have developed an online computational tool named transcription factor information system (TFIS) for detecting TFBS for the first time using a collection of JAVA programs and is mainly based on TFBS detection using position weight matrix (PWM). The database used for obtaining position frequency matrices (PFM) is JASPAR and HOCOMOCO, which is an open-access database of transcription factor binding profiles. Pseudo-counts are used while converting PFM to PWM, and TFBS detection is carried out on the basis of percent score taken as threshold value. TFIS is equipped with advanced features such as direct sequence retrieving from NCBI database using gene identification number and accession number, detecting binding site for common TF in a batch of gene sequences, and TFBS detection after generating PWM from known raw binding sequences in addition to general detection methods. TFIS can detect the presence of potential TFBSs in both the directions at the same time. This feature increases its efficiency. And the results for this dual detection are presented in different colors specific to the orientation of the binding site. Results obtained by the TFIS are more detailed and specific to the detected TFs as integration of more informative links from various related web servers are added in the result pages like Gene Ontology, PAZAR database and Transcription Factor Encyclopedia in addition to NCBI and UniProt. Common TFs like SP1, AP1 and NF-KB of the Amyloid beta precursor gene is easily detected using TFIS along with multiple binding sites. In another scenario of embryonic developmental process, TFs of the FOX family (FOXL1 and FOXC1) were also identified. TFIS is platform-independent which is publicly available along with its support and documentation at http://tfistool.appspot.com and http://www.bioinfoplus.com/tfis/.TFIS is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPL-3.0).