ECF Hub - An interactive data platform for ECF sigma factors

Sigma factors play a crucial role in signal transduction mechanisms in the prokaryotic transcription initiation by recruiting the RNA Polymerase to the right spot to start. As an omnipresent and very diverse subfamily of the Sigma-70 sigma factor protein family, the Extracytoplasmic function sigma factor subfamily contains promising candidates as targets and tools to alter - or even create - complex circuits in the field of synthetic biology.

The ECF Hub is a place for ECFs, clustered into subgroups, described, and examined. Scientists can investigate their favorite species and ECFs using various ECF Hub tools and computational power, e.g., characterizing arbitrary sequences, through a web interface (ecfhub.computational.bio).

Characterizing unknown sequences can also be done offline with the ecf_classify ruby package (available here).

If you are using the ECF Hub, please cite:

Casas-Pastor D, Müller RR, Jaenicke S, Brinkrolf K, Becker A, Buttner MJ, Gross CA, Mascher T, Goesmann A, Fritz G. Expansion and re-classification of the extracytoplasmic function (ECF) σ factor family. Nucleic Acids Res. 2021 Jan 4:gkaa1229. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaa1229. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33398323.