BART
Binding Analysis for Regulation of Transcription
About BART
BART (Binding Analysis for Regulation of Transcription) is a bioinformatics tool for predicting functional transcriptional regulators (TRs) that bind at cis-regulatory regions to regulate gene expression in human or mouse, taking a query gene set, a ChIP-seq dataset or a scored genomic region set as input.
BART leverages 7,968 human TR binding profiles and 5,851 mouse TR binding profiles from the public domain (collected in Cistrome Data Browser) to make the prediction.
BART is implemented in Python and distributed as an open-source package along with necessary data libraries. BART package is also available on Github.
BART is developed and maintained by the Chongzhi Zang Lab at the University of Virginia.
Web Interface
BART web interface can be accessed here.
Download
BART Package
Current version: 2.1.1, updated March 30, 2026
BART2.1.1 for Python3 – Source code only (need to download data library separately)
BART Data Libraries
The human genome hg38 and the mouse genome mm10 are supported.
Supplementary Data
The union DNaseI hypersensitive sites (UDHS) used in the BART model. (They are NOT required for BART installation.)
Tutorial
Positional arguments
{geneset,profile,region}
bart2 geneset
Given a query gene set in official gene symbols (HGNC for human or MGI for mouse) in text format (each gene in a row, at least 100 genes recommended), predict functional TRs that regulate these genes.
Usage:bart2 geneset -i genelist.txt -s hg38 --outdir bart2_output
bart2 profile
Given a ChIP-seq data file (mapped reads in BAM or BED format in either hg38 or mm10), predict TRs whose binding pattern associates with the input ChIP-seq profile.
Usage:bart2 profile -i ChIP.bam -f bam -s hg38 --outdir bart2_output
bart2 region
Given a scored genomic region set (BED format in either hg38 or mm10), predict TRs enriched in this genomic region set.
Usage:bart2 region -i ChIPpeak.bed -c 4 -s hg38 --outdir bart2_output
Output files
*_adaptive_lass_Info.txt provides regression information tells which representative H3K27ac samples are selected along with coefficients through adaptive lasso regression and sample annotations including cell line, cell type or tissue type. This is the output only generated in geneset mode.
*_CRE_prediction_lasso.txt is the predicted cis-regulatory profile of the input gene set and is a ranked list of all CREs (UDHS) in the genome. The higher the score, the more likely the regulatory element regulates the input gene set. This is the output only generated in geneset mode.
*_auc.txt provides the association score of each of the TR ChIP-seq dataset with the genome cis-regulatory profile.
*_bart_results.txt is a rank of all TRs with multiple quantification scores.
An example of BART2 output can be found here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please sign up to BART users Google Group for update announcements and discussions.
Citation
If you use BART in your data analysis, please cite:
BART: a transcription factor prediction tool with query gene sets or epigenomic profiles
Zhenjia Wang, Mete Civelek, Clint Miller, Nathan Sheffield, Michael J. Guertin, Chongzhi Zang
Bioinformatics 34, 2867–2869 (2018)
Contact
BART is developed and maintained by the Chongzhi Zang Lab at the University of Virginia. Please email us for any questions.
Last modified: March 30, 2026