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J Lynn Fink

Publications and source records attributed to J Lynn Fink.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

Differential use of signal peptides and membrane domains is a common occurrence in the protein output of transcriptional units.

Membrane organization describes the orientation of a protein with respect to the membrane and can be determined by the presence, or absence, and organization within the protein sequence of two features: endoplasmic reticulum signal peptides and alpha-helical transmembrane domains. These features allow protein sequences to be classified into one of five membrane organization categories: soluble intracellular proteins, soluble secreted proteins, type I membrane proteins, type II membrane proteins, and multi-spanning membrane proteins. Generation of protein isoforms with variable membrane organizations can change a protein's subcellular localization or association with the membrane. Application of MemO, a membrane organization annotation pipeline, to the FANTOM3 Isoform Protein Sequence mouse protein set revealed that within the 8,032 transcriptional units (TUs) with multiple protein isoforms, 573 had variation in their use of signal peptides, 1,527 had variation in their use of transmembrane domains, and 615 generated protein isoforms from distinct membrane organization classes. The mechanisms underlying these transcript variations were analyzed. While TUs were identified encoding all pairwise combinations of membrane organization categories, the most common was conversion of membrane proteins to soluble proteins. Observed within our high-confidence set were 156 TUs predicted to generate both extracellular soluble and membrane proteins, and 217 TUs generating both intracellular soluble and membrane proteins. The differential use of endoplasmic reticulum signal peptides and transmembrane domains is a common occurrence within the variable protein output of TUs. The generation of protein isoforms that are targeted to multiple subcellular locations represents a major functional consequence of transcript variation within the mouse transcriptome.

Animals↗

PhosphoregDB: the tissue and sub-cellular distribution of mammalian protein kinases and phosphatases.

BACKGROUND: Protein kinases and protein phosphatases are the fundamental components of phosphorylation dependent protein regulatory systems. We have created a database for the protein kinase-like and phosphatase-like loci of mouse http://phosphoreg.imb.uq.edu.au that integrates protein sequence, interaction, classification and pathway information with the results of a systematic screen of their sub-cellular localization and tissue specific expression data mined from the GNF tissue atlas of mouse. RESULTS: The database lets users query where a specific kinase or phosphatase is expressed at both the tissue and sub-cellular levels. Similarly the interface allows the user to query by tissue, pathway or sub-cellular localization, to reveal which components are co-expressed or co-localized. A review of their expression reveals 30% of these components are detected in all tissues tested while 70% show some level of tissue restriction. Hierarchical clustering of the expression data reveals that expression of these genes can be used to separate the samples into tissues of related lineage, including 3 larger clusters of nervous tissue, developing embryo and cells of the immune system. By overlaying the expression, sub-cellular localization and classification data we examine correlations between class, specificity and tissue restriction and show that tyrosine kinases are more generally expressed in fewer tissues than serine/threonine kinases. CONCLUSION: Together these data demonstrate that cell type specific systems exist to regulate protein phosphorylation and that for accurate modelling and for determination of enzyme substrate relationships the co-location of components needs to be considered.

Amino Acid Sequence↗

LOCATE: a mouse protein subcellular localization database.

We present here LOCATE, a curated, web-accessible database that houses data describing the membrane organization and subcellular localization of proteins from the FANTOM3 Isoform Protein Sequence set. Membrane organization is predicted by the high-throughput, computational pipeline MemO. The subcellular locations of selected proteins from this set were determined by a high-throughput, immunofluorescence-based assay and by manually reviewing >1700 peer-reviewed publications. LOCATE represents the first effort to catalogue the experimentally verified subcellular location and membrane organization of mammalian proteins using a high-throughput approach and provides localization data for approximately 40% of the mouse proteome. It is available at http://locate.imb.uq.edu.au.

Animals↗

Subcellular localization of mammalian type II membrane proteins.

Application of a computational membrane organization prediction pipeline, MemO, identified putative type II membrane proteins as proteins predicted to encode a single alpha-helical transmembrane domain (TMD) and no signal peptides. MemO was applied to RIKEN's mouse isoform protein set to identify 1436 non-overlapping genomic regions or transcriptional units (TUs), which encode exclusively type II membrane proteins. Proteins with overlapping predicted InterPro and TMDs were reviewed to discard false positive predictions resulting in a dataset comprised of 1831 transcripts in 1408 TUs. This dataset was used to develop a systematic protocol to document subcellular localization of type II membrane proteins. This approach combines mining of published literature to identify subcellular localization data and a high-throughput, polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based approach to experimentally characterize subcellular localization. These approaches have provided localization data for 244 and 169 proteins. Type II membrane proteins are localized to all major organelle compartments; however, some biases were observed towards the early secretory pathway and punctate structures. Collectively, this study reports the subcellular localization of 26% of the defined dataset. All reported localization data are presented in the LOCATE database (http://www.locate.imb.uq.edu.au).

Animals↗

IL-2- and STAT5-regulated cytokine gene expression in cells expressing the Tax protein of HTLV-1.

Interleukin-2 (IL-2) mediates cell cycle progression and antiapoptosis in human T cells via several signal transduction pathways. The Tax protein of the human T-cell leukemia virus type I (HTLV-1) deregulates cell growth and alters the role of IL-2 in infected cells. However, Tax-immortalized cells stay dependent on IL-2, suggesting that events besides HTLV-1 gene expression are required for leukemia to develop. Here, IL-2-dependent and -independent events were analysed in a human T cell line immortalized by Tax. These studies show that, of the signaling pathways evaluated, only STAT5 remains dependent. Microarray analyses revealed several genes, including il-5, il-9 and il-13, are uniquely upregulated by IL-2 in the presence of Tax. Bioinformatics and supporting molecular biology show that some of these genes are STAT5 targets, explaining their IL-2 upregulation. These results suggest that IL-2 and viral proteins work together to induce gene expression, promoting the hypothesis that deregulation via the constitutive activation of STAT5 may lead to the IL-2-independent phenotype of HTLV-1-transformed cells.

Cell Culture Techniques↗

2HAPI: a microarray data analysis system.

SUMMARY: 2HAPI (version 2 of High density Array Pattern Interpreter) is a web-based, publicly-available analytical tool designed to aid researchers in microarray data analysis. 2HAPI includes tools for searching, manipulating, visualizing, and clustering the large sets of data generated by microarray experiments. Other features include association of genes with NCBI information and linkage to external data resources. Unique to 2HAPI is the ability to retrieve upstream sequences of co-regulated genes for promoter analysis using MEME (Multiple Expectation-maximization for Motif Elicitation) AVAILABILITY: 2HAPI is freely available at http://array.sdsc.edu. Users can try 2HAPI anonymously with pre-loaded data or they can register as a 2HAPI user and upload their data.

Algorithms↗

The PlantsP and PlantsT Functional Genomics Databases.

PlantsP and PlantsT allow users to quickly gain a global understanding of plant phosphoproteins and plant membrane transporters, respectively, from evolutionary relationships to biochemical function as well as a deep understanding of the molecular biology of individual genes and their products. As one database with two functionally different web interfaces, PlantsP and PlantsT are curated plant-specific databases that combine sequence-derived information with experimental functional-genomics data. PlantsP focuses on proteins involved in the phosphorylation process (i.e., kinases and phosphatases), whereas PlantsT focuses on membrane transport proteins. Experimentally, PlantsP provides a resource for information on a collection of T-DNA insertion mutants (knockouts) in each kinase and phosphatase, primarily in Arabidopsis thaliana, and PlantsT uniquely combines experimental data regarding mineral composition (derived from inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy) of mutant and wild-type strains. Both databases provide extensive information on motifs and domains, detailed information contributed by individual experts in their respective fields, and descriptive information drawn directly from the literature. The databases incorporate a unique user annotation and review feature aimed at acquiring expert annotation directly from the plant biology community. PlantsP is available at http://plantsp.sdsc.edu and PlantsT is available at http://plantst.sdsc.edu.

Arabidopsis↗

Rival penalized competitive learning (RPCL): a topology-determining algorithm for analyzing gene expression data.

DNA arrays have become the immediate choice in the analysis of large-scale expression measurements. Understanding the expression pattern of genes provide functional information on newly identified genes by computational approaches. Gene expression pattern is an indicator of the state of the cell, and abnormal cellular states can be inferred by comparing expression profiles. Since co-regulated genes, and genes involved in a particular pathway, tend to show similar expression patterns, clustering expression patterns has become the natural method of choice to differentiate groups. However, most methods based on cluster analysis suffer from the usual problems (i) dead units, and (ii) the problem of determining the correct number of clusters (k) needed to classify the data. Selecting the k has been an open problem of pattern recognition and statistics for decades. Since clustering reveals similar patterns present in the data, fixing this number strongly influences the quality of the result. While there is no theoretical solution to this problem, the number of clusters can be decided by a heuristic clustering algorithm called rival penalized competitive learning (RPCL). We present a novel implementation of RPCL that transforms the correct number of clusters problem to the tractable problem of clustering based on the degree of similarity. This is biologically significant since our implementation clusters functionally co-regulated genes and genes that present similar patterns of expression. This new approach reveals potential genes that are co-involved in a biological process. This implementation of the RPCL algorithm is useful in differentiating groups involved in concerted functional regulation and helps to progressively home into patterns, which are closely similar.

Algorithms↗

Use of keyword hierarchies to interpret gene expression patterns.

MOTIVATION: High-density microarray technology permits the quantitative and simultaneous monitoring of thousands of genes. The interpretation challenge is to extract relevant information from this large amount of data. A growing variety of statistical analysis approaches are available to identify clusters of genes that share common expression characteristics, but provide no information regarding the biological similarities of genes within clusters. The published literature provides a potential source of information to assist in interpretation of clustering results. RESULTS: We describe a data mining method that uses indexing terms ('keywords') from the published literature linked to specific genes to present a view of the conceptual similarity of genes within a cluster or group of interest. The method takes advantage of the hierarchical nature of Medical Subject Headings used to index citations in the MEDLINE database, and the registry numbers applied to enzymes.

Abstracting and Indexing↗