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Transposon insertions of magellan-4 that impair social gliding motility in Myxococcus xanthus.

Myxococcus xanthus has two different mechanisms of motility, adventurous (A) motility, which permits individual cells to glide over solid surfaces, and social (S) motility, which permits groups of cells to glide. To identify the genes involved in S-gliding motility, we mutagenized a delta aglU (A-) strain with the defective transposon, magellan-4, and screened for S- mutants that form nonmotile colonies. Sequence analysis of the sites of the magellan-4 insertions in these mutants and the alignment of these sites with the M. xanthus genome sequence show that two-thirds of these insertions lie within 27 of the 37 nonessential genes known to be required for social motility, including those necessary for the biogenesis of type IV pili, exopolysaccharide, and lipopolysaccharide. The remaining insertions also identify 31 new, nonessential genes predicted to encode both structural and regulatory determinants of S motility. These include three tetratricopeptide repeat proteins, several regulators of transcription that may control the expression of genes involved in pilus extension and retraction, and additional enzymes involved in polysaccharide metabolism. Three insertions that abolish S motility lie within genes predicted to encode glycolytic enzymes, suggesting that the signal for pilus retraction may be a simple product of exopolysaccharide catabolism.

Bacterial Proteins↗

Prediction of genomewide conserved epitope profiles of HIV-1: classifier choice and peptide representation.

Identification of peptides binding to Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) molecules is important for accelerating vaccine development and improving immunotherapy. Accordingly, a wide variety of prediction methods have been applied in this context. In this paper, we introduce (tree-based) ensemble classifiers for such problems and contrast their predictive performance with forefront existing methods for both MHC class I and class II molecules. In addition, we investigate the impact of differing peptide representation schemes on performance. Finally, classifier predictions are used to conduct genomewide scans of a diverse collection of HIV-1 strains, enabling assessment of epitope conservation. We investigated all combinations of six classification methods (classification trees, artificial neural networks, support vector machines, as well as the more recently devised ensemble methods (bagging, random forests, boosting) with four peptide representation schemes (amino acid sequence, select biophysical properties, select quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) descriptors, and the combination of the latter two) in predicting peptide binding to an MHC class I molecule (HLA-A2) and MHC class II molecule (HLA-DR4). Our results show that the ensemble methods are consistently more accurate than the other three alternatives. Furthermore, they are robust with respect to parameter tuning. Among the four representation schemes, the amino acid sequence representation gave consistently (across classifiers) best results. This finding obviates the need for feature selection strategies incurred by use of biophysical and/or QSAR properties. We obtained, and aligned, a diverse set of 32 HIV-1 genomes and pursued genomewide HLA-DR4 epitope profiling by querying with respect to classifier predictions, as obtained under each of the four peptide representation schemes. We validated those epitopes conserved across strains against known T-cell epitopes. Once again, amino acid sequence representation was at least as effective as using properties. Assessment of novel epitope predictions awaits experimental verification.

Journal Article↗

Rapidly evolving aphid gall effector proteins exhibit saposin-like folds.

Many insects manipulate plants by injecting effector proteins. In one extreme example of this molecular "hijacking", Hormaphis cornu aphids inject bicycle proteins into Hamamelis virginiana (Witch Hazel), contributing to the development of novel organs called galls. Bicycle proteins share no amino acid sequence similarity with proteins of known function. Here, we report the crystal structures of two divergent bicycle proteins. Both proteins contain saposin-like folds: one with multiple disulfide bonds exhibits a helix swap; the other has no disulfide bonds and possesses two tandem domains. To explore the structural evolution of bicycle proteins, we predicted bicycle protein structures with Alphafold2 (AF2). While AF2 did not recover the two experimental structures using existing databases, it succeeded after we provided multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) containing protein sequences encoded in new genome sequences from closely related aphid species. Using this customized approach at scale, we generated 2400 high-confidence predictions for bicycle proteins from seven aphid species. This dataset revealed that bicycle proteins without cysteines are outliers in fold space and appear to have evolved from ancestral proteins with disulfide-bonded saposin-like folds. While all bicycle proteins contain predicted saposin-like folds, they display a vast diversity of structural and physicochemical properties. While this diversity thwarts prediction of conserved functions encoded in structure, it suggests that bicycle proteins have evolved to target diverse plant processes and/or to evade plant immune surveillance.

AlphaFold predictions↗

Virus bioinformatics: databases and recent applications.

Bioinformatics is now used as an umbrella term for almost all aspects of computational biology. Bioinformatics research will have an impact on all of biology, and virology is not immune from these research methods. Although virology has been slower to embrace bioinformatics this is now changing, particularly in the areas of viral sequences databasing and the systematic identification of viral and host homologous proteins. Here we will review some of these recent advances focusing mainly on the herpesvirus.

Computational Biology↗

A distributed computation of Interpro Pfam, PROSITE and ProDom for protein annotation.

Interpro is a widely used tool for protein annotation in genome sequencing projects, demanding a large amount of computation and representing a huge time-consuming step. We present a strategy to execute programs using databases Pfam, PROSITE and ProDom of Interpro in a distributed environment using a Java-based messaging system. We developed a two-layer scheduling architecture of the distributed infrastructure. Then, we made experiments and analyzed the results. Our distributed system gave much better results than Interpro Pfam, PROSITE and ProDom running in a centralized platform. This approach seems to be appropriate and promising for highly demanding computational tools used for biological applications.

Computational Biology↗

Performance-guarantee gene predictions via spliced alignment.

An important and still unsolved problem in gene prediction is designing an algorithm that not only predicts genes but estimates the quality of individual predictions as well. Since experimental biologists are interested mainly in the reliability of individual predictions (rather than in the average reliability of an algorithm) we attempted to develop a gene recognition algorithm that guarantees a certain quality of predictions. We demonstrate here that the similarity level with a related protein is a reliable quality estimator for the spliced alignment approach to gene recognition. We also study the average performance of the spliced alignment algorithm for different targets on a complete set of human genomic sequences with known relatives and demonstrate that the average performance of the method remains high even for very distant targets. Using plant, fungal, and prokaryotic target proteins for recognition of human genes leads to accurate predictions with 95, 93, and 91% correlation coefficient, respectively. For target proteins with similarity score above 60%, not only the average correlation coefficient is very high (97% and up) but also the quality of individual predictions is guaranteed to be at least 82%. It indicates that for this level of similarity the worst case performance of the spliced alignment algorithm is better than the average case performance of many statistical gene recognition methods.

Algorithms↗

Molecular phylogenetic analysis of Iranian HDV complete genome.

Hepatitis D (delta) virus (HDV) is a subviral pathogen agent and a satellite of Hepatitis B virus. Three distinct genotypes are described for HDV; genotype I is distributed worldwide but other genotypes appear to be more restricted geographically. In the present study, the entire nucleotide sequence of an HDV isolate from an Iranian patient (IR-1) was obtained using twelve pairs of primers to amplify six overlapping fragments covering the whole HDV genome by RT-nested PCR. Phylogenetic and pairwise alignments were done on this new isolate to determine IR-1 position among other isolates. Our results indicate that IR-1 contains 1676 nucleotides encoding 214 a.a. of the hepatitis delta antigen (HDAg). This new isolate belongs to genotype I with most sequence similarity to an Italian HDV isolate (92.6%). At amino acid level, predicted HDAg sequence of IR-1 revealed the most homology with those of Italian and Lebanese isolates. Data analysis confirmed genetic variability and heterogeneity of the HDV species isolated from different geographical areas.

Adult↗

Alignment algorithm for homology modeling and threading.

A DNA/protein sequence comparison is a popular computational tool for molecular biologists. Finding a good alignment implies an evolutionary and/or functional relationship between proteins or genomic loci. Sequential similarity between two proteins indicates their structural resemblance, providing a practical approach for structural modeling, when structure of one of these proteins is known. The first step in the homology modeling is a construction of an accurate sequence alignment. The commonly used alignment algorithms do not provide an adequate treatment of the structurally mismatched residues in locally dissimilar regions. We propose a simple modification of the existing alignment algorithm which treats these regions properly and demonstrate how this modification improves sequence alignments in real proteins.

Algorithms↗

Aligning experimental design with bioinformatics analysis to meet discovery research objectives.

The utility of genomic technology and bioinformatic analytical support to provide new and needed insight into the molecular basis of disease, development, and diversity continues to grow as more research model systems and populations are investigated. Yet deriving results that meet a specific set of research objectives requires aligning or coordinating the design of the experiment, the laboratory techniques, and the data analysis. The following paragraphs describe several important interdependent factors that need to be considered to generate high quality data from the microarray platform. These factors include aligning oligonucleotide probe design with the sample labeling strategy if oligonucleotide probes are employed, recognizing that compromises are inherent in different sample procurement methods, normalizing 2-color microarray raw data, and distinguishing the difference between gene clustering and sample clustering. These factors do not represent an exhaustive list of technical variables in microarray-based research, but this list highlights those variables that span both experimental execution and data analysis.

Computational Biology↗

PredictRegulon: a web server for the prediction of the regulatory protein binding sites and operons in prokaryote genomes.

An interactive web server is developed for predicting the potential binding sites and its target operons for a given regulatory protein in prokaryotic genomes. The program allows users to submit known or experimentally determined binding sites of a regulatory protein as ungapped multiple sequence alignments. It analyses the upstream regions of all genes in a user-selected prokaryote genome and returns the potential binding sites along with the downstream co-regulated genes (operons). The known binding sites of a regulatory protein can also be used to identify its orthologue binding sites in phylogeneticaly related genomes where the trans-acting regulator protein and cognate cis-acting DNA sequences could be conserved. PredictRegulon can be freely accessed from a link on our world wide web server: http://www.cdfd.org.in/predictregulon/.

5' Flanking Region↗

Molecular analysis of the ecdysterone-inducible 2B5 "early' puff in Drosophila melanogaster.

The 2B5 region of the X-chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster plays a developmentally important role in the ecdysterone-triggered response of the late third instar salivary gland. Using a combination of transposon-tagging and chromosomal walking techniques, we have isolated 231 kb of contiguous genomic DNA sequences corresponding to this region. We have more precisely aligned this DNA to the 2B1,2 to 2B5-6 interval of the cytogenetic map by locating the position of three well-characterized chromosomal breakpoints by in situ hybridization and genomic DNA blotting experiments. Labeled cDNA, synthesized from poly(A)+ RNA isolated from hormone-induced salivary gland and imaginal disc tissues and hybridized to the cloned DNA, demonstrated that the ecdysterone-inducible sequences mapped to DNA segments corresponding to the 2B3,4 to 2B5-6 interval. Although some of these sequences were inducible in only one tissue type, many were found to be inducible in both salivary glands and imaginal discs. RNA blotting experiments have detected a major 4.5-kb RNA which is hormone inducible in the larval salivary gland and whose quantitative induction is not inhibited by cycloheximide. Thus, the 4.5-kb RNA represents at least one product from the ecdysterone-responsive 2B5 "early' puff.

Animals↗

Influenza Virus Database (IVDB): an integrated information resource and analysis platform for influenza virus research.

Frequent outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza and the increasing data available for comparative analysis require a central database specialized in influenza viruses (IVs). We have established the Influenza Virus Database (IVDB) to integrate information and create an analysis platform for genetic, genomic, and phylogenetic studies of the virus. IVDB hosts complete genome sequences of influenza A virus generated by Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG) and curates all other published IV sequences after expert annotation. Our Q-Filter system classifies and ranks all nucleotide sequences into seven categories according to sequence content and integrity. IVDB provides a series of tools and viewers for comparative analysis of the viral genomes, genes, genetic polymorphisms and phylogenetic relationships. A search system has been developed for users to retrieve a combination of different data types by setting search options. To facilitate analysis of global viral transmission and evolution, the IV Sequence Distribution Tool (IVDT) has been developed to display the worldwide geographic distribution of chosen viral genotypes and to couple genomic data with epidemiological data. The BLAST, multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis tools were integrated for online data analysis. Furthermore, IVDB offers instant access to pre-computed alignments and polymorphisms of IV genes and proteins, and presents the results as SNP distribution plots and minor allele distributions. IVDB is publicly available at http://influenza.genomics.org.cn.

Databases, Genetic↗

Characterization of M-class genome segments of muscovy duck reovirus S14.

This report documents the first sequence analysis of the entire M1, M2, and M3 genome segments of the muscovy duck reovirus (DRV) S14. The complete sequence of each of the three M gene segments was determined. The M1 genome segment was 2283 nucleotides in length and was predicted to encode muA protein of 732 residues. The Escherichia coli expressed M1 transcripts generated a 108kDa protein, as expected for muA. A cleavage product of muA, muA1, could be detected by Western blotting with duck anti-reovirus and mouse anti-muA polyclonal serum. muA was distributed diffusely in the cytoplasma and nucleus of transfected Vero cells, which provides evidence that muA might be functional related to the mammalian reovirus (MRV) mu2. The M2 gene was 2155 nucleotides in length and was predicted to encode muB major outer capsid protein of 676 amino acids. The M3 genome segment was 1996 nucleotides in length and was predicted to encode a muNS protein of 635 amino acids. It was unexpectedly found that 5'-termini of the M1 and M2 genes ended with 5'-ACUUUU and 5'-UCUUUU, respectively, instead of 5'-GCUUUU, which is present on most mRNAs of other avian reoviruses (ARV). The UCAUC 3'-terminal sequences of the S14 M1, M2, and M3 genome segments are shared by DRV, ARV, and MRV. Alignment of the DRV muA-, muB-, and muNS-encoding genes with ARV revealed 72.9-73.9%, 67.1-69.6%, and 69.4-70.8% nucleotide identity, respectively. The amino acid sequence homology between DRV and ARV ranged from 85.3 to 86.2% (muA), 75.0 to 76.5% (muB), and 78.4 to 79.8% (muNS). Phylogenetic analyses of the M1, M2, M3, and S-class [Kuntz-Simon, G., Le Gall-Recule, G., de Boisseson, C., Jestin, V., 2002. Muscovy duck reovirus sigmaC protein is a typically encoded by the smallest genome segment. J. Gen. Virol. 83, 1189-1200; Zhang, Y., Liu, M., Hu, Q.L., Ouyang, S.D., Tong, G.Z., 2006a. Characterization of the sigmaC-encoding gene from muscovy duck reovirus. Virus Genes 36, 169-174; Zhang, Y., Liu, M., Ouyan, S.D., Hu, Q.L., Guo, D.C., Han, Z., 2006b. Detection and identification of avian, duck, and goose reoviruses by RT-PCR: goose and duck reoviruses aggregated the same specified genogroup in Orthoreovirus Genus II. Arch. Virol. 151, 1525-1538] genome segments suggests that DRV and ARV share a recent common ancestor and that the two lineages have subsequently undergone host dependent evolution.

Amino Acid Sequence↗

CDACHIE: chromatin domain annotation by integrating chromatin interaction and epigenomic data with contrastive learning.

MOTIVATION: Chromatin domain annotation identifies functional genomic regions, such as active and inactive zones, based on epigenomic features like histone modifications, DNA methylation, and chromatin accessibility. While recent methods have utilized both chromatin interaction data (e.g. Hi-C) and epigenomic data, they often overlook the direct relationship between these data types. RESULTS: In this study, we introduce Chromatin Domain Annotation using Contrastive Learning for Hi-C and Epigenomic Data (CDACHIE), a method for identifying chromatin domains from Hi-C and epigenomic data. Our approach leverages contrastive learning to generate aligned representative vectors for both data types at each genomic bin. The concatenated vectors are then clustered using K-means to classify distinct chromatin domain types. CDACHIE achieves superior performance in Variance Explained, evaluated across gene expression, replication timing, and ChIA-PET data. This highlights its robust ability to integrate semantic associations between Hi-C and epigenomic features within the embedding space. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/maruyama-lab-design/CDACHIE. An archival snapshot of the code used in this study is available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15751780.

Chromatin↗

A comparative method for identification of gene structures and alternatively spliced variants.

MOTIVATION: Alternative splicing (AS) serves as a mechanism to create diversity among functional proteins. Increasing evidence indicates that a large portion of genes have AS forms. Hence AS variants should be considered while analyzing gene structures. RESULTS: A new cross-species gene identification and AS analysis system, PSEP, has been developed. The system is based on expressed sequence tag (EST)-to-genome and genome-to-genome comparisons and is implemented in two steps: sequence alignment and a series of post-alignment processes, including progressive signal extraction and patching. For gene identification, these post-alignment processes serve as noise filters and enable PSEP to eliminate approximately 88% of potential overprediction. The overall accuracy of PSEP is better than or comparable to that of other well-known cross-species gene prediction programs, including the ROSETTA program, TWINSCAN, SGP-1/-2 and SLAM, when tested on three benchmark datasets (the ELN gene region, the HoxA cluster and the ROSETTA set). In addition, 76.2 and 76.0% of multiple-exon genes in the ROSETTA dataset and human chromosome 20, respectively, are found to have AS forms. Approximately 23% of the 210 elementary alternatives identified in the ROSETTA dataset are not conserved between the human and mouse genomes, and none of the 210 transcripts is found in the RefSeq annotation. With its dual functions in cross-species conserved sequence analysis and AS analysis, PSEP is highly suitable for studying the evolution of AS patterns and for finding unidentified gene expression features.

Algorithms↗

Molecular evolutionary analysis of the YWVZ/7B globin gene cluster of the insect Chironomus thummi.

We report the sequence of 8.1 kb of DNA containing the 3' end of one and seven other complete intronless globin genes from the YWVZ/7B locus of the dipteran Chironomus thummi thummi. One of these (ctt-v) appears to be a pseudogene by virtue of a premature termination codon, whereas the others encode apparently functional globin polypeptides. taken together with previously published data, the C. th. thummi YWVZ/7B locus codes for at least 11 globins, five of which differ from one another by no more than two amino acids. In contrast only nine globin genes are found in a comparable genomic clone isolated from C. th. piger. As indicated by sequence alignment, this difference in copy number can be attributed to a loss of one gene (fusion of globin genes 7B8 and 7B10) in the piger lines, coupled with a gain (globin gene 7B9) in the thummi lineage. Comparisons between the thummi and piger sequences showed that YWVZ/7B intergenic regions have maintained a level of 91% similarity since the thummi/piger divergence: most differences are simply due to single base substitutions or insertion/deletion events in either the thummi or the piger DNA, but three instances of partially overlapping deletions were also detected. A phylogenetic analysis of YWVZ/7B gene products was conducted, from which a plausible reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the locus was obtained. In addition, alignment of globin 7B amino acid sequences suggested that globin genes 7B2 and 7B3 (reported at the protein and cDNA level, respectively, but not contained on the C. th. thummi or C. th. piger genomic clones) are possibly chimeric genes. Given the trend toward expansion of the C. thummi globin gene family in general and of the globin 7B subfamily in particular, we propose that increased copy number of these genes has been positively selected as a mechanism to achieve a high Hb concentration in the larval hemolymph.

Amino Acid Sequence↗

Mulan: multiple-sequence local alignment and visualization for studying function and evolution.

Multiple-sequence alignment analysis is a powerful approach for understanding phylogenetic relationships, annotating genes, and detecting functional regulatory elements. With a growing number of partly or fully sequenced vertebrate genomes, effective tools for performing multiple comparisons are required to accurately and efficiently assist biological discoveries. Here we introduce Mulan (http://mulan.dcode.org/), a novel method and a network server for comparing multiple draft and finished-quality sequences to identify functional elements conserved over evolutionary time. Mulan brings together several novel algorithms: the TBA multi-aligner program for rapid identification of local sequence conservation, and the multiTF program for detecting evolutionarily conserved transcription factor binding sites in multiple alignments. In addition, Mulan supports two-way communication with the GALA database; alignments of multiple species dynamically generated in GALA can be viewed in Mulan, and conserved transcription factor binding sites identified with Mulan/multiTF can be integrated and overlaid with extensive genome annotation data using GALA. Local multiple alignments computed by Mulan ensure reliable representation of short- and large-scale genomic rearrangements in distant organisms. Mulan allows for interactive modification of critical conservation parameters to differentially predict conserved regions in comparisons of both closely and distantly related species. We illustrate the uses and applications of the Mulan tool through multispecies comparisons of the GATA3 gene locus and the identification of elements that are conserved in a different way in avians than in other genomes, allowing speculation on the evolution of birds. Source code for the aligners and the aligner-evaluation software can be freely downloaded from http://www.bx.psu.edu/miller_lab/.

Animals↗