Composition Profile of the Human Genome at the Chromosome Level

IsoXpressor: A Tool to Assess Transcriptional Activity within Isochores

Genomes are characterized by large regions of homogeneous base compositions known as isochores. The latter are divided into GC-poor and GC-rich classes linked to distinct functional and structural properties. Several studies have addressed how isochores shape function and structure. To aid in this important subject, we present IsoXpressor, a tool designed for the analysis of the functional property of transcription within isochores. IsoXpressor allows users to process RNA-Seq data in relation to the isochores, and it can be employed to investigate any biological question of interest for any species. The results presented herein as proof of concept are focused on the preimplantation process in Homo sapiens (human) and Macaca mulatta (rhesus monkey).

Transcriptome activity of isochores during preimplantation process in human and mouse

This work investigates the role of isochores during preimplantation process. Using RNA-seq data from human and mouse preimplantation stages, we created the spatio-temporal transcriptional profiles of the isochores during preimplantation. We found that from early to late stages, GC-rich isochores increase their expression while GC-poor ones decrease it. Network analysis revealed that modules with few coexpressed isochores are GC-poorer than medium-large ones, characterized by an opposite expression as preimplantation advances, decreasing and increasing respectively. Our results reveal a functional contribution of the isochores, supporting the presence of structural-functional interactions during maturation and early-embryonic development.

Hidden coding potential of eukaryotic genomes: nonAUG started ORFs

It is widely considered that the vast majority of eukaryotic mRNAs contain only one open reading frame (ORF) and encode single protein. However, eukaryotic ribosomes can initiate translation at alternative start codons due to leaky scanning or reinitiation mechanisms that provides an opportunity to synthesize several protein products. Recent investigations also demonstrated that alternative translation from nonAUG start codons and AUG codons in a weak nucleotide context could make an important contribution to eukaryotic proteomes. However, accurate prediction of alternative start codons demands detailed investigation of mRNA features influencing their recognition by eukaryotic ribosomes. In this work, we present the results of computational analysis of characteristics of yeast and mammalian mRNAs potentially involved in the recognition of nonAUG start codons. It was found that sequence features of nonAUG started Saccharomyces cerevisiae upstream ORFs (uORFs) were adjusted for efficient translation and these uORFs could frequently encode functional polypeptides. In particular, our initial studies revealed that predicted tertiary structures downstream of nonAUG start sites in mammalian mRNAs were energetically more stable than those predicted for AUG start sites with strong Kozak context. We hypothesize that presence of such stable tertiary structure downstream of nonAUG start sites could be an important factor for the ribosome to recognize noncanonical start codons.

Gene re-annotation in genome of the extremophile Pyrobaculum aerophilum by using bioinformatics methods

In this paper, we re-annotated the genome of Pyrobaculum aerophilum str. IM2, particularly for hypothetical ORFs. The annotation process includes three parts. Firstly and most importantly, 23 new genes, which were missed in the original annotation, are found by combining similarity search and the ab initio gene finding approaches. Among these new genes, five have significant similarities with function-known genes and the rest have significant similarities with hypothetical ORFs contained in other genomes. Secondly, the coding potentials of the 1645 hypothetical ORFs are re-predicted by using 33 Z curve variables combined with Fisher linear discrimination method. With the accuracy being 99.68%, 25 originally annotated hypothetical ORFs are recognized as non-coding by our method. Thirdly, 80 hypothetical ORFs are assigned with potential functions by using similarity search with BLAST program. Re-annotation of the genome will benefit related researches on this hyperthermophilic crenarchaeon. Also, the re-annotation procedure could be taken as a reference for other archaeal genomes. Details of the revised annotation are freely available at http://cobi.uestc.edu.cn/resource/paero/

From lipid transport to oxygenation of aromatic compounds: evolution within the Bet v1-like superfamily

In absence of significant sequence similarity, remote homology between proteins can be confused with analogy and in such a case, shared ancestry can be inferred in light of certain unique and common features. In the present study, to understand the evolutionary origin of catalytic domain of large subunit of ring-hydroxylating oxygenases (RHOs), belonging to the Bet v1-like superfamily, structure-based phylogenies have been derived from structural alignment of representative proteins of the superfamily. A careful inspection of the structural relatedness of RHOs with the rest of the families showed closest similarity between RHO catalytic domain and PA1206-like protein. In addition, phylogenetic relationship of the Rieske domain of the large subunit of RHOs with functionally and structurally similar proteins has also been elucidated so as to postulate the most possible events leading to the genesis of the large subunit of RHOs.

Tandem termination signal in plant mRNAs

It was proposed that if some mRNA characteristics resulted in a low efficiency of termination signal, an additional closely located stop codon (tandem stop codons) could be used to prevent the harmful readthrough. However, the role of tandem terminators in higher eukaryotes was not verified and remains hypothetical. In this work the sequence features of Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa mRNAs were analyzed. It was found that plant mRNAs with UGA terminator were characterized by a higher frequency of nonsense codons in the first triplet position of 3'-UTR that could result from a weak natural selection for "reserve" stop signal. Interestingly, the presence of tandem stop codons positively correlated with a specific amino acid composition in the C-terminal position of the encoded proteins. In particular, C-terminal glycine positively correlated with significantly higher frequencies of reserve terminators at the beginning positions of 3'-UTR in UGA-containing mRNAs. This finding coincides with some earlier observations concerning the role of glycine and its codons in inefficient termination of translation and recoding (e.g., 2A oligopeptide).

Weighted relative entropy for alignment-free sequence comparison based on Markov model

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic measure for computing the similarity between two biological sequences without alignment. The computation of the similarity measure is based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence of two constructed Markov models. We firstly validate the method on clustering nine chromosomes from three species. Secondly, we give the result of similarity search based on our new method. We lastly apply the measure to the construction of phylogenetic tree of 48 HEV genome sequences. Our results indicate that the weighted relative entropy is an efficient and powerful alignment-free measure for the analysis of sequences in the genomic scale.

Genome-wide identification and evolutionary analysis of Arabidopsis sm genes family

Sm proteins are members of a family of small proteins that are widespread in biosphere and found associated with RNA metabolism. To date, to our knowledge, only Arabidopsis SAD1 gene has been studied functionally in plant. In this study, 42 Sm genes are identified through comprehensive analysis in Arabidopsis. And a complete overview of this gene family is presented, including the gene structures, phylogeny, chromosome locations, selection pressure and expression. The results reveal that gene duplication contributes to the expansion of the Sm gene family in Arabidopsis genome, diverse expression patterns suggest their functional differentiation and divergence analysis indicates purifying selection as a key role in evolution. Our comparative genomics analysis of Sm genes will provide the first step towards the future experimental research on determining the functions of these genes.

An efficient binomial model-based measure for sequence comparison and its application

Sequence comparison is one of the major tasks in bioinformatics, which could serve as evidence of structural and functional conservation, as well as of evolutionary relations. There are several similarity/dissimilarity measures for sequence comparison, but challenges remains. This paper presented a binomial model-based measure to analyze biological sequences. With help of a random indicator, the occurrence of a word at any position of sequence can be regarded as a random Bernoulli variable, and the distribution of a sum of the word occurrence is well known to be a binomial one. By using a recursive formula, we computed the binomial probability of the word count and proposed a binomial model-based measure based on the relative entropy. The proposed measure was tested by extensive experiments including classification of HEV genotypes and phylogenetic analysis, and further compared with alignment-based and alignment-free measures. The results demonstrate that the proposed measure based on binomial model is more efficient.

Evolution of galanin receptor genes: insights from the deuterostome genomes

Galanin exerts its biological activities through three different G protein-coupled receptors, Galr1, Galr2 and Galr3. To obtain insights into the evolution of Galrs, we searched the genomes of the deuterostomes by extensive BLAST survey and phylogenetic analyses. The Galr2 and Galr3 share similar genomic structures, and most of them are composed of 2 exons and 1 intron. However, most of Galr1 are composed of 3 extrons and 2 introns. We did not detect the typical Galr genes in the genomic databases of invertebrate deutserotomes, but three Galr1/Alstr homologs and two Galr1/Gpr151 homologs in amphioxus, two Galr1/Gpr151 homologs in sea squirt and one Galr1/Gpr151 homologs in sea urchin were identified. It is highly possible that the Galr genes in vertebrates may evolve from the homologous genes of Galr1/Alstr/Gpr151 in invertebrate deuterostomes. We also proposed that Galr3 genes were the products of Galr2 duplication during evolution, while Galr2 genes may evolve from Galr1.

Interrelations between the nucleotide context of human start AUG codon, N-end amino acids of the encoded protein and initiation of translation

It is known that the recognition of AUG triplet by eukaryotic ribosomes as a translation start site strongly depends on its nucleotide context. However, the relative significance of different context positions is not fully clear. In particular, it concerns the role of 3'-end part of the context located at the beginning of the protein-coding sequence. The significant bias observed in nucleotide frequencies in positions +4, +5, +6 (corresponding to the second codon of CDS) could result from different reasons and their contribution to start codon recognition and initiation of translation is under discussion. In this study, we conducted a comparative computational analysis of the human mRNA samples containing different nucleotides (adenine, guanine or pyrimidine) in the essential context position -3. It was found that the presence of G in position +4 could be important for the context variant GnnAUG but not for AnnAUG. Interestingly, the second position of proteins encoded by mRNAs with AnnAUG context variant was specifically and significantly enriched with serine whereas the presence of GnnAUG context also correlated with a higher occurrence of alanine and glycine. It is likely that the efficiency of translation initiation process can depend on the interplay between 5'-context part, 3'-context part and the type of amino acid in the second position of the encoded protein.