Homo cerevisiae-Leveraging Yeast for Investigating Protein-Protein Interactions and Their Role in Human Disease

Understanding how genetic variation affects phenotypes represents a major challenge, particularly in the context of human disease. Although numerous disease-associated genes have been identified, the clinical significance of most human variants remains unknown. Despite unparalleled advances in genomics, functional assays often lack sufficient throughput, hindering efficient variant functionalization. There is a critical need for the development of more potent, high-throughput methods for characterizing human genetic variants. Here, we review how yeast helps tackle this challenge, both as a valuable model organism and as an experimental tool for investigating the molecular basis of phenotypic perturbation upon genetic variation. In systems biology, yeast has played a pivotal role as a highly scalable platform which has allowed us to gain extensive genetic and molecular knowledge, including the construction of comprehensive interactome maps at the proteome scale for various organisms. By leveraging interactome networks, one can view biology from a systems perspective, unravel the molecular mechanisms underlying genetic diseases, and identify therapeutic targets. The use of yeast to assess the molecular impacts of genetic variants, including those associated with viral interactions, cancer, and rare and complex diseases, has the potential to bridge the gap between genotype and phenotype, opening the door for precision medicine approaches and therapeutic development.

Variobox: automatic detection and annotation of human genetic variants

Triggered by the sequencing of the human genome, personalized medicine has been one of the fastest growing research areas in the last decade. Multiple software and hardware technologies have been developed by several projects, culminating in the exponential growth of genetic data. Considering the technological developments in this field, it is now fairly easy and inexpensive to obtain genetic profiles for unique individuals, such as those performed by several genetic analysis companies. The availability of computational tools that simplify genetic data analysis and the disclosure of biomedical evidences are of utmost importance. We present Variobox, a desktop tool to annotate, analyze, and compare human genes. Variobox obtains variant annotation data from WAVe, protein metadata annotations from Protein Data Bank, and sequences are obtained from Locus Reference Genomic or RefSeq databases. To explore the data, Variobox provides an advanced sequence visualization that enables agile navigation through genetic regions. DNA sequencing data can be compared with reference sequences retrieved from LRG or RefSeq records, identifying and automatically annotating new potential variants. These features and data, ranging from patient sequences to HGVS-compliant variant descriptions, are combined in an intuitive interface to analyze genes and variants. Variobox is a Java application, available at http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/variobox.