| 1. |
- Basile, Walter, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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Difference in disorder between eukaryotes and prokaryotes is largely due to Serine in linker regions
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this study we ask what are the molecular properties that make eukaryotic proteins more disordered than prokaryotic ones. First, we show that on average eukaryotic proteins contain more amino acids that are promoting disorder. In particular the fraction of Serine residues is close to 8% of all residues in eukaryotes and less than 6% in prokaryotes. Second, we show that domains unique to eukaryotes and linker regions in eukaryotes are both more disordered and more abundant than corresponding regions in prokaryotic proteins. Serine is an important residue for post-translational modification and regulatory mechanisms. Therefore, we conclude that it is not unlikely that both the need for regulation in a complex eukaryotic cell and the increased amount of longer multi-domain proteins contribute to the higher intrinsic structural disorder in eukaryotic proteins.
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| 2. |
- Basile, Walter, et al.
(författare)
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High GC content causes orphan proteins to be intrinsically disordered
- 2017
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Ingår i: PloS Computational Biology. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1553-734X .- 1553-7358. ; 13:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- De novo creation of protein coding genes involves the formation of short ORFs from noncoding regions; some of these ORFs might then become fixed in the population These orphan proteins need to, at the bare minimum, not cause serious harm to the organism, meaning that they should for instance not aggregate. Therefore, although the creation of short ORFs could be truly random, the fixation should be subjected to some selective pressure. The selective forces acting on orphan proteins have been elusive, and contradictory results have been reported. In Drosophila young proteins are more disordered than ancient ones, while the opposite trend is present in yeast. To the best of our knowledge no valid explanation for this difference has been proposed. To solve this riddle we studied structural properties and age of proteins in 187 eukaryotic organisms. We find that, with the exception of length, there are only small differences in the properties between proteins of different ages. However, when we take the GC content into account we noted that it could explain the opposite trends observed for orphans in yeast (low GC) and Drosophila (high GC). GC content is correlated with codons coding for disorder promoting amino acids. This leads us to propose that intrinsic disorder is not a strong determining factor for fixation of orphan proteins. Instead these proteins largely resemble random proteins given a particular GC level. During evolution the properties of a protein change faster than the GC level causing the relationship between disorder and GC to gradually weaken.
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| 3. |
- Basile, Walter, 1980-
(författare)
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Orphan Genes Bioinformatics : Identification and properties of de novo created genes
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Even today, many genes are without any known homolog. These "orphans" are found in all species, from Viruses to Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes. For a portion of these genes, we might simply not have enough data to find homologs yet. Some of them are imported from taxonomically distant organisms via lateral transfer; others have homologs, but mutated beyond the point of recognition.However, a sizeable fraction of orphan genes is unambiguously created via "de novo" mechanisms. The study of such novel genes can contribute to our understanding of the emergence of functional novelty and the adaptation of species to new ecological niches.In this work, we first survey the field of orphan studies, and illustrate some of the common issues. Next, we analyze some of the intrinsic properties of orphans proteins, including secondary structure elements and Intrinsic Structural Disorder; specifically, we observe that in young proteins the relationship between these properties and the G+C content of their coding sequence is stronger than in older proteins.We then tackle some of the methodological problems often found in orphan studies. We find that using evolutionarily close species, and sensitive, state-of-the art homology recognition methods is instrumental to the identification of a set of orphans enriched in de novo created ones.Finally, we compare how intrinsic disorder is distributed in bacteria versus eukaryota. Eukaryotic proteins are longer and more disordered; the difference is to be attributed primarily to eukaryotic-specific domains and linker regions. In these sections of the proteins, a higher frequency of the disorder-promoting amino acid Serine can be observed in Eukaryotes.
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| 4. |
- Basile, Walter, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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The classification of orphans is improved by combining searches in both proteomes and genomes
- 2017
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The identification of de novo created genes is important as it provides a glimpse on the evolutionary processes of gene creation. Potential de novo created genes are identified by selecting genes that have no homologs outside a particular species, but for an accurate detection this identification needs to be correct.Genes without any homologs are often referred to as orphans; in addition to de novo created ones, fast evolving genes or genes lost in all related genomes might also be classified as orphans. The identification of orphans is dependent on: (i) a method to detect homologs and (ii) a database including genes from related genomes.Here, we set out to investigate how the detection of orphans is influenced by these two factors. Using Saccharomyces cerevisiae we identify that best strategy is to use a combination of searching annotated proteins and a six-frame translation of all ORFs from closely related genomes. Using this strategy we obtain a set of 54 orphans in Drosophila melanogaster and 38 in Drosophila pseudoobscura, significantly less than what is reported in some earlier studies.
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| 5. |
- Basile, Walter, et al.
(författare)
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Why do eukaryotic proteins contain more intrinsically disordered regions?
- 2019
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Ingår i: PloS Computational Biology. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1553-734X .- 1553-7358. ; 15:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Intrinsic disorder is more abundant in eukaryotic than prokaryotic proteins. Methods predicting intrinsic disorder are based on the amino acid sequence of a protein. Therefore, there must exist an underlying difference in the sequences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic proteins causing the (predicted) difference in intrinsic disorder. By comparing proteins, from complete eukaryotic and prokaryotic proteomes, we show that the difference in intrinsic disorder emerges from the linker regions connecting Pfam domains. Eukaryotic proteins have more extended linker regions, and in addition, the eukaryotic linkers are significantly more disordered, 38% vs. 12-16% disordered residues. Next, we examined the underlying reason for the increase in disorder in eukaryotic linkers, and we found that the changes in abundance of only three amino acids cause the increase. Eukaryotic proteins contain 8.6% serine; while prokaryotic proteins have 6.5%, eukaryotic proteins also contain 5.4% proline and 5.3% isoleucine compared with 4.0% proline and ≈ 7.5% isoleucine in the prokaryotes. All these three differences contribute to the increased disorder in eukaryotic proteins. It is tempting to speculate that the increase in serine frequencies in eukaryotes is related to regulation by kinases, but direct evidence for this is lacking. The differences are observed in all phyla, protein families, structural regions and type of protein but are most pronounced in disordered and linker regions. The observation that differences in the abundance of three amino acids cause the difference in disorder between eukaryotic and prokaryotic proteins raises the question: Are amino acid frequencies different in eukaryotic linkers because the linkers are more disordered or do the differences cause the increased disorder?
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| 6. |
- Light, Sara, et al.
(författare)
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Orphans and new gene origination, a structural and evolutionary perspective
- 2014
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Ingår i: Current opinion in structural biology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0959-440X .- 1879-033X. ; 26, s. 73-83
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The frequency of de novo creation of proteins has been debated. Early it was assumed that de novo creation should be extremely rare and that the vast majority of all protein coding genes were created in early history of life. However, the early genomics era lead to the insight that protein coding genes do appear to be lineage-specific. Today, with thousands of completely sequenced genomes, this impression remains. It has even been proposed that the creation of novel genes, a continuous process where most de novo genes are short-lived, is as frequent as gene duplications. There exist reports with strongly indicative evidence for de novo gene emergence in many organisms ranging from Bacteria, sometimes generated through bacteriophages, to humans, where orphans appear to be overexpressed in brain and testis. In contrast, research on protein evolution indicates that many very distantly related proteins appear to share partial homology. Here, we discuss recent results on de novo gene emergence, as well as important technical challenges limiting our ability to get a definite answer to the extent of de novo protein creation.
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| 7. |
- Salvatore, Marco, et al.
(författare)
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SubCons : a new ensemble method for improved human subcellular localization predictions
- 2017
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Ingår i: Bioinformatics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1367-4803 .- 1367-4811. ; 33:16, s. 2464-2470
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Motivation: Knowledge of the correct protein subcellular localization is necessary for understanding the function of a protein. Unfortunately large-scale experimental studies are limited in their accuracy. Therefore, the development of prediction methods has been limited by the amount of accurate experimental data. However, recently large-scale experimental studies have provided new data that can be used to evaluate the accuracy of subcellular predictions in human cells. Using this data we examined the performance of state of the art methods and developed SubCons, an ensemble method that combines four predictors using a Random Forest classifier. Results: SubCons outperforms earlier methods in a dataset of proteins where two independent methods confirm the subcellular localization. Given nine subcellular localizations, SubCons achieves an F1-Score of 0.79 compared to 0.70 of the second bestmethod. Furthermore, at a FPR of 1% the true positive rate (TPR) is over 58% for SubCons compared to less than 50% for the best individual predictor.
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