| 1. |
- Gatherer, D., et al.
(författare)
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ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profile: Herpesviridae 2021
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of General Virology. - : Microbiology Society. - 0022-1317 .- 1465-2099. ; 102:10
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Members of the family Herpesviridae have enveloped, spherical virions with characteristic complex structures consisting of symmetrical and non-symmetrical components. The linear, double-stranded DNA genomes of 125-241 kbp contain 70-170 genes, of which 43 have been inherited from an ancestral herpesvirus. In general, herpesviruses have coevolved with and are highly adapted to their hosts, which comprise many mammalian, avian and reptilian species. Following primary infection, they are able to establish lifelong latent infection, during which there is limited viral gene expression. Severe disease is usually observed only in the foetus, the very young, the immunocompromised or following infection of an alternative host. This is a summary of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) Report on the family Herpesviridae, which is available at ictv.global/report/herpesviridae.
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| 2. |
- Gustafsson, Joel, et al.
(författare)
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Fast parallel construction of variable-length Markov chains
- 2021
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Ingår i: Bmc Bioinformatics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1471-2105. ; 22:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Alignment-free methods are a popular approach for comparing biological sequences, including complete genomes. The methods range from probability distributions of sequence composition to first and higher-order Markov chains, where a k-th order Markov chain over DNA has 4k formal parameters. To circumvent this exponential growth in parameters, variable-length Markov chains (VLMCs) have gained popularity for applications in molecular biology and other areas. VLMCs adapt the depth depending on sequence context and thus curtail excesses in the number of parameters. The scarcity of available fast, or even parallel software tools, prompted the development of a parallel implementation using lazy suffix trees and a hash-based alternative. Results: An extensive evaluation was performed on genomes ranging from 12Mbp to 22Gbp. Relevant learning parameters were chosen guided by the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) to avoid over-fitting. Our implementation greatly improves upon the state-of-the-art even in serial execution. It exhibits very good parallel scaling with speed-ups for long sequences close to the optimum indicated by Amdahl's law of 3 for 4 threads and about 6 for 16 threads, respectively. Conclusions: Our parallel implementation released as open-source under the GPLv3 license provides a practically useful alternative to the state-of-the-art which allows the construction of VLMCs even for very large genomes significantly faster than previously possible. Additionally, our parameter selection based on BIC gives guidance to endusers comparing genomes.
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| 3. |
- Thomsen, M. M., et al.
(författare)
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Genetic Variants and Immune Responses in a Cohort of Patients With Varicella Zoster Virus Encephalitis
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Infectious Diseases. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0022-1899 .- 1537-6613. ; 224:12, s. 2122-2132
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background. Infection with varicella zoster virus (VZV) may involve different central nervous system (CNS) manifestations, including meningitis, encephalitis, and vasculitis. In cases in which otherwise healthy individuals are affected, an inborn error of immunity may underlie increased susceptibility or severity of infection. Methods. We collected a cohort of 17 adults who experienced VZV encephalitis and performed whole exome sequencing. Patient peripheral blood mononuclear cells were infected with VZV, and innate antiviral interferon (IFN) and cytokine responses as well as viral replication were evaluated. Data were analyzed by Mann-Whitney U test. Results. We identified a total of 21 different potentially disease-causing variants in a total of 13 of the 17 patients included. These gene variants were within 2 major functional clusters: (1) innate viral sensors and immune pathways and (2) autophagy pathways. Antiviral IFN and cytokine responses were abnormal in the majority of patients, whereas viral replication was increased in only 2 of 17 patients. Conclusions. This study identifies a list of variants of pathogenic potential, which may serve as a platform for generating hypotheses for future studies addressing genetic and immunological factors associated with susceptibility to VZV encephalitis. These data, taken together, suggest that disturbances in innate sensing and autophagy pathways may predispose to VZV encephalitis.
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