Deciphering psoriasis. A bioinformatic approach.

Background: Psoriasis is an immune-mediated, inflammatory and hyperproliferative disease of the skin and joints. The cause of psoriasis is still unknown. The fundamental feature of the disease is the hyperproliferation of keratinocytes and the recruitment of cells from the immune system in the region of the affected skin, which leads to deregulation of many well-known gene expressions.

Classical dynamin DNM1 and DNM3 genes attain maximum expression in the normal human central nervous system.

Dynamin is a super-family of large GTPase proteins that polymerise during their biological activity. Dynamin polymers form around lipid tubes and contribute to the membrane fission and scission of nascent vesicles from parent membranes. Here we used the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and the BioGPS gene expression portal to study differential dynamin gene expression in normal human organs or tissues.

Adaptation of the short intergenic spacers between co-directional genes to the Shine-Dalgarno motif among prokaryote genomes.

Background: In prokaryote genomes most of the co-directional genes are in close proximity. Even the coding sequence or the stop codon of a gene can overlap with the Shine-Dalgarno (SD) sequence of the downstream co-directional gene. In this paper we analyze how the presence of SD may influence the stop codon usage or the spacing lengths between co-directional genes.

Specific gene hypomethylation and cancer: new insights into coding region feature trends.

Giving coding region structural features a role in the hypomethylation of specific genes, the occurrence of G+C content, CpG islands, repeat and retrotransposable elements in demethylated genes related to cancer has been evaluated. A comparative analysis among different cancer types has also been performed. In this work, the inter-cancer coding region features comparative analysis carried out, show insights into what structural trends/patterns are present in the studied cancers.

PairWise Neighbours database: overlaps and spacers among prokaryote genomes.

Background: Although prokaryotes live in a variety of habitats and possess different metabolic and genomic complexity, they have several genomic architectural features in common. The overlapping genes are a common feature of the prokaryote genomes. The overlapping lengths tend to be short because as the overlaps become longer they have more risk of deleterious mutations.

A first-stage approximation to identify new imprinted genes through sequence analysis of its coding regions.

In the present study, a positive training set of 30 known human imprinted gene coding regions are compared with a set of 72 randomly sampled human nonimprinted gene coding regions (negative training set) to identify genomic features common to human imprinted genes. The most important feature of the present work is its ability to use multivariate analysis to look at variation, at coding region DNA level, among imprinted and non-imprinted genes. There is a force affecting genomic parameters that appears through the use of the appropriate multivariate methods (principle components analysis (PCA) and quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA)) to analyse quantitative genomic data.

Phylogenetic analysis of homologous fatty acid synthase and polyketide synthase involved in aflatoxin biosynthesis.

The first two steps of aflatoxin biosynthesis are catalyzed by the HexA/B and by the Pks protein. The phylogenetic analysis clearly distinguished fungal HexA/B from FAS subunits and from other homologous proteins. The phylogenetic trees of the HexA and HexB set of proteins share the same clustering.

In silico prediction of the origin of replication among bacteria: a case study of Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron.

The initiation of chromosomal replication occurs only once during the prokaryote cell cycle. Some origins of replication have been experimentally determined and have led to the development of in silico approaches to find the origin of replication among other prokaryotes. DNA base composition asymmetry is the basis of numerous in silico methods used to detect the origin and terminus of replication in prokaryotes.

Completely sequenced genomes of pathogenic bacteria: a review.

Six out of ten completely sequenced bacterial genomes are pathogenic or opportunistic bacteria. The genome sequence of at least one strain of all the principal pathogenic bacteria will soon be available. This information should enable us to identify genes that encode virulence factors.

HEG-DB: a database of predicted highly expressed genes in prokaryotic complete genomes under translational selection.

The highly expressed genes database (HEG-DB) is a genomic database that includes the prediction of which genes are highly expressed in prokaryotic complete genomes under strong translational selection. The current version of the database contains general features for almost 200 genomes under translational selection, including the correspondence analysis of the relative synonymous codon usage for all genes, and the analysis of their highly expressed genes. For each genome, the database contains functional and positional information about the predicted group of highly expressed genes.

OPTIMIZER: a web server for optimizing the codon usage of DNA sequences.

OPTIMIZER is an on-line application that optimizes the codon usage of a gene to increase its expression level. Three methods of optimization are available: the 'one amino acid-one codon' method, a guided random method based on a Monte Carlo algorithm, and a new method designed to maximize the optimization with the fewest changes in the query sequence. One of the main features of OPTIMIZER is that it makes it possible to optimize a DNA sequence using pre-computed codon usage tables from a predicted group of highly expressed genes from more than 150 prokaryotic species under strong translational selection.

Towards reconstructing a metabolic tree of life.

Using information from several metabolic databases, we have built our own metabolic database containing 434 pathways and 1157 different enzymes. We have used this information to construct a dendrogram that demonstrates the metabolic similarities between 282 species. The resulting species distribution and the clusters defined in the tree show a certain taxonomic congruence, especially in recent relationships between species.

Frameshift mutation events in beta-glucosidases.

Compensated frameshift mutation is a modification of the reading frame of a gene that takes place by way of various molecular events. It appears to be a widespread event that is only observed when homologous amino acid and nucleodotide sequences are compared. To identify these mutation events, the sequence analysis rationale was based on the search for short regions that would have much lower degrees of conservation in protein, but not in DNA, in well-conserved beta-glucosidase families.

Simultaneous horizontal gene transfer of a gene coding for ribosomal protein l27 and operational genes in Arthrobacter sp.

Phylogenetic analysis of bacterial L27 ribosomal proteins showed that, against taxonomy, the L27 protein from the Actinobacteria Arthrobacter sp. clusters with protein sequences from the Bacillus group. The L27 gene clusters in the Arthrobacter sp.