Discovery of a Novel Species of Trichomonasvirus in the Human Parasite Using Transcriptome Mining.

is the most common non-viral cause of sexually transmitted infections globally. Infection by this protozoan parasite results in the clinical syndrome trichomoniasis, which manifests as an inflammatory disease with acute and chronic consequences. Half or more isolates of this parasite are themselves infected with one or more dsRNA viruses that can exacerbate the inflammatory syndrome.

Mitovirus and Mitochondrial Coding Sequences from Basal Fungus .

Fungi constituting the species complex (members of subphylum , phylum ) commonly kill their insect hosts and manipulate host behaviors in the process. In this study, we made use of public transcriptome data to identify and characterize eight new species of mitoviruses associated with several different isolates. Mitoviruses are simple RNA viruses that replicate in host mitochondria and are frequently found in more phylogenetically apical fungi (members of subphylum , phylum , phylum and phylum ) as well as in plants.

Beta vulgaris mitovirus 1 in diverse cultivars of beet and chard.

Recent results indicate that mitoviruses, which replicate persistently in host mitochondria, are not restricted to fungi, but instead are found also in plants. Beta vulgaris mitovirus 1 (BevuMV1) is an example first discovered in sugar beet cultivars. For the current study, complete coding sequences of 42 BevuMV1 strains were newly determined, derived from not only sugar beet but also fodder beet, table beet, and Swiss chard cultivars of Beta vulgaris, as well as wild sea beet.

A barnavirus sequence mined from a transcriptome of the Antarctic pearlwort Colobanthus quitensis.

Because so few viruses in the family Barnaviridae have been reported, we searched for more of them in public sequence databases. Here, we report the complete coding sequence of Colobanthus quitensis associated barnavirus 1, mined from a transcriptome of the Antarctic pearlwort Colobanthus quitensis. The 4.

Convergence of Domain Architecture, Structure, and Ligand Affinity in Animal and Plant RNA-Binding Proteins.

Reconstruction of ancestral protein sequences using phylogenetic methods is a powerful technique for directly examining the evolution of molecular function. Although ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) is itself very efficient, downstream functional, and structural studies necessary to characterize when and how changes in molecular function occurred are often costly and time-consuming, currently limiting ASR studies to examining a relatively small number of discrete functional shifts. As a result, we have very little direct information about how molecular function evolves across large protein families.

Resurrecting ancestral structural dynamics of an antiviral immune receptor: adaptive binding pocket reorganization repeatedly shifts RNA preference.

Background: Although resurrecting ancestral proteins is a powerful tool for understanding the molecular-functional evolution of gene families, nearly all studies have examined proteins functioning in relatively stable biological processes. The extent to which more dynamic systems obey the same 'rules' governing stable processes is unclear. Here we present the first detailed investigation of the functional evolution of the RIG-like receptors (RLRs), a family of innate immune receptors that detect viral RNA in the cytoplasm.