Open label safety and efficacy pilot to study mitigation of equine recurrent uveitis through topical suppressor of cytokine signaling-1 mimetic peptide.

Equine recurrent uveitis (ERU) is a painful and debilitating autoimmune disease and represents the only spontaneous model of human recurrent uveitis (RU). Despite the efficacy of existing treatments, RU remains a leading cause of visual handicap in horses and humans. Cytokines, which utilize Janus kinase 2 (Jak2) for signaling, drive the inflammatory processes in ERU that promote blindness.

eCOMPASS: evaluative comparison of multiple protein alignments by statistical score.

Motivation: Detecting subtle biologically relevant patterns in protein sequences often requires the construction of a large and accurate multiple sequence alignment (MSA). Methods for constructing MSAs are usually evaluated using benchmark alignments, which, however, typically contain very few sequences and are therefore inappropriate when dealing with large numbers of proteins.

Results: eCOMPASS addresses this problem using a statistical measure of relative alignment quality based on direct coupling analysis (DCA): to maintain protein structural integrity over evolutionary time, substitutions at one residue position typically result in compensating substitutions at other positions.