Publications by authors named "Michael Piechotta"

Motivation: In precision oncology (PO), clinicians aim to find the best treatment for any patient based on their molecular characterization. A major bottleneck is the manual annotation and evaluation of individual variants, for which usually a range of knowledge bases are screened. To incorporate and integrate the vast information of different databases, fast and accurate methods for harmonizing databases with different types of information are necessary.

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Queuosine (Q) is a complex tRNA modification found in bacteria and eukaryotes at position 34 of four tRNAs with a GUN anticodon, and it regulates the translational efficiency and fidelity of the respective codons that differ at the Wobble position. In bacteria, the biosynthesis of Q involves two precursors, preQ0 and preQ1, whereas eukaryotes directly obtain Q from bacterial sources. The study of queuosine has been challenging due to the limited availability of high-throughput methods for its detection and analysis.

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Article Synopsis
  • Ribosomal RNAs undergo various post-transcriptional modifications, and their roles in processes like ribosome biogenesis and human diseases are still not fully understood.
  • A new targeted direct rRNA sequencing method, paired with JACUSA2 software, effectively identifies and analyzes differential modification sites, outperforming other existing tools in detecting modifications like methylation and acetylation.
  • This method was successfully applied to CRISPR-Cas9 engineered colon carcinoma cells, demonstrating its ability to detect important rRNA modifications using smaller nanopore flow cells, making it practical for clinical samples with limited RNA.
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Several high-throughput antibody-free methods for RNA modification detection from sequencing data have been developed. We present JACUSA2 as a versatile software solution and comprehensive analysis framework for RNA modification detection assays that are based on either the Illumina or Nanopore platform. Importantly, JACUSA2 can integrate information from multiple experiments, such as replicates and different conditions, and different library types, such as first- or second-strand cDNA libraries.

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Background: RNA editing is a co-transcriptional modification that increases the molecular diversity, alters secondary structure and protein coding sequences by changing the sequence of transcripts. The most common RNA editing modification is the single base substitution (A→I) that is catalyzed by the members of the Adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADAR) family. Typically, editing sites are identified as RNA-DNA-differences (RDDs) in a comparison of genome and transcriptome data from next-generation sequencing experiments.

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Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a large class of animal RNAs. To investigate possible circRNA functions, it is important to understand circRNA biogenesis. Besides human ALU repeats, sequence features that promote exon circularization are largely unknown.

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Summary: Direct comparisons of assembled short-read stacks are one way to identify single-nucleotide variants. Single-nucleotide variant detection is especially challenging across samples with different read depths (e.g.

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