Structural proteomics defines a sequential priming mechanism for the progesterone receptor.

The progesterone receptor (PR) is a steroid-responsive nuclear receptor with two isoforms: PR-A and PR-B. Disruption of PR-A:PR-B signaling is associated with breast cancer through interactions with oncogenic co-regulatory proteins (CoRs). However, molecular details of isoform-specific PR-CoR interactions remain poorly understood.

COG database update 2024.

The Clusters of Orthologous Genes (COG) database, originally created in 1997, has been updated to reflect the constantly growing collection of completely sequenced prokaryotic genomes. This update increased the genome coverage from 1309 to 2296 species, including 2103 bacteria and 193 archaea, in most cases, with a single representative genome per genus. This set covers all genera of bacteria and archaea that included organisms with 'complete genomes' as per NCBI databases in November 2023.

Aberrant spliceosome activity via elevated intron retention and upregulation and phosphorylation of SF3B1 in chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Splicing factor 3b subunit 1 (SF3B1) is the largest subunit and core component of the spliceosome. Inhibition of SF3B1 was associated with an increase in broad intron retention (IR) on most transcripts, suggesting that IR can be used as a marker of spliceosome inhibition in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells. Furthermore, we separately analyzed exonic and intronic mapped reads on annotated RNA-sequencing transcripts obtained from B cells ( = 98 CLL patients) and healthy volunteers ( = 9).

GTax: improving de novo transcriptome assembly by removing foreign RNA contamination.

The cost and complexity of generating a complete reference genome means that many organisms lack an annotated reference. An alternative is to use a de novo reference transcriptome. This technology is cost-effective but is susceptible to off-target RNA contamination.

ElasticBLAST: accelerating sequence search via cloud computing.

Background: Biomedical researchers use alignments produced by BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) to categorize their query sequences. Producing such alignments is an essential bioinformatics task that is well suited for the cloud. The cloud can perform many calculations quickly as well as store and access large volumes of data.

ElasticBLAST: Accelerating Sequence Search via Cloud Computing.

Background: Biomedical researchers use alignments produced by BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) to categorize their query sequences. Producing such alignments is an essential bioinformatics task that is well suited for the cloud. The cloud can perform many calculations quickly as well as store and access large volumes of data.

Conservation and Evolution of the Sporulation Gene Set in Diverse Members of the .

The current classification of the phylum (new name, ) features eight distinct classes, six of which include known spore-forming bacteria. In Bacillus subtilis, sporulation involves up to 500 genes, many of which do not have orthologs in other bacilli and/or clostridia. Previous studies identified about 60 sporulation genes of B.

Non-essential ribosomal proteins in bacteria and archaea identified using COGs.

Ribosomal proteins (RPs) are highly conserved across the bacterial and archaeal domains. Although many RPs are essential for survival, genome analysis demonstrates the absence of some RP genes in many bacterial and archaeal genomes. Furthermore, global transposon mutagenesis and/or targeted deletion showed that elimination of some RP genes had only a moderate effect on the bacterial growth rate.

BioContainers Registry: Searching Bioinformatics and Proteomics Tools, Packages, and Containers.

BioContainers is an open-source project that aims to create, store, and distribute bioinformatics software containers and packages. The BioContainers community has developed a set of guidelines to standardize software containers including the metadata, versions, licenses, and software dependencies. BioContainers supports multiple packaging and container technologies such as Conda, Docker, and Singularity.

Transcriptome annotation in the cloud: complexity, best practices, and cost.

Background: The NIH Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) initiative provides NIH-funded researchers cost-effective access to commercial cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These cloud providers represent an alternative for the execution of large computational biology experiments like transcriptome annotation, which is a complex analytical process that requires the interrogation of multiple biological databases with several advanced computational tools. The core components of annotation pipelines published since 2012 are BLAST sequence alignments using annotated databases of both nucleotide or protein sequences almost exclusively with networked on-premises compute systems.

PM4NGS, a project management framework for next-generation sequencing data analysis.

Background: FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis relies on complex computational biology workflows and pipelines to guarantee reproducibility, portability, and scalability. Moreover, workflow languages, managers, and container technologies have helped address the problem of data analysis pipeline execution across multiple platforms in scalable ways.

Findings: Here, we present a project management framework for NGS data analysis called PM4NGS.

COG database update: focus on microbial diversity, model organisms, and widespread pathogens.

The Clusters of Orthologous Genes (COG) database, also referred to as the Clusters of Orthologous Groups of proteins, was created in 1997 and went through several rounds of updates, most recently, in 2014. The current update, available at https://www.ncbi.

BAMscale: quantification of next-generation sequencing peaks and generation of scaled coverage tracks.

Background: Next-generation sequencing allows genome-wide analysis of changes in chromatin states and gene expression. Data analysis of these increasingly used methods either requires multiple analysis steps, or extensive computational time. We sought to develop a tool for rapid quantification of sequencing peaks from diverse experimental sources and an efficient method to produce coverage tracks for accurate visualization that can be intuitively displayed and interpreted by experimentalists with minimal bioinformatics background.

MutaBind2: Predicting the Impacts of Single and Multiple Mutations on Protein-Protein Interactions.

Missense mutations may affect proteostasis by destabilizing or over-stabilizing protein complexes and changing the pathway flux. Predicting the effects of stabilizing mutations on protein-protein interactions is notoriously difficult because existing experimental sets are skewed toward mutations reducing protein-protein binding affinity and many computational methods fail to correctly evaluate their effects. To address this issue, we developed a method MutaBind2, which estimates the impacts of single as well as multiple mutations on protein-protein interactions.

Banana (Musa acuminata) transcriptome profiling in response to rhizobacteria: Bacillus amyloliquefaciens Bs006 and Pseudomonas fluorescens Ps006.

Background: Banana is one of the most important crops in tropical and sub-tropical regions. To meet the demands of international markets, banana plantations require high amounts of chemical fertilizers which translate into high farming costs and are hazardous to the environment when used excessively. Beneficial free-living soil bacteria that colonize the rhizosphere are known as plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR).

LitSense: making sense of biomedical literature at sentence level.

Literature search is a routine practice for scientific studies as new discoveries build on knowledge from the past. Current tools (e.g.

TPMCalculator: one-step software to quantify mRNA abundance of genomic features.

Summary: The quantification of RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) abundance using a normalization method that calculates transcripts per million (TPM) is a key step to compare multiple samples from different experiments. TPMCalculator is a one-step software to process RNA-seq alignments in BAM format and reports TPM values, raw read counts and feature lengths for genes, transcripts, exons and introns. The program describes the genomic features through a model generated from the gene transfer format file used during alignments reporting of the TPM values and the raw read counts for each feature.

SNPDelScore: combining multiple methods to score deleterious effects of noncoding mutations in the human genome.

Summary: Addressing deleterious effects of noncoding mutations is an essential step towards the identification of disease-causal mutations of gene regulatory elements. Several methods for quantifying the deleteriousness of noncoding mutations using artificial intelligence, deep learning and other approaches have been recently proposed. Although the majority of the proposed methods have demonstrated excellent accuracy on different test sets, there is rarely a consensus.

Workflow and web application for annotating NCBI BioProject transcriptome data.

Abstract: The volume of transcriptome data is growing exponentially due to rapid improvement of experimental technologies. In response, large central resources such as those of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) are continually adapting their computational infrastructure to accommodate this large influx of data. New and specialized databases, such as Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly Sequence Database (TSA) and Sequence Read Archive (SRA), have been created to aid the development and expansion of centralized repositories.

BioContainers: an open-source and community-driven framework for software standardization.

Motivation: BioContainers (biocontainers.pro) is an open-source and community-driven framework which provides platform independent executable environments for bioinformatics software. BioContainers allows labs of all sizes to easily install bioinformatics software, maintain multiple versions of the same software and combine tools into powerful analysis pipelines.

Quantifying deleterious effects of regulatory variants.

The majority of genome-wide association study (GWAS) risk variants reside in non-coding DNA sequences. Understanding how these sequence modifications lead to transcriptional alterations and cell-to-cell variability can help unraveling genotype-phenotype relationships. Here, we describe a computational method, dubbed CAPE, which calculates the likelihood of a genetic variant deactivating enhancers by disrupting the binding of transcription factors (TFs) in a given cellular context.

Census of solo LuxR genes in prokaryotic genomes.

luxR genes encode transcriptional regulators that control acyl homoserine lactone-based quorum sensing (AHL QS) in Gram negative bacteria. On the bacterial chromosome, luxR genes are usually found next or near to a luxI gene encoding the AHL signal synthase. Recently, a number of luxR genes were described that have no luxI genes in their vicinity on the chromosome.