Phylogeny and Sequence Space: A Combined Approach to Analyze the Evolutionary Trajectories of Homologous Proteins. The Case Study of Aminodeoxychorismate Synthase.

During the course of evolution, variations of a protein sequence is an ongoing phenomenon however limited by the need to maintain its structural and functional integrity. Deciphering the evolutionary path of a protein is thus of fundamental interest. With the development of new methods to visualize high dimension spaces and the improvement of phylogenetic analysis tools, it is possible to study the evolutionary trajectories of proteins in the sequence space.

ColorPhylo: A Color Code to Accurately Display Taxonomic Classifications.

Color may be very useful to visualise complex data. As far as taxonomy is concerned, color may help observing various species' characteristics in correlation with classification. However, choosing the number of subclasses to display is often a complex task: on the one hand, assigning a limited number of colors to taxa of interest hides the structure imbedded in the subtrees of the taxonomy; on the other hand, differentiating a high number of taxa by giving them specific colors, without considering the underlying taxonomy, may lead to unreadable results since relationships between displayed taxa would not be supported by the color code.

How Fitch-Margoliash Algorithm can Benefit from Multi Dimensional Scaling.

Whatever the phylogenetic method, genetic sequences are often described as strings of characters, thus molecular sequences can be viewed as elements of a multi-dimensional space. As a consequence, studying motion in this space (ie, the evolutionary process) must deal with the amazing features of high-dimensional spaces like concentration of measured phenomenon.TO STUDY HOW THESE FEATURES MIGHT INFLUENCE PHYLOGENY RECONSTRUCTIONS, WE EXAMINED A PARTICULAR POPULAR METHOD: the Fitch-Margoliash algorithm, which belongs to the Least Squares methods.

Molecular and evolutionary bases of within-patient genotypic and phenotypic diversity in Escherichia coli extraintestinal infections.

Although polymicrobial infections, caused by combinations of viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites, are being recognised with increasing frequency, little is known about the occurrence of within-species diversity in bacterial infections and the molecular and evolutionary bases of this diversity. We used multiple approaches to study the genomic and phenotypic diversity among 226 Escherichia coli isolates from deep and closed visceral infections occurring in 19 patients. We observed genomic variability among isolates from the same site within 11 patients.

DD-HDS: A method for visualization and exploration of high-dimensional data.

Mapping high-dimensional data in a low-dimensional space, for example, for visualization, is a problem of increasingly major concern in data analysis. This paper presents data-driven high-dimensional scaling (DD-HDS), a nonlinear mapping method that follows the line of multidimensional scaling (MDS) approach, based on the preservation of distances between pairs of data. It improves the performance of existing competitors with respect to the representation of high-dimensional data, in two ways.

GENSTYLE: exploration and analysis of DNA sequences with genomic signature.

GENSTYLE (http://Genstyle.imed.jussieu.

Detection and characterization of horizontal transfers in prokaryotes using genomic signature.

Horizontal DNA transfer is an important factor of evolution and participates in biological diversity. Unfortunately, the location and length of horizontal transfers (HTs) are known for very few species. The usage of short oligonucleotides in a sequence (the so-called genomic signature) has been shown to be species-specific even in DNA fragments as short as 1 kb.

Analysis of the compositional biases in Plasmodium falciparum genome and proteome using Arabidopsis thaliana as a reference.

Comparative genomic analysis of the malaria causative agent, Plasmodium falciparum, with other eukaryotes for which the complete genome is available, revealed that the genome from P. falciparum was more similar to the genome of a plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, than to other non-apicomplexan taxa. Plant-like sequences are thought to result from horizontal gene transfers after a secondary endosymbiosis involving an algal ancestor.