Cancer3D 2.0: interactive analysis of 3D patterns of cancer mutations in cancer subsets.

Our knowledge of cancer genomics exploded in last several years, providing us with detailed knowledge of genetic alterations in almost all cancer types. Analysis of this data gave us new insights into molecular aspects of cancer, most important being the amazing diversity of molecular abnormalities in individual cancers. The most important question in cancer research today is how to classify this diversity to identify subtypes that are most relevant for treatment and outcome prediction for individual patients.

Mapping genetic variations to three-dimensional protein structures to enhance variant interpretation: a proposed framework.

The translation of personal genomics to precision medicine depends on the accurate interpretation of the multitude of genetic variants observed for each individual. However, even when genetic variants are predicted to modify a protein, their functional implications may be unclear. Many diseases are caused by genetic variants affecting important protein features, such as enzyme active sites or interaction interfaces.

Revealing aperiodic aspects of solenoid proteins from sequence information.

Motivation: Repeat proteins, which contain multiple repeats of short sequence motifs, form a large but seldom-studied group of proteins. Methods focusing on the analysis of 3D structures of such proteins identified many subtle effects in length distribution of individual motifs that are important for their functions. However, similar analysis was yet not applied to the vast majority of repeat proteins with unknown 3D structures, mostly because of the extreme diversity of the underlying motifs and the resulting difficulty to detect those.

PDBFlex: exploring flexibility in protein structures.

The PDBFlex database, available freely and with no login requirements at http://pdbflex.org, provides information on flexibility of protein structures as revealed by the analysis of variations between depositions of different structural models of the same protein in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). PDBFlex collects information on all instances of such depositions, identifying them by a 95% sequence identity threshold, performs analysis of their structural differences and clusters them according to their structural similarities for easy analysis.

A Pan-Cancer Catalogue of Cancer Driver Protein Interaction Interfaces.

Despite their importance in maintaining the integrity of all cellular pathways, the role of mutations on protein-protein interaction (PPI) interfaces as cancer drivers has not been systematically studied. Here we analyzed the mutation patterns of the PPI interfaces from 10,028 proteins in a pan-cancer cohort of 5,989 tumors from 23 projects of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to find interfaces enriched in somatic missense mutations. To that end we use e-Driver, an algorithm to analyze the mutation distribution of specific protein functional regions.

Localize.pytom: a modern webserver for cryo-electron tomography.

Localize.pytom, available through http://localize.pytom.

POSA: a user-driven, interactive multiple protein structure alignment server.

POSA (Partial Order Structure Alignment), available at http://posa.godziklab.org, is a server for multiple protein structure alignment introduced in 2005 (Ye,Y.

ConSole: using modularity of contact maps to locate solenoid domains in protein structures.

Background: Periodic proteins, characterized by the presence of multiple repeats of short motifs, form an interesting and seldom-studied group. Due to often extreme divergence in sequence, detection and analysis of such motifs is performed more reliably on the structural level. Yet, few algorithms have been developed for the detection and analysis of structures of periodic proteins.

Fast and accurate reference-free alignment of subtomograms.

In cryoelectron tomography alignment and averaging of subtomograms, each dnepicting the same macromolecule, improves the resolution compared to the individual subtomogram. Major challenges of subtomogram alignment are noise enhancement due to overfitting, the bias of an initial reference in the iterative alignment process, and the computational cost of processing increasingly large amounts of data. Here, we propose an efficient and accurate alignment algorithm via a generalized convolution theorem, which allows computation of a constrained correlation function using spherical harmonics.

Structure and 3D arrangement of endoplasmic reticulum membrane-associated ribosomes.

In eukaryotic cells, cotranslational protein translocation across the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane requires an elaborate macromolecular machinery. While structural details of ribosomes bound to purified and solubilized constituents of the translocon have been elucidated in recent years, little structural knowledge of ribosomes bound to the complete ER protein translocation machinery in a native membrane environment exists. Here, we used cryoelectron tomography to provide a three-dimensional reconstruction of 80S ribosomes attached to functional canine pancreatic ER microsomes in situ.

PyTom: a python-based toolbox for localization of macromolecules in cryo-electron tomograms and subtomogram analysis.

Cryo-electron tomography (CET) is a three-dimensional imaging technique for structural studies of macromolecules under close-to-native conditions. In-depth analysis of macromolecule populations depicted in tomograms requires identification of subtomograms corresponding to putative particles, averaging of subtomograms to enhance their signal, and classification to capture the structural variations among them. Here, we introduce the open-source platform PyTom that unifies standard tomogram processing steps in a python toolbox.

Size distribution of native cytosolic proteins of Thermoplasma acidophilum.

We used molecular sieve chromatography in combination with LC-MS/MS to identify protein complexes that can serve as templates in the template matching procedures of visual proteomics approaches. By this method the sample complexity was lowered sufficiently to identify 464 proteins and - on the basis of size distribution and bioinformatics analysis - 189 of them could be assigned as subunits of macromolecular complexes over the size of 300 kDa. From these we purified six stable complexes of Thermoplasma acidophilum whose size and subunit composition - analyzed by electron microscopy and MALDI-TOF-MS, respectively - verified the accuracy of our method.