Establishing and validating regulatory regions for variant annotation and expression analysis.

Background: The regulatory effect of inherited or de novo genetic variants occurring in promoters as well as in transcribed or even coding gene regions is gaining greater recognition as a contributing factor to disease processes in addition to mutations affecting protein functionality. Thousands of such regulatory mutations are already recorded in HGMD, OMIM, ClinVar and other databases containing published disease causing and associated mutations. It is therefore important to properly annotate genetic variants occurring in experimentally verified and predicted transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) that could thus influence the factor binding event.

Genome wide prediction of HNF4alpha functional binding sites by the use of local and global sequence context.

We report an application of machine learning algorithms that enables prediction of the functional context of transcription factor binding sites in the human genome. We demonstrate that our method allowed de novo identification of hepatic nuclear factor (HNF)4alpha binding sites and significantly improved an overall recognition of faithful HNF4alpha targets. When applied to published findings, an unprecedented high number of false positives were identified.

A novel computational approach for the prediction of networked transcription factors of aryl hydrocarbon-receptor-regulated genes.

A novel computational method based on a genetic algorithm was developed to study composite structure of promoters of coexpressed genes. Our method enabled an identification of combinations of multiple transcription factor binding sites regulating the concerted expression of genes. In this article, we study genes whose expression is regulated by a ligand-activated transcription factor, aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR), that mediates responses to a variety of toxins.

In vivo effects of the Epstein-Barr virus small RNA EBER-1 on protein synthesis and cell growth regulation.

Recent studies have suggested a role for the Epstein-Barr virus-encoded RNA EBER-1 in malignant transformation. EBER-1 inhibits the activity of the protein kinase PKR, an inhibitor of protein synthesis with tumour suppressor properties. In human 293 cells and murine embryonic fibroblasts, transient expression of EBER-1 promoted total protein synthesis and enhanced the expression of cotransfected reporter genes.