No Arabic abstract
The Dissertation is focused on the studies of associations between functional elements in human genome and their nucleotide structure. The asymmetry in nucleotide content (skew, bias) was chosen as the main feature for nucleotide structure. A significant difference in nucleotide content asymmetry was found for human exons vs. introns. Specifically, exon sequences display bias for purines (i.e., excess of A and G over C and T), while introns exhibit keto-amino skew (i.e. excess of G and T over A and C). The extents of these biases depend upon gene expression patterns. The highest intronic keto-amino skew is found in the introns of housekeeping genes. In the case of introns, whose sequences are under weak repair system, the AT->GC and CG->TA substitutions are preferentially accumulated. A comparative analysis of gene sequences encoding cytochrome P450 2E1 of Homo sapiens and representative mammals was done. The cladistic tree on the basis of coding sequences similarity of the gene Cyp2e1 was constructed. A new programming tools of NCBI database sequence mining and analysis was developed, resulting in construction of a own database.
Gene-gene interactions have long been recognized to be fundamentally important to understand genetic causes of complex disease traits. At present, identifying gene-gene interactions from genome-wide case-control studies is computationally and methodologically challenging. In this paper, we introduce a simple but powerful method, named `BOolean Operation based Screening and Testing(BOOST). To discover unknown gene-gene interactions that underlie complex diseases, BOOST allows examining all pairwise interactions in genome-wide case-control studies in a remarkably fast manner. We have carried out interaction analyses on seven data sets from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC). Each analysis took less than 60 hours on a standard 3.0 GHz desktop with 4G memory running Windows XP system. The interaction patterns identified from the type 1 diabetes data set display significant difference from those identified from the rheumatoid arthritis data set, while both data sets share a very similar hit region in the WTCCC report. BOOST has also identified many undiscovered interactions between genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region in the type 1 diabetes data set. In the coming era of large-scale interaction mapping in genome-wide case-control studies, our method can serve as a computationally and statistically useful tool.
We train a neural network to predict chemical toxicity based on gene expression data. The input to the network is a full expression profile collected either in vitro from cultured cells or in vivo from live animals. The output is a set of fine grained predictions for the presence of a variety of pathological effects in treated animals. When trained on the Open TG-GATEs database it produces good results, outperforming classical models trained on the same data. This is a promising approach for efficiently screening chemicals for toxic effects, and for more accurately evaluating drug candidates based on preclinical data.
We train a neural network to predict human gene expression levels based on experimental data for rat cells. The network is trained with paired human/rat samples from the Open TG-GATES database, where paired samples were treated with the same compound at the same dose. When evaluated on a test set of held out compounds, the network successfully predicts human expression levels. On the majority of the test compounds, the list of differentially expressed genes determined from predicted expression levels agrees well with the list of differentially expressed genes determined from actual human experimental data.
The aim of this study is to investigate the relation that can be found between the phylogeny of a large set of complete chloroplast genomes, and the evolution of gene content inside these sequences. Core and pan genomes have been computed on textit{de novo} annotation of these 845 genomes, the former being used for producing well-supported phylogenetic tree while the latter provides information regarding the evolution of gene contents over time. It details too the specificity of some branches of the tree, when specificity is obtained on accessory genes. After having detailed the material and methods, we emphasize some remarkable relation between well-known events of the chloroplast history, like endosymbiosis, and the evolution of gene contents over the phylogenetic tree.
In unicellular organisms such as bacteria the same acquired mutations beneficial in one environment can be restrictive in another. However, evolving Escherichia coli populations demonstrate remarkable flexibility in adaptation. The mechanisms sustaining genetic flexibility remain unclear. In E. coli the transcriptional regulation of gene expression involves both dedicated regulators binding specific DNA sites with high affinity and also global regulators - abundant DNA architectural proteins of the bacterial chromoid binding multiple low affinity sites and thus modulating the superhelical density of DNA. The first form of transcriptional regulation is dominantly pairwise and specific, representing digitial control, while the second form is (in strength and distribution) continuous, representing analog control. Here we look at the properties of effective networks derived from significant gene expression changes under variation of the two forms of control and find that upon limitations of one type of control (caused e.g. by mutation of a global DNA architectural factor) the other type can compensate for compromised regulation. Mutations of global regulators significantly enhance the digital control; in the presence of global DNA architectural proteins regulation is mostly of the analog type, coupling spatially neighboring genomic loci; together our data suggest that two logically distinct types of control are balancing each other. By revealing two distinct logical types of control, our approach provides basic insights into both the organizational principles of transcriptional regulation and the mechanisms buffering genetic flexibility. We anticipate that the general concept of distinguishing logical types of control will apply to many complex biological networks.