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 signifi
cant 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.
Proteins are an important class of biomolecules that serve as essential building blocks of the cells. Their three-dimensional structures are responsible for their functions. In this thesis we have investigated the protein structures using a network t
heoretical approach. While doing so we used a coarse-grained method, viz., complex network analysis. We model protein structures at two length scales as Protein Contact Networks (PCN) and as Long-range Interaction Networks (LINs). We found that proteins by virtue of being characterised by high amount of clustering, are small-world networks. Apart from the small-world nature, we found that proteins have another general property, viz., assortativity. This is an interesting and exceptional finding as all other complex networks (except for social networks) are known to be disassortative. Importantly, we could identify one of the major topological determinant of assortativity by building appropriate controls.
