Background Advances in whole genome sequencing strategies have provided the opportunity for genomic and comparative genomic analysis of a vast variety of organisms. The analysis results are highly dependent on the quality ...

DNA methylation (5mC) and hydroxymethylation (5hmC) are chemical modifications of cytosine bases which play a crucial role in epigenetic gene regulation. However, cost, data complexity and unavailability of comprehensive ...

Abstract In B lymphocytes, the uracil N-glycosylase (UNG) excises genomic uracils made by activation-induced deaminase (AID), thus underpinning antibody gene diversification and oncogenic chromosomal translocations, ...

Background Comparing sets of sequences is a situation frequently encountered in bioinformatics, examples being comparing an assembly to a reference genome, or two genomes to each other. The purpose of the ...

Both a DNA lesion and an intermediate for antibody maturation, uracil is primarily processed by base excision repair (BER), either initiated by uracil-DNA glycosylase (UNG) or by single-strand selective monofunctional ...

Background. VSEARCH is an open source and free of charge multithreaded 64-bit tool for processing and preparing metagenomics, genomics and population genomics nucleotide sequence data. It is designed as an alternative to ...

Sequence clustering is a common early step in amplicon-based microbial community analysis, when raw sequencing reads are clustered into operational taxonomic units (OTUs) to reduce the run time of subsequent analysis steps. ...

Background: As an intracellular human pathogen, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is facing multiple stressful stimuli inside the macrophage and the granuloma. Understanding Mtb responses to stress is essential to identify ...

Background With advances in next generation sequencing technology and analysis methods, single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and indels can be detected with high sensitivity and specificity in exome sequencing ...

Previously we presented Swarm v1, a novel and open source amplicon clustering program that produced fine-scale molecular operational taxonomic units (OTUs), free of arbitrary global clustering thresholds and input-order ...

The oxidation resistance gene 1 (OXR1) is crucial for protecting against oxidative stress; however, its molecular function is unknown. We employed RNA sequencing to examine the role of human OXR1 for genome wide transcription ...

Popular de novo amplicon clustering methods suffer from two fundamental flaws: arbitrary global clustering thresholds, and input-order dependency induced by centroid selection. Swarm was developed to address these issues ...

The alkylating agent N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine (MNNG) is known to trigger the adaptive response by inducing the ada-regulon – consisting of three DNA repair enzymes Ada, AlkB, AlkA and the enigmatic AidB. We ...

The recently discovered HEAT-like repeat (HLR) DNA glycosylase superfamily is widely distributed in all domains of life. The present bioinformatics and phylogenetic analysis shows that HLR DNA glycosylase superfamily members ...

3',5'-cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) dependent protein kinase or protein kinase A (PKA) has served as a prototype for the large family of protein kinases that are crucially important for signal transduction in ...

The functions of several SOS regulated genes in Escherichia coli are still unknown, including dinQ. In this work we characterize dinQ and two small RNAs, agrA and agrB, with antisense complementarity to dinQ. Northern ...

The genes PRKACA and PRKACB encode the principal catalytic (C) subunits of protein kinase A (PKA) Cα and Cβ, respectively. Cα is expressed in all eukaryotic tissues examined and studies of Cα knockout mice demonstrate a ...

Piwi proteins and Piwi-interacting small RNAs (piRNAs) have known functions in transposon silencing in the male germline of fetal and newborn mice. Both are also present in adult testes; however, their function here remains ...

Background The Smith-Waterman algorithm for local sequence alignment is more sensitive than heuristic methods for database searching, but also more time-consuming. The fastest approach to parallelisation ...

Activation of oxidative stress-responses and downregulation of insulin-like signaling (ILS) is seen in Nucleotide Excision Repair (NER) deficient segmental progeroid mice. Evidence suggests that this is a survival response ...

Huntington's disease (HD) is one of several neurodegenerative disorders caused by expansion of CAG repeats in a coding gene. Somatic CAG expansion rates in HD vary between organs, and the greatest instability is observed ...

Background Eschericia coli AlkB is a 2-oxoglutarate- and iron-dependent dioxygenase that reverses alkylated DNA damage by oxidative demethylation. Mouse AlkB homolog 1 (Alkbh1) is one of eight members of the newly discovered ...

Background Despite comprehensive investigation, the Escherichia coli SOS response system is not yet fully understood. We have applied custom designed whole genome tiling arrays to measure UV invoked transcriptional changes ...

Background The ability to detect neoplasia-specific fusion genes is important not only in cancer research, but also increasingly in clinical settings to ensure that correct diagnosis is made and the optimal ...

Background Recent segmental duplications are relatively large (≥ 1 kb) genomic regions of high sequence identity (≥ 90%). They cover approximately 4–5% of the human genome and play important roles in gene ...

Pathogenic bacteria continuously encounter multiple forms of stress in their hostile environments, which leads to DNA damage. With the new insight into biology offered by genome sequences, the elucidation of the gene content ...

Background High-density tiling microarrays are a powerful tool for the characterization of complete genomes. The two major computational challenges associated with custom-made arrays are design and analysis. Firstly, ...

Specific guanine-rich sequence motifs in the human genome have considerable potential to form four-stranded structures known as G-quadruplexes or G4 DNA. The enrichment of these motifs in key chromosomal regions has suggested ...

3-methyladenine DNA glycosylases initiate repair of cytotoxic and promutagenic alkylated bases in DNA. We demonstrate by comparative modelling that Bacillus cereus AlkD belongs to a new, fifth, structural superfamily of ...

Soil bacteria are heavily exposed to environmental methylating agents such as methylchloride and may have special requirements for repair of alkylation damage on DNA. We have used functional complementation of an Escherichia ...

We present an overview of selected computational methods for microRNA prediction. It is especially aimed at viral miRNA detection. As the number of microRNAs increases and the range of genomes encoding miRNAs expands, it ...

PARALIGN is a rapid and sensitive similarity search tool for the identification of distantly related sequences in both nucleotide and amino acid sequence databases. Two algorithms are implemented, accelerated Smith–Waterman ...