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Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) are severe complications of pregnancy with high morbidity and are a major cause of increased maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. Currently, there is a lack of effective early diagnostic indicators and safe and effective preventive strategies for HDP in clinical practice, except for monitoring maternal blood pressure levels, the degree of proteinuria, organ involvement and fetal conditions. The intestinal microbiota consists of the gut flora and intestinal environment, which is the largest microecosystem of the human body and participates in material and energy metabolism, gene expression regulation, immunity regulation, and other functions. During pregnancy, due to changes in hormone levels and altered immune function, the intestinal microecological balance is affected, triggering HDP. A dysregulated intestinal microenvironment influences the composition and distribution of the gut flora and changes the intestinal barrier, driving beneficial or harmful bacterial metabolites and inflammatory responses to participate in the development of HDP and promote its malignant development. When the gut flora is dysbiotic and affects blood pressure, supplementation with probiotics and dietary fiber can be used to intervene. In this review, the interaction between the intestinal microbiota and HDP was investigated to explore the feasibility of the gut flora as a novel biomarker of HDP and to provide a new strategy and basis for the prevention and treatment of clinical HDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obtaining new grapevine varieties with unique aromas has been a long-standing goal of breeders. Norisoprenoids are of particular interest to wine producers and researchers, as these compounds are responsible for the important varietal aromas in wine, characterized by a complex floral and fruity smell, and are likely present in all grape varieties. However, the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) loci and candidate genes genetically controlling the norisoprenoid content in grape berry remain unknown. To this end, in this study, we investigated 13 norisoprenoid traits across two years in an F1 population consisting of 149 individuals from a hybrid of Vitis vinifera L. cv. Muscat Alexandria and V. vinifera L. cv. Christmas Rose. Based on 568,953 SNP markers, genome-wide association analysis revealed that 27 candidate SNP loci belonging to 18 genes were significantly associated with the concentrations of norisoprenoid components in grape berry. Among them, 13 SNPs were confirmed in a grapevine germplasm population comprising 97 varieties, including two non-synonymous mutations SNPs within the VvDXS1 and VvGGPPS genes, respectively in the isoprenoid metabolic pathway. Genotype analysis showed that the grapevine individuals with the heterozygous genotype C/T at chr5:2987350 of VvGGPPS accumulated higher average levels of 6- methyl-5-hepten-2-one and b-cyclocitral than those with the homozygous genotype C/C. Furthermore, VvGGPPS was highly expressed in individuals with high norisoprenoids concentrations. Transient overexpression of VvGGPPS in the leaves of Vitis quinquangularis and tobacco resulted in an increase in norisoprenoid concentrations. These findings indicate the importance of VvGGPPS in the genetic control of norisoprenoids in grape berries, serving as a potential molecular breeding target for aroma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Effectively predicting protein complexes not only helps to understand the structures and functions of proteins and their complexes, but also is useful for diagnosing disease and developing new drugs. Up to now, many methods have been developed to detect complexes by mining dense subgraphs from static protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, while ignoring the value of other biological information and the dynamic properties of cellular systems. Results: In this paper, based on our previous works CPredictor and CPredictor2.0, we present a new method for predicting complexes from PPI networks with both gene expression data and protein functional annotations, which is called CPredictor3.0. This new method follows the viewpoint that proteins in the same complex should roughly have similar functions and are active at the same time and place in cellular systems. We first detect active proteins by using gene express data of different time points and cluster proteins by using gene ontology (GO) functional annotations, respectively. Then, for each time point, we do set intersections with one set corresponding to active proteins generated from expression data and the other set corresponding to a protein cluster generated from functional annotations. Each resulting unique set indicates a cluster of proteins that have similar function(s) and are active at that time point. Following that, we map each cluster of active proteins of similar function onto a static PPI network, and get a series of induced connected subgraphs. We treat these subgraphs as candidate complexes. Finally, by expanding and merging these candidate complexes, the predicted complexes are obtained. We evaluate CPredictor3.0 and compare it with a number of existing methods on several PPI networks and benchmarking complex datasets. The experimental results show that CPredictor3.0 achieves the highest F1-measure, which indicates that CPredictor3.0 outperforms these existing method in overall. Conclusion: CPredictor3.0 can serve as a promising tool of protein complex prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Bacterial operons are considerably more complex than what were thought. At least their components are dynamically rather than statically defined as previously assumed. Here we present a computational study of the landscape of the transcriptional units (TUs) of E. coli K12, revealed by the available genomic and transcriptomic data, providing new understanding about the complexity of TUs as a whole encoded in the genome of E. coli K12. Results and conclusion: Our main findings include that (i) different TUs may overlap with each other by sharing common genes, giving rise to clusters of overlapped TUs (TUCs) along the genomic sequence; (ii) the intergenic regions in front of the first gene of each TU tend to have more conserved sequence motifs than those of the other genes inside the TU, suggesting that TUs each have their own promoters; (iii) the terminators associated with the 3' ends of TUCs tend to be Rho-independent terminators, substantially more often than terminators of TUs that end inside a TUC; and (iv) the functional relatedness of adjacent gene pairs in individual TUs is higher than those in TUCs, suggesting that individual TUs are more basic functional units than TUCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] miR-106b is significantly up-regulated in laryngeal carcinoma. [•] miR-106b as an oncogene can regulate laryngeal carcinoma cell line growth and invasion through directly targeting RUNX3. [•] We propose a model whereby one miRNA targets two genes in laryngeal carcinoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kir2.4, a strongly rectifying potassium channel that is localized to neurons and is especially abundant in retina, was fished with yeast two-hybrid screen using a constitutively active Gαo1. Here, we wished to determine whether and how Gαo affects this channel. Using transfected HEK 293 cells and retinal tissue, we showed that Kir2.4 interacts with Gαo, and this interaction is stronger with the GDP-bound form ofGαo. Using two-electrode voltage clamp, we recorded from oocytes that were injected with Kir2.4 mRNA and a combination of G-protein subunit mRNAs. We found that the wild type and the inactive mutant of Gαo reduce the Kir2.4 basal current, whereas the active mutant has little effect. Other pertussis-sensitive Gα subunits also reduce this current, whereas Gαs increases it. Gβγ increases the current, whereasm-phosducin, which binds Gβγ without affecting the state ofGα, reduces it.Wethen tested the effect of G-protein subunits on the surface expression of the channel fused to cerulean by imaging the plasma membranes of the oocytes. We found that the surface expression is affected, with effects paralleling those seen with the basal current. This suggests that the observed effects on the current are mainly indirect and are due to surface expression. Similar results were obtained in transfected HEK cells. Moreover, we show that in retinal ON bipolar cells lacking Gβ3, localization of Kir2.4 in the dendritic tips is reduced. We conclude that Gβγ targets Kir2.4 to the plasma membrane, and Gαo slows this down by binding Gβγ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Reconstruction of biological pathways is typically done through mapping well-characterized pathways of model organisms to a target genome, through orthologous gene mapping. A limitation of such pathway-mapping approaches is that the mapped pathway models are constrained by the composition of the template pathways, e.g., some genes in a target pathway may not have corresponding genes in the template pathways, the so-called "missing gene" problem. Methods: We present a novel pathway-expansion method for identifying additional genes that are possibly involved in a target pathway after pathway mapping, to fill holes caused by missing genes as well as to expand the mapped pathway model. The basic idea of the algorithm is to identify genes in the target genome whose homologous genes share common operons with homologs of any mapped pathway genes in some reference genome, and to add such genes to the target pathway if their functions are consistent with the cellular function of the target pathway. Results: We have implemented this idea using a graph-theoretic approach and demonstrated the effectiveness of the algorithm on known pathways of E. coli in the KEGG database. On all KEGG pathways containing at least 5 genes, our method achieves an average of 60% positive predictive value (PPV) and the performance is increased with more seed genes added. Analysis shows that our method is highly robust. Conclusions: An effective method is presented to find missing genes in biological pathways of prokaryotes, which achieves high prediction reliability on E. coli at a genome level. Numerous missing genes are found to be related to knwon E. coli pathways, which can be further validated through biological experiments. Overall this method is robust and can be used for functional inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although dynorphins are widely involved in the control of not only nociceptive neurotransmission but also a variety of brain functions such as memory and emotion, no natural regulator for inducing the mRNA expression of prodynorphin (Pdyn), a precursor protein of dynorphins, is known. Using primary cultures of rat cortical neurons, we found that pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP), a member of the vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP)/secretin/glucagon neuropeptide family, markedly induces Pdyn mRNA expression. PACAP was much more effective than VIP, indicating a major role for PAC1 in the PACAP-induced Pdyn mRNA expression. The increase in Pdyn mRNA expression was independent of de novo protein synthesis. Administration of forskolin, an activator for adenylate cyclase/protein kinase A (PKA), but not TPA, an activator for protein kinase C (PKC), induced Pdyn mRNA expression, suggesting a major role for PKA. The involvement of PKA was supported by the inhibition of PACAP-induced Pdyn mRNA expression upon addition of H89, an inhibitor for PKA. The PACAP-induced potentiation of NMDA-R was involved in the mRNA expression of Bdnf or c-fos but not Pdyn. These results suggest PACAP to be an upstream regulator for inducing Pdyn mRNA expression through PKA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally known that bacterial genes working in the same biological pathways tend to group into operons, possibly to facilitate cotranscription and to provide stoichiometry. However, very little is understood about what may determine the global arrangement of bacterial genes in a genome beyond the operon level. Here we present evidence that the global arrangement of operons in a bacterial genome is largely influenced by the tendency that a bacterium keeps its operons encoding the same biological pathway in nearby genomic locations, and by the tendency to keep operons involved in multiple pathways in locations close to the other members of their participating pathways. We also observed that the activation frequencies of pathways also influence the genomic locations of their encoding operons, tending to have operons of the more frequently activated pathways more tightly clustered together. We have quantitatively assessed the influences on the global genomic arrangement of operons by different factors. We found that the current arrangements of operons in most of the bacterial genomes we studied tend to minimize the overall distance between consecutive operons of a same pathway across all pathways encoded in the genome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: During microRNA (miRNA) maturation in humans and flies, Drosha and Dicer cut the precursor transcript, thereby producing a short RNA duplex. One strand of this duplex becomes a functional component of the RNA-Induced Silencing Complex (RISC), while the other is eliminated. While thermodynamic asymmetry of the duplex ends appears to play a decisive role in the strand selection process, the details of the selection mechanism are not yet understood. Results: Here, we assess miRNA strand selection bias in humans and fruit flies by analyzing the sequence composition and relative expression levels of the two strands of the precursor duplex in these species. We find that the sequence elements associated with preferential miRNA strand selection and/or rejection differ between the two species. Further, we identify another feature that distinguishes human and fly miRNA processing machinery: the relative accuracy of the Drosha and Dicer enzymes. Conclusion: Our result provides clues to the mechanistic aspects of miRNA strand selection in humans and other mammals. Further, it indicates that human and fly miRNA processing pathways are more distinct than currently recognized. Finally, the observed strand selection determinants are instrumental in the rational design of efficient miRNA-based expression regulators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mapping biological pathways across microbial genomes is a highly important technique in functional studies of biological systems. Existing methods mainly rely on sequence-based orthologous gene mapping, which often leads to suboptimal mapping results because sequence-similarity information alone does not contain sufficient information for accurate identification of orthology relationship. Here we present an algorithm for pathway mapping across microbial genomes. The algorithm takes into account both sequence similarity and genomic structure information such as operons and regulons. One basic premise of our approach is that a microbial pathway could generally be decomposed into a few operons or regulons. We formulated the pathway-mapping problem to map genes across genomes to maximize their sequence similarity under the constraint that the mapped genes be grouped into a few operons, preferably coregulated in the target genome. We have developed an integer-programming algorithm for solving this constrained optimization problem and implemented the algorithm as a computer software program, P-MAP. We have tested P-MAP on a number of known homologous pathways. We conclude that using genomic structure information as constraints could greatly improve the pathway-mapping accuracy over methods that use sequence-similarity information alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative splicing is a sophisticated nuclear process that regulates gene expression. It represents an important mechanism for enhancing the functional diversity of proteins. Our current knowledge of alternatively spliced variants is derived mainly from mRNA transcripts, and very little is known about their protein tertiary structures. We carried out a large-scale analysis of known alternatively spliced variants at both protein sequence and structure levels and have shown that threading is, in general, a viable approach for modeling structures of alternatively spliced variants. An examination of alternative splicing at the protein sequence level revealed that the size of splicing events follows the power law distribution and the majority of splicing isoforms harbor only one or two alternations. We examined alternative splicing in the context of protein 3D structures and found that the boundaries of alternative splicing events generally happen in coil regions of secondary structures and exposed residues and the majority of the sequences involved in splicing are located on the surface of proteins. In light of these findings, we then proceeded to demonstrate that threading represents a useful tool for structure prediction of alternative splicing isoforms and addressed the fold stability issue of threading-based structure prediction by molecular dynamics simulation. Our analysis and the insights gained have helped to establish a viable method for structure prediction of alternatively spliced isoforms at the genome scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new sigma factor, SigF, was identified from the social and developmental bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. SigF is required for fruiting body formation during development as well as social motility during vegetative growth. Analysis of gene expression indicates that it is possible that the sigF gene is involved in regulation of an unidentified gene for social motility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information on the 4th Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference which was held in August 2005 in Stanford, California is presented. The papers presented at the conference discussed about genomic structures, gene functions, gene expression, helical transmembrane proteins, and mathematical pathways regulated by allosteric enzyme.

AbstractIn most cases, the successful application of gene therapy requires the development of vectors that can provide regulated control of therapeutic gene expression. We have reconstituted the Tet-On (tetracycline-regulated transgene expression) two-component system in a single lentiviral vector with insertion of a chicken chromatin insulator (cHS4) element between the two expression cassettes. Optimization of this vector included an improved reverse tetracycline-dependent trans-activator (rtTA) sequence developed through HIV viral evolution, and an rtTA-dependent, Tet-responsive element containing modifications of the tetOsequence (TRE-tight1) to improve leaky basal transcription. Transduction of HeLa cells with these lentiviral vectors resulted in a high level of rtTA expression in the presence of doxycycline. In neuronal cells, rtTA expression driven by a neuron-specific enolase (NSE) promoter was more efficient than gene expression from a murine cytomegalovirus promoter. Transgene expression from the NSE promoter also provided tightly regulated gene expression in neurons in vivo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background & Aims: Down-regulation of the growth arrest specific transcript 5 (GAS5) (long non-coding RNA) is associated with cell proliferation of gastric cancer (GC) and a poor prognosis. We aimed to investigate whether the variant rs145204276 of GAS5 is associated with the prognosis of GC in the Chinese population, and to unveil the regulatory mechanism underlying the GAS5 expression in GC tissues. Method: 1,253 GC patients and 1,354 healthy controls were included. The frequency of the genotype del/del and the allele del of rs145204276 were compared between the patients and the controls and between different subgroups of patients classified by clinicopathological variables. The overall survival rate was analyzed according to the Kaplan-Meier method using the log-rank test. Results: The frequency of genotype del/del was significantly lower in patients than in the controls (7.0% vs. 9.1%, p = 0.001). Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that genotype del/del was significantly associated with a higher survival rate (p = 0.01). Patients with late tumor stage were found to have a significantly lower rate of genotype del/del than those with an early tumor stage (4.9% vs. 8.8%, p = 0.01). Patients with UICC III and IV were found to have a significantly lower rate of genotype del/del than those with UICC I and II (5.3% vs. 8.1%, p = 0.02). Conclusion: The variant rs145204276 of GAS5 is associated with the development and prognosis of GC. The allele del of rs145204276 is associated with a remarkably lower incidence of cancer progression and metastasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are short DNA transposons with terminal inverted repeat (TIR) signals and have been extensively studied in plants and other eukaryotes. But little is known about them in eubacteria. We identified a novel and recently active MITE, Chunjie, when studying the recent duplication of an operon consisting of ABC transporters and a phosphate uptake regulator in the chromosome of Geobacter uraniireducens Rf4. Chunjie resembles the other known MITEs in many aspects, e.g., having TIR signals and direct repeats, small in size, noncoding, able to fold into a stable secondary structure, and typically inserted into A + T-rich regions. At least one case of recent transposition was observed, i.e., the insertion of Chunjie into one copy of the aforementioned operon. As far as we know, this is the first report that the insertion of a MITE does not disrupt the operon structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]