• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.9-15
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• 2012

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the movement of genetic material between kingdoms and is considered to play a positive role in adaptation. $Cryptosporidium$ $parvum$ is a parasitic protozoan that causes an infectious disease. Its genome sequencing reported 14 bacteria-like proteins in the nuclear genome. Among them, cgd2_1810, which has been annotated as CysQ, a sulfite synthesis pathway protein, is listed as one of the candidates of genes horizontally transferred from bacterial origin. In this report, we examined this issue using phylogenetic analysis. Our BLAST search showed that $C.$ $parvum$ CysQ protein had the highest similarity with that of proteobacteria. Analysis with NCBI's Conserved Domain Tree showed phylogenetic incongruence, in that $C.$ $parvum$ CysQ protein was located within a branch of proteobacteria in the cd01638 domain, a bacterial member of the inositol monophosphatase family. According to Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway, the sulfate assimilation pathway, where CysQ plays an important role, is well conserved in most eukaryotes as well as prokaryotes. However, the Apicomplexa, including $C.$ $parvum$, largely lack orthologous genes of the pathway, suggesting its loss in those protozoan lineages. Therefore, we conclude that $C.$ $parvum$ regained cysQ from proteobacteria by HGT, although its functional role is elusive.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.64-70
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• 2014

Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is the leading cause of cancer mortality among women worldwide. The life-threatening infection caused by HPV demands the need for designing anticancerous drugs. In the recent years, different compounds from natural origins, such as carrageenan, curcumin, epigallocatechin gallate, indole-3-carbinol, jaceosidin, and withaferin, have been used as a hopeful source of anticancer therapy. These compounds have been shown to suppress HPV infection by different researchers. In the present study, we explored these natural inhibitors against E6 oncoprotein of high-risk HPV-16, which is known to inactivate the p53 tumor suppressor protein. A robust homology model of HPV-16 E6 was built to anticipate the interaction mechanism of E6 oncoprotein with natural inhibitory molecules using a structure-based drug designing approach. Docking analysis showed the interaction of these natural compounds with the p53-binding site of E6 protein residues 113-122 (CQKPLCPEEK) and helped the restoration of p53 functioning. Docking analysis, besides helping in silico validation of natural compounds, also helps understand molecular mechanisms of protein-ligand interactions.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.63-69
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• 2010

Monofunctional biosynthetic peptidoglycan transglycosylase (MBPT) catalyzes the formation of the glycan chain in bacterial cell walls from peptidoglycan subunits: N-acetylglucosamine (NAG) and acetylmuramic acid (NAM). Bifunctional glycosyltransferases such as the penicillin binding protein (PBP) have peptidoglycan glycosyltransferase (PGT) on their C terminal end which links together the peptidoglycan subunits while transpeptidase (TP) on the N terminal end cross-links the peptide moieties on the NAM monosaccharide of the peptide subunits to create the bacterial cell wall. The singular function of MBPT resembles the C terminal end of PBP as it too contains and utilizes a similar PGT domain. In this article we analyzed the infectious and non infectious protein sequences of MBPT from 31 different strains of bacteria using a variety of bioinformatic tools. Motif analysis, dot-plot comparison, and phylogenetic analysis identified a number of significant differences between infectious and non-infectious protein sequences. In this paper we have made an attempt to explain, analyze and discuss these differences from an evolutionary perspective. The results of our sequence analysis may open the door for utilizing MBPT as a new target to fight a variety of infectious bacteria.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.181-186
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• 2009

Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1), which is a dominantly inherited neurodegenerative disorder, results from a CTG trinucleotide repeat expansion in the 3'-untranslated region (3'-UTR) of the myotonic dystrophy protein kinase (DMPK) gene. Retention of mutant DMPK (mDMPK) transcripts in the nuclei of affected cells has been known to be the main cause of pathogenesis of the disease. Thus, reducing the RNA toxicity through elimination of the mutant RNA has been suggested as one therapeutic strategy against DM1. In this study, we suggested RNA replacement with a trans -splicing ribozyme as an alternate genetic therapeutic approach for amelioration of DM1. To this end, we identified the regions of mDMPK 3'-UTR RNA that were accessible to ribozymes by using an RNA mapping strategy based on a trans-splicing ribozyme library. We found that particularly accessible sites were present not only upstream but also downstream of the expanded repeat sequence. Repair or replacement of the mDMPK transcript with the specific ribozyme will be useful for DM1 treatment through reduction of toxic mutant transcripts and simultaneously restore wild-type DMPK or release nucleus-entrapped mDMPK transcripts to the cytoplasm.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.90-93
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• 2010

A-kinase-anchoring proteins (AKAPs) are scaffold proteins which compartmentalize protein kinase A (PKA, cAMP-dependent protein kinase) and other enzymes to specific subcellular sites. The spatiotemporal control of these enzymes by AKAPs is important for cellular function like cell growth and development etc. Hence, it is important to understand the basic function of AKAPs and their functional domains. However, diverse names, function, cellular localizations and many members of AKAPs increase difficulties when researchers search appropriate AKAPs for their experimental purpose. Nevertheless, there was no previous AKAPs-related database regardless of their important cellular functions and difficulty of finding appropriate AKAPs. So, we developed AKAPs database (AKAPDB), which contains their sequence information, functions and other information derived from prediction programs and other databases. Therefore, we propose that AKAPDB can be an important tool to researchers in the related fields. AKAPDB is available via the internet at http://plaza3.snu.ac.kr/akapdb/.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.17.1-17.3
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• 2019

Text mining has become an important research method in biology, with its original purpose to extract biological entities, such as genes, proteins and phenotypic traits, to extend knowledge from scientific papers. However, few thorough studies on text mining and application development, for plant molecular biology data, have been performed, especially for rice, resulting in a lack of datasets available to solve named-entity recognition tasks for this species. Since there are rare benchmarks available for rice, we faced various difficulties in exploiting advanced machine learning methods for accurate analysis of the rice literature. To evaluate several approaches to automatically extract information from gene/protein entities, we built a new dataset for rice as a benchmark. This dataset is composed of a set of titles and abstracts, extracted from scientific papers focusing on the rice species, and is downloaded from PubMed. During the 5th Biomedical Linked Annotation Hackathon, a portion of the dataset was uploaded to PubAnnotation for sharing. Our ultimate goal is to offer a shared task of rice gene/protein name recognition through the BioNLP Open Shared Tasks framework using the dataset, to facilitate an open comparison and evaluation of different approaches to the task.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.24.1-24.8
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• 2022

Hypomyelinating leukodystrophy type 2 (HLD2), is an inherited genetic disease of the central nervous system caused by recessive mutations in the gap junction protein gamma 2 (GJC2/GJA12). HLD2 is characterized by nystagmus, developmental delay, motor impairments, ataxia, severe speech problem, and hypomyelination in the brain. The GJC2 sequence encodes connexin 47 protein (Cx47). Connexins are a group of membrane proteins that oligomerize to construct gap junctions protein. In the present study, a novel missense mutation gene c.760G>A (p.Val254Met) was identified in a patient with HLD2 by performing whole exome sequencing. Following the discovery of the new mutation in the proband, we used Sanger sequencing to analyze his affected sibling and parents. Sanger sequencing verified homozygosity of the mutation in the proband and his affected sibling. The autosomal recessive inheritance pattern was confirmed since Sanger sequencing revealed both healthy parents were heterozygous for the mutation. PolyPhen2, SIFT, PROVEAN, and CADD were used to evaluate the function prediction scores of detected mutations. Cx47 is essential for oligodendrocyte function, including adequate myelination and myelin maintenance in humans. Novel mutation p.Val254Met is located in the second extracellular domain of Cx47, both extracellular loops are highly conserved and probably induce intramolecular disulfide interactions. This novel mutation in the Cx47 gene causes oligodendrocyte dysfunction and HLD2 disorder.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.210-222
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• 2008

Due to the polygenic nature of cancer, it is believed that breast cancer is caused by the perturbation of multiple genes and their complex interactions, which contribute to the wide aspects of disease phenotypes. A systems biology approach for the identification of subnetworks of interconnected genes as functional modules is required to understand the complex nature of diseases such as breast cancer. In this study, we apply a 3-step strategy for the interpretation of microarray data, focusing on identifying significantly perturbed metabolic pathways rather than analyzing a large amount of overexpressed and underexpressed individual genes. The selected pathways are considered to be dysregulated functional modules that putatively contribute to the progression of disease. The subnetwork of protein-protein interactions for these dysregulated pathways are constructed for further detailed analysis. We evaluated the method by analyzing microarray datasets of breast cancer tissues; i.e., normal and invasive breast cancer tissues. Using the strategy of microarray analysis, we selected several significantly perturbed pathways that are implicated in the regulation of progression of breast cancers, including the extracellular matrix-receptor interaction pathway and the focal adhesion pathway. Moreover, these selected pathways include several known breast cancer-related genes. It is concluded from this study that the present strategy is capable of selecting interesting perturbed pathways that putatively play a role in the progression of breast cancer and provides an improved interpretability of networks of protein-protein interactions.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.142-146
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• 2008

In order to understand the protein functions that are related to disease, it is important to detect the correlation between amino acid mutations and disease. Many mutation studies about disease-related proteins have been carried out through molecular biology techniques, such as vector design, protein engineering, and protein crystallization. However, experimental protein mutation studies are time-consuming, be it in vivo or in vitro. We therefore performed a bioinformatic analysis of known disease-related mutations and their protein structure changes in order to analyze the correlation between mutation and disease. For this study, we selected 111 diseases that were related to 175 proteins from the PDB database and 710 mutations that were found in the protein structures. The mutations were acquired from the Human Gene Mutation Database (HGMD). We selected point mutations, excluding only insertions or deletions, for detecting structural changes. To detect a structural change by mutation, we analyzed not only the structural properties (distance of pocket and mutation, pocket size, surface size, and stability), but also the physico-chemical properties (weight, instability, isoelectric point (IEP), and GRAVY score) for the 710 mutations. We detected that the distance between the pocket and disease-related mutation lay within $20\;{\AA}$ (98.5%, 700 proteins). We found that there was no significant correlation between structural stability and disease-causing mutations or between hydrophobicity changes and critical mutations. For large-scale mutational analysis of disease-causing mutations, our bioinformatics approach, using 710 structural mutations, called "Structural Mutatomics," can help researchers to detect disease-specific mutations and to understand the biological functions of disease-related proteins.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.774-789
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• 1995

Due to the rapid socioeconomic development and the introduction of the national health insurance system the general population's need for health care and utilization of health care services have increased dramatically. As a result of this change. Korea is experiencing a shortage of health care facilities and health manpower, and this leads long wailing line at doctor's offices. One of the solutions of this problem could be home health care system for those who have minor health related problems. With this background, this study was conducted to look at the feasibility of a home-based prenatal care system using information superhighway and nursing informatics specialists. With the home-based prenatal care system, the pregnant woman checks her blood pressure, tests her urine for sugar and protein, and measures her body weight at home and sends the information to a hospital computer via the information networks such as public telephone line and information superhighway. Nursing informatics specialist at the hospital will go through each patient record and screen those who have abnormal values and notify them to see a doctor as soon as possible. Besides telemonitoring features, the proposed system will include tole-education capabilities for the patients so that patient can learn whatever they need to know ragarding the prenatal care via information networks. If this system develops and operates, patient can save time in terms of travel to and from the hospital and waiting time in the hospital. And the health care institute can utilize its resource more efficiently.