In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Aligned sequences of nucleotide or amino acid residues are typically represented as rows within a matrix. Gaps are inserted between the residues so that identical or similar characters are aligned in successive columns. Sequence alignments are also used for non-biological sequences, such as calculating the distance cost between strings in a natural language or in financial data.
Protein structure prediction is the inference of the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence—that is, the prediction of its secondary and tertiary structure from primary structure. Structure prediction is different from the inverse problem of protein design. Protein structure prediction is one of the most important goals pursued by computational biology; and it is important in medicine and biotechnology.
In biology, a sequence motif is a nucleotide or amino-acid sequence pattern that is widespread and usually assumed to be related to biological function of the macromolecule. For example, an N-glycosylation site motif can be defined as Asn, followed by anything but Pro, followed by either Ser or Thr, followed by anything but Pro residue.
A protein family is a group of evolutionarily related proteins. In many cases, a protein family has a corresponding gene family, in which each gene encodes a corresponding protein with a 1:1 relationship. The term "protein family" should not be confused with family as it is used in taxonomy.
Structural alignment attempts to establish homology between two or more polymer structures based on their shape and three-dimensional conformation. This process is usually applied to protein tertiary structures but can also be used for large RNA molecules. In contrast to simple structural superposition, where at least some equivalent residues of the two structures are known, structural alignment requires no a priori knowledge of equivalent positions. Structural alignment is a valuable tool for the comparison of proteins with low sequence similarity, where evolutionary relationships between proteins cannot be easily detected by standard sequence alignment techniques. Structural alignment can therefore be used to imply evolutionary relationships between proteins that share very little common sequence. However, caution should be used in using the results as evidence for shared evolutionary ancestry because of the possible confounding effects of convergent evolution by which multiple unrelated amino acid sequences converge on a common tertiary structure.
In genetics and bioinformatics, a single-nucleotide polymorphism is a germline substitution of a single nucleotide at a specific position in the genome that is present in a sufficiently large fraction of considered population.
In computational biology, gene prediction or gene finding refers to the process of identifying the regions of genomic DNA that encode genes. This includes protein-coding genes as well as RNA genes, but may also include prediction of other functional elements such as regulatory regions. Gene finding is one of the first and most important steps in understanding the genome of a species once it has been sequenced.
Protein structure is the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in an amino acid-chain molecule. Proteins are polymers – specifically polypeptides – formed from sequences of amino acids, which are the monomers of the polymer. A single amino acid monomer may also be called a residue, which indicates a repeating unit of a polymer. Proteins form by amino acids undergoing condensation reactions, in which the amino acids lose one water molecule per reaction in order to attach to one another with a peptide bond. By convention, a chain under 30 amino acids is often identified as a peptide, rather than a protein. To be able to perform their biological function, proteins fold into one or more specific spatial conformations driven by a number of non-covalent interactions, such as hydrogen bonding, ionic interactions, Van der Waals forces, and hydrophobic packing. To understand the functions of proteins at a molecular level, it is often necessary to determine their three-dimensional structure. This is the topic of the scientific field of structural biology, which employs techniques such as X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and dual polarisation interferometry, to determine the structure of proteins.
Protein–protein interaction prediction is a field combining bioinformatics and structural biology in an attempt to identify and catalog physical interactions between pairs or groups of proteins. Understanding protein–protein interactions is important for the investigation of intracellular signaling pathways, modelling of protein complex structures and for gaining insights into various biochemical processes.
PROSITE is a protein database. It consists of entries describing the protein families, domains and functional sites as well as amino acid patterns and profiles in them. These are manually curated by a team of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and tightly integrated into Swiss-Prot protein annotation. PROSITE was created in 1988 by Amos Bairoch, who directed the group for more than 20 years. Since July 2018, the director of PROSITE and Swiss-Prot is Alan Bridge.
The Eukaryotic Linear Motif (ELM) resource is a computational biology resource for investigating short linear motifs (SLiMs) in eukaryotic proteins. It is currently the largest collection of linear motif classes with annotated and experimentally validated linear motif instances.
In molecular biology short linear motifs (SLiMs), linear motifs or minimotifs are short stretches of protein sequence that mediate protein–protein interaction.
Protein function prediction methods are techniques that bioinformatics researchers use to assign biological or biochemical roles to proteins. These proteins are usually ones that are poorly studied or predicted based on genomic sequence data. These predictions are often driven by data-intensive computational procedures. Information may come from nucleic acid sequence homology, gene expression profiles, protein domain structures, text mining of publications, phylogenetic profiles, phenotypic profiles, and protein-protein interaction. Protein function is a broad term: the roles of proteins range from catalysis of biochemical reactions to transport to signal transduction, and a single protein may play a role in multiple processes or cellular pathways.
HIVToolbox is an internet application that helps scientists identify and develop new hypotheses as well as facilitate interpretation of experiments, with the goal of helping scientists better understand HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and to identify new potential drug targets.
The HH-suite is an open-source software package for sensitive protein sequence searching. It contains programs that can search for similar protein sequences in protein sequence databases. Sequence searches are a standard tool in modern biology with which the function of unknown proteins can be inferred from the functions of proteins with similar sequences. HHsearch and HHblits are two main programs in the package and the entry point to its search function, the latter being a faster iteration. HHpred is an online server for protein structure prediction that uses homology information from HH-suite.
PredictProtein (PP) is an automatic service that searches up-to-date public sequence databases, creates alignments, and predicts aspects of protein structure and function. Users send a protein sequence and receive a single file with results from database comparisons and prediction methods. PP went online in 1992 at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; since 1999 it has operated from Columbia University and in 2009 it moved to the Technische Universität München. Although many servers have implemented particular aspects, PP remains the most widely used public server for structure prediction: over 1.5 million requests from users in 104 countries have been handled; over 13000 users submitted 10 or more different queries. PP web pages are mirrored in 17 countries on 4 continents. The system is optimized to meet the demands of experimentalists not experienced in bioinformatics. This implied that we focused on incorporating only high-quality methods, and tried to collate results omitting less reliable or less important ones.
Megf8 also known as Multiple Epidermal Growth Factor-like Domains 8, is a protein coding gene that encodes a single pass membrane protein, known to participate in developmental regulation and cellular communication. It is located on chromosome 19 at the 49th open reading frame in humans (19q13.2). There are two isoform constructs known for MEGF8, which differ by a 67 amino acid indel. The isoform 2 splice version is 2785 amino acids long, and predicted to be 296.6 kdal in mass. Isoform 1 is composed of 2845 amino acids and predicted to weigh 303.1 kdal. Using BLAST searches, orthologs were found primarily in mammals, but MEGF8 is also conserved in invertebrates and fishes, and rarely in birds, reptiles, and amphibians. A notably important paralog to multiple epidermal growth factor-like domains 8 is ATRNL1, which is also a single pass transmembrane protein, with several of the same key features and motifs as MEGF8, as indicated by Simple Modular Architecture Research Tool (SMART) which is hosted by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory located in Heidelberg, Germany. MEGF8 has been predicted to be a key player in several developmental processes, such as left-right patterning and limb formation. Currently, researchers have found MEGF8 SNP mutations to be the cause of Carpenter syndrome subtype 2.
Single nucleotide polymorphism annotation is the process of predicting the effect or function of an individual SNP using SNP annotation tools. In SNP annotation the biological information is extracted, collected and displayed in a clear form amenable to query. SNP functional annotation is typically performed based on the available information on nucleic acid and protein sequences.
LOC105377021 is a protein which in humans is encoded by the LOC105377021 gene. LOC105377021 exhibits expressional pathology related to breast cancer, specifically triple negative breast cancer. LOC105377021 contains a serine rich region in addition to predicted alpha helix motifs.
