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AT excursion: a new approach to predict replication origins in viral genomes by locating AT-rich regions.

ABSTRACT: Replication origins are considered important sites for understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in DNA replication. Many computational methods have been developed for predicting their locations in archaeal, bacterial and eukaryotic genomes. However, a prediction method designed for a particular kind of genomes might not work well for another. In this paper, we propose the AT excursion method, which is a score-based approach, to quantify local AT abundance in genomic sequences and use the identified high scoring segments for predicting replication origins. This method has the advantages of requiring no preset window size and having rigorous criteria to evaluate statistical significance of high scoring segments.We have evaluated the AT excursion method by checking its predictions against known replication origins in herpesviruses and comparing its performance with an existing base weighted score method (BWS1). Out of 43 known origins, 39 are predicted by either one or the other method and 26 origins are predicted by both. The excursion method identifies six origins not predicted by BWS1, showing that the AT excursion method is a valuable complement to BWS1. We have also applied the AT excursion method to two other families of double stranded DNA viruses, the poxviruses and iridoviruses, of which very few replication origins are documented in the public domain. The prediction results are made available as supplementary materials at 1. Preliminary investigation shows that the proposed method works well on some larger genomes too.The AT excursion method will be a useful computational tool for identifying replication origins in a variety of genomic sequences.

SUBMITTER: Chew DS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1904460 | biostudies-literature | 2007 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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AT excursion: a new approach to predict replication origins in viral genomes by locating AT-rich regions.

Chew David S H DS Leung Ming-Ying MY Choi Kwok Pui KP

BMC bioinformatics 20070521

<h4>Background</h4>Replication origins are considered important sites for understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in DNA replication. Many computational methods have been developed for predicting their locations in archaeal, bacterial and eukaryotic genomes. However, a prediction method designed for a particular kind of genomes might not work well for another. In this paper, we propose the AT excursion method, which is a score-based approach, to quantify local AT abundance in genomic seq ...[more]

PMID: 17517140

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Project description:DNA replication initiates from multiple replication origins (ORIs) in eukaryotes. Discovery and characterization of replication origins are essential for a better understanding of the molecular mechanism of DNA replication. In this study, the features of autonomously replicating sequences (ARSs) in Saccharomyces cerevisiae have been comprehensively analyzed as follows. Firstly, we carried out the analysis of the ARSs available in S. cerevisiae S288C. By evaluating the sequence similarity of experimentally established ARSs, we found that 94.32% of ARSs are unique across the whole genome of S. cerevisiae S288C and those with high sequence similarity are prone to locate in subtelomeres. Subsequently, we built a non-redundant dataset with a total of 520 ARSs, which are based on ARSs annotation of S. cerevisiae S288C from SGD and then supplemented with those from OriDB and DeOri databases. We conducted a large-scale comparison of ORIs among the diverse budding yeast strains from a population genomics perspective. We found that 82.7% of ARSs are not only conserved in genomic sequence but also relatively conserved in chromosomal position. The non-conserved ARSs tend to distribute in the subtelomeric regions. We also conducted a pan-genome analysis of ARSs among the S. cerevisiae strains, and a total of 183 core ARSs existing in all yeast strains were determined. We extracted the genes adjacent to replication origins among the 104 yeast strains to examine whether there are differences in their gene functions. The result showed that the genes involved in the initiation of DNA replication, such as orc3, mcm2, mcm4, mcm6, and cdc45, are conservatively located adjacent to the replication origins. Furthermore, we found the genes adjacent to conserved ARSs are significantly enriched in DNA binding, enzyme activity, transportation, and energy, whereas for the genes adjacent to non-conserved ARSs are significantly enriched in response to environmental stress, metabolites biosynthetic process and biosynthesis of antibiotics. In general, we characterized the replication origins from the genome-wide and population genomics perspectives, which would provide new insights into the replication mechanism of S. cerevisiae and facilitate the design of algorithms to identify genome-wide replication origins in yeast.

Dataset Information

AT excursion: a new approach to predict replication origins in viral genomes by locating AT-rich regions.

Publications

AT excursion: a new approach to predict replication origins in viral genomes by locating AT-rich regions.

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