Dataset Information

Exalign: a new method for comparative analysis of exon-intron gene structures.

ABSTRACT: The evolution of genes is usually studied and reconstructed at the sequence level, that is, by comparing and aligning their genomic, transcript or protein sequences. However, including the exon-intron structure of genes in the analysis can provide further and useful information, for example to draw reliable phylogenetic relationships left unsolved by traditional sequence-based evolutionary studies, or to shed further light on patterns of intron gain and loss. In spite of this, no tool especially devised for this task is currently available. In this work we present Exalign, an algorithm designed to retrieve, compare and search for the exon-intron structure of existing gene annotations, that has been implemented in a software tool freely accessible through a web interface as well as available for download. We present different applications of our method, from the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of homologous gene families to the detection of as of today unknown cases of intron loss in human and rodents, and, remarkably, two never reported intron gain events in human and mouse. The web interface for accessing Exalign is available at http://www.pesolelab.it/exalign/ or http://www.beacon.unimi.it/exalign/

SUBMITTER: Pavesi G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2377436 | biostudies-literature | 2008 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Exalign: a new method for comparative analysis of exon-intron gene structures.

Pavesi Giulio G Zambelli Federico F Caggese Corrado C Pesole Graziano G

Nucleic acids research 20080408 8

The evolution of genes is usually studied and reconstructed at the sequence level, that is, by comparing and aligning their genomic, transcript or protein sequences. However, including the exon-intron structure of genes in the analysis can provide further and useful information, for example to draw reliable phylogenetic relationships left unsolved by traditional sequence-based evolutionary studies, or to shed further light on patterns of intron gain and loss. In spite of this, no tool especially ...[more]

PMID: 18397951

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Project description:BACKGROUND: HES/HEY genes encode a family of basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factors with both bHLH and Orange domain. HES/HEY proteins are direct targets of the Notch signaling pathway and play an essential role in developmental decisions, such as the developments of nervous system, somitogenesis, blood vessel and heart. Despite their important functions, the origin and evolution of this HES/HEY gene family has yet to be elucidated. METHODS AND FINDINGS: In this study, we identified genes of the HES/HEY family in representative species and performed evolutionary analysis to elucidate their origin and evolutionary process. Our results showed that the HES/HEY genes only existed in metazoans and may originate from the common ancestor of metazoans. We identified HES/HEY genes in more than 10 species representing the main lineages. Combining the bHLH and Orange domain sequences, we constructed the phylogenetic trees by different methods (Bayesian, ML, NJ and ME) and classified the HES/HEY gene family into four groups. Our results indicated that this gene family had undergone three expansions, which were along with the origins of Eumetazoa, vertebrate, and teleost. Gene structure analysis revealed that the HES/HEY genes were involved in exon and/or intron loss in different species lineages. Genes of this family were duplicated in bony fishes and doubled than other vertebrates. Furthermore, we studied the teleost-specific duplications in zebrafish and investigated the expression pattern of duplicated genes in different tissues by RT-PCR. Finally, we proposed a model to show the evolution of this gene family with processes of expansion, exon/intron loss, and motif loss. CONCLUSIONS: Our study revealed the evolution of HES/HEY gene family, the expression and function divergence of duplicated genes, which also provide clues for the research of Notch function in development. This study shows a model of gene family analysis with gene structure evolution and duplication.

Project description:BACKGROUND:In-depth study of the intron retention levels of transcripts provide insights on the mechanisms regulating pre-mRNA splicing efficiency. Additionally, detailed analysis of retained introns can link these introns to post-transcriptional regulation or identify aberrant splicing events in human diseases. RESULTS:We present IntEREst, Intron-Exon Retention Estimator, an R package that supports rigorous analysis of non-annotated intron retention events (in addition to the ones annotated by RefSeq or similar databases), and support intra-sample in addition to inter-sample comparisons. It accepts binary sequence alignment/map (.bam) files as input and determines genome-wide estimates of intron retention or exon-exon junction levels. Moreover, it includes functions for comparing subsets of user-defined introns (e.g. U12-type vs U2-type) and its plotting functions allow visualization of the distribution of the retention levels of the introns. Statistical methods are adapted from the DESeq2, edgeR and DEXSeq R packages to extract the significantly more or less retained introns. Analyses can be performed either sequentially (on single core) or in parallel (on multiple cores). We used IntEREst to investigate the U12- and U2-type intron retention in human and plant RNAseq dataset with defects in the U12-dependent spliceosome due to mutations in the ZRSR2 component of this spliceosome. Additionally, we compared the retained introns discovered by IntEREst with that of other methods and studies. CONCLUSION:IntEREst is an R package for Intron retention and exon-exon junction levels analysis of RNA-seq data. Both the human and plant analyses show that the U12-type introns are retained at higher level compared to the U2-type introns already in the control samples, but the retention is exacerbated in patient or plant samples carrying a mutated ZRSR2 gene. Intron retention events caused by ZRSR2 mutation that we discovered using IntEREst (DESeq2 based function) show considerable overlap with the retained introns discovered by other methods (e.g. IRFinder and edgeR based function of IntEREst). Our results indicate that increase in both the number of biological replicates and the depth of sequencing library promote the discovery of retained introns, but the effect of library size gradually decreases with more than 35 million reads mapped to the introns.

Dataset Information

Exalign: a new method for comparative analysis of exon-intron gene structures.

Publications

Exalign: a new method for comparative analysis of exon-intron gene structures.

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