Biomedical subjects

Peter Clote

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Clote.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Predicting transmembrane beta-barrels and interstrand residue interactions from sequence.

Transmembrane beta-barrel (TMB) proteins are embedded in the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, mitochondria, and chloroplasts. The cellular location and functional diversity of beta-barrel outer membrane proteins (omps) makes them an important protein class. At the present time, very few nonhomologous TMB structures have been determined by X-ray diffraction because of the experimental difficulty encountered in crystallizing transmembrane proteins. A novel method using pairwise interstrand residue statistical potentials derived from globular (nonouter membrane) proteins is introduced to predict the supersecondary structure of transmembrane beta-barrel proteins. The algorithm transFold employs a generalized hidden Markov model (i.e., multitape S-attribute grammar) to describe potential beta-barrel supersecondary structures and then computes by dynamic programming the minimum free energy beta-barrel structure. Hence, the approach can be viewed as a "wrapping" component that may capture folding processes with an initiation stage followed by progressive interaction of the sequence with the already-formed motifs. This approach differs significantly from others, which use traditional machine learning to solve this problem, because it does not require a training phase on known TMB structures and is the first to explicitly capture and predict long-range interactions. TransFold outperforms previous programs for predicting TMBs on smaller (<or=200 residues) proteins and matches their performance for straightforward recognition of longer proteins. An exception is for multimeric porins where the algorithm does perform well when an important functional motif in loops is initially identified. We verify our simulations of the folding process by comparing them with experimental data on the functional folding of TMBs. A Web server running transFold is available and outputs contact predictions and locations for sequences predicted to form TMBs.

Amino Acid Sequence↗

PubMed2006

transFold: a web server for predicting the structure and residue contacts of transmembrane beta-barrels.

Transmembrane beta-barrel (TMB) proteins are embedded in the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts. The cellular location and functional diversity of beta-barrel outer membrane proteins makes them an important protein class. At the present time, very few non-homologous TMB structures have been determined by X-ray diffraction because of the experimental difficulty encountered in crystallizing transmembrane (TM) proteins. The transFold web server uses pairwise inter-strand residue statistical potentials derived from globular (non-outer-membrane) proteins to predict the supersecondary structure of TMB. Unlike all previous approaches, transFold does not use machine learning methods such as hidden Markov models or neural networks; instead, transFold employs multi-tape S-attribute grammars to describe all potential conformations, and then applies dynamic programming to determine the global minimum energy supersecondary structure. The transFold web server not only predicts secondary structure and TMB topology, but is the only method which additionally predicts the side-chain orientation of transmembrane beta-strand residues, inter-strand residue contacts and TM beta-strand inclination with respect to the membrane. The program transFold currently outperforms all other methods for accuracy of beta-barrel structure prediction. Available at http://bioinformatics.bc.edu/clotelab/transFold.

Amino Acids↗

PubMed2006

Symmetric time warping, Boltzmann pair probabilities and functional genomics.

Given two time series, possibly of different lengths, time warping is a method to construct an optimal alignment obtained by stretching or contracting time intervals. Unlike pairwise alignment of amino acid sequences, classical time warping, originally introduced for speech recognition, is not symmetric in the sense that the time warping distance between two time series is not necessarily equal to the time warping distance of the reversal of the time series. Here we design a new symmetric version of time warping, and present a formal proof of symmetry for our algorithm as well as for one of the variants of Aach and Church [1]. We additionally design quadratic time dynamic programming algorithms to compute both the forward and backward Boltzmann partition functions for symmetric time warping, and hence compute the Boltzmann probability that any two time series points are aligned. In the future, with the availability of increasingly long and accurate time series gene expression data, our algorithm can provide a sense of biological significance for aligned time points - e.g. our algorithm could be used to provide evidence that expression values of two genes have higher Boltzmann probability (say) in the G1 and S phase than in G2 and M phases. Algorithms, source code and web interface, developed by the first author, are made publicly available via the Boltzmann Time Warping web server at bioinformatics.bc.edu/clotelab/.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

On realizing shapes in the theory of RNA neutral networks.

It is known (Reidys et al., 1997b. Bull. Math. Biol. 59(2), 339-397) that for any two secondary structures S,S' there exists an RNA sequence compatible with both, and that this result does not extend to more than two secondary structures. Indeed, a simple formula for the number of RNA sequences compatible with secondary structures S,S' plays a role in the algorithms of Flamm et al. (2001. RNA 7, 254-265) and of Abfalter et al. (2003. Proceedings of the German Conference on Bioinformatics, ) to design an RNA switch. Here we show that a natural extension of this problem is NP-complete. Unless P=NP, there is no polynomial time algorithm, which when given secondary structures S1,...,S(k), for k4, determines the least number of positions, such that after removal of all base pairs incident to these positions there exists an RNA nucleotide sequence compatible with the given secondary structures. We also consider a restricted version of this problem with a "fixed maximum" number of possible stars and show that it has a simple polynomial time solution.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

Structural RNA has lower folding energy than random RNA of the same dinucleotide frequency.

We present results of computer experiments that indicate that several RNAs for which the native state (minimum free energy secondary structure) is functionally important (type III hammerhead ribozymes, signal recognition particle RNAs, U2 small nucleolar spliceosomal RNAs, certain riboswitches, etc.) all have lower folding energy than random RNAs of the same length and dinucleotide frequency. Additionally, we find that whole mRNA as well as 5'-UTR, 3'-UTR, and cds regions of mRNA have folding energies comparable to that of random RNA, although there may be a statistically insignificant trace signal in 3'-UTR and cds regions. Various authors have used nucleotide (approximate) pattern matching and the computation of minimum free energy as filters to detect potential RNAs in ESTs and genomes. We introduce a new concept of the asymptotic Z-score and describe a fast, whole-genome scanning algorithm to compute asymptotic minimum free energy Z-scores of moving-window contents. Asymptotic Z-score computations offer another filter, to be used along with nucleotide pattern matching and minimum free energy computations, to detect potential functional RNAs in ESTs and genomic regions.

3' Untranslated Regions↗