利用基因组比对方法寻找大肠杆菌DH1基因组中的非必需序列

目的:寻找大肠杆菌DH1基因组中的非必需序列。方法:采用基因组比对的方法,通过软件MAUVE分别对大肠杆菌DH1与miniMG1655、miniW3110进行基因组比对,筛选得到大肠杆菌DH1基因组中的候选非必需序列,进而以基因必需性评分的方法确定非必需序列。结果与结论:通过基因组比对及基因必需性评分的方法,确定了大肠杆菌DH1基因组中64个非必需序列区域,占全基因组的26.3%。非必需序列区域的确定,为后续构建基因组减小的大肠杆菌miniDH1提供了基础。     

一个新的多序列比对算法

多序列比对是生物信息学中基础而又重要的序列分析方法.本文提出一种新的多序列比对算法,该算法综合了渐进比对方法和迭代策略,采用加权函数以调整序列的有偏分布,用neighbor-joining方法构建指导树以确定渐进比对的顺序.通过对BAlibASE中142组蛋白质序列比对的测试,验证了本算法的有效性.与Multalin算法比较的结果表明,本算法能有效地提高分歧较大序列的比对准确率.     

细菌基因组重复序列PCR技术及其应用

细菌中散在分布的DNA重复序列近年来不断被报道,基因外重复回文序列和肠细菌基因间共有重复序列是两个典型的原核细胞基因组散在重复序列。重复序列在染色体上的分布和拷贝数具种间特异性,用它们的互补序列作为引物,以细菌基因组DNA为模板进行PCR扩增反应,反应产物的琼脂糖电泳可以提供非常清晰的DNA指纹图谱,使用此图谱既可对各种微生物进行快速分型及鉴定,又可对它们进行DNA水平上的遗传多样性分析。细菌基因组重复序列PCR技术具有简捷、快速、结果稳定等特点,可对细菌进行分子标记,用于菌株分型、分类鉴定和亲缘关系等方面的研究。     

番茄RAPD分析有效引物3′端序列的偏倚分布及其与基因组序列结构的关系

对番茄RAPD分析的有效引物与Operon引物系列（OP系列）的3′端序列作了统计比较,研究结果指出,翻茄有效引物系列不是OP系列的随机样本,而是3端序列的种类和分布上有偏倚性的选择性样本,虽然两个系列的引物都具有3’端同序现象,但对其分布频率正交比较结果差异极显,此类同序性3’端在番茄基因组的RAPD座位中是普遍分布 的,RAPD引物3’端序列的非随机分布,反映了番茄基因组内的多态性区段侧翼具有序列的特异性,这种特异性结构应是番茄基因组序列的一种属性,这种属性为番茄属基因组所共有。     

简单重复DNA序列在哺乳动物mtDNA D-loop区的分布及进化特征

简单重复序列广泛分布于从原核到真核生物的基因组中, 其形成的分子机理目前尚不明确。对NCBI数据库中已有256种哺乳动物线粒体DNA (mtDNA) D-loop区进行序列比对分析, 根据其所含有的简单重复序列类型分为3组, 分别是53种哺乳动物含有六核苷酸重复序列; 104种哺乳动物含有非六核苷酸重复序列(＞6 bp); 99种哺乳动物不含有任何重复序列。通过碱基序列分析比对, 发现六核苷酸重复序列集中分布在CSB1-CSB2间隔区, 而非六核苷酸重复可以分布于终止区(TAS)、中央保守区(Central domain)以及CSB(Central sequence block)区。通过比较含有重复序列与不含重复序列的功能保守区发现, 简单重复序列的存在并不明确影响D-loop区内的中央保守区以及CSB1、CSB2、CSB3三个功能保守区的碱基序列保守性。在此基础上, 利用N-J法构建了256种哺乳动物的进化树, 分析了哺乳动物D-Loop区内重复序列在进化过程中的可能变化规律, 发现简单重复序列随着物种的进化地位的升高而呈现消失趋势。     

中华鳖线粒体基因组序列分析

参照近源物种线粒体基因组序列,设计17对特异引物,采用PCR产物直接测序法测得中华鳖线粒体基因组全序列.初步分析其基因组特点和各基因的定位,用pDRAW32软件预测12种限制性酶对其的酶切图谱.结果表明,中华鳖线粒体基因组全长17364bp,核苷酸组成为35.23%A、27.26%T、25.73%C、11.78%G,包括13个蛋白质编码基因、2个rRNA基因、22个tRNA基因和1个非编码控制区.基于线粒体基因组编码的13个蛋白质的氨基酸序列,用NJ法和MP法构建系统进化树,分析6种龟鳖类动物之间的亲缘关系,与传统的系统分类基本一致,初步确定淡水龟科与海龟科的亲缘关系比与龟科的亲缘关系要近.     

功能基因中的微卫星序列

微卫星序列广泛存在真核生物和一些原核生物的基因组中,它在基因组中的分布并不是随机的。不同重复拷贝类别在基因组中存在种属间和碱基组成的特异性,各种优势的重复序列类型不同。此外,基因中在编码区和非编码区的分布也表现出种属和碱基组成差异。这种差异显示了微卫星序列起源进化的复杂性,也反映了基因中微卫星序列的生物学功能。功能基因为遗传学工作者提供了一个联系表型和基因型的手段,研究功能基因中的微卫星序列不仅在绘制精细遗传图谱、筛选重要农艺性状基因、物种进化等问题上都有着重要的作用,而且在疾病治疗有潜在的应用价值。本文主要阐述了微卫星序列的形成机制、基因中微卫星序列的分布以及功能基因中微卫星序列的生物学作用,并指出了目前实践中的一些问题。     

基于全基因组序列的弯曲菌特征分析

空肠弯曲菌(Campylobacter jejuni)和结肠弯曲菌(Campylobacter coli)是引起人类腹泻的主要致病菌。传统生化方法在鉴定弯曲菌时存在步骤多、耗时长、通量低等问题。本研究通过利用生物信息学方法对弯曲菌全基因组进行序列、基因注释、耐药基因、多位点序列分型以及CRISPR-Cas系统等分析,挖掘能够有效区分空肠弯曲菌和结肠弯曲菌的高分辨力特征。实验结果表明,空肠弯曲菌和结肠弯曲菌在基因组序列长度、GC含量、基因数量、多位点序列分型以及CRISPR-Cas系统等方面存在显著差异。同时,研究还发现了一段在空肠弯曲菌基因组中广泛存在的高分辨力CRISPR重复序列。这些特征可用于构建能够准确鉴别空肠弯曲菌和结肠弯曲菌的生物信息学方法。     

k-长DNA子序列频数分布研究

在详细阐述了生成DNA序列分形图像的Hao方法后,提出一种能够直观显示k-长DNA子序列频数分布差异性的三维频数分布图生成方法。把3D频数分布图转化为1D对数频谱图,突出显示了频数分布的局部特征,提出k-长DNA子序列频数区划分准则,并详细研究了甚高频数区的n阶零间隔现象,指出n阶零间隔分布就是基因组进化过程所留痕迹的假设,并给出对数频谱图特征的生物学解释。实验发现许多DNA序列频数概率分布近似服从非中心F分布,对于分布呈多峰现象的基因组序列,可采用多个非中心F分布的叠加来拟合。在比较非中心F分布与Gamma分布后,提出一种结合二者在拟合方面具有互补优势的新分布,实验证明这种新分布能够更好地吻合实际DNA序列的频数分布。最后研究了两种特异出现频数(最高出现频数与出现频数为1的k-长子序列个数)与k值的关系,发现不同物种的这两种关系具有良好的一致性。     

肠杆菌基因间重复共有序列及ERIC-PCR

ERIC序列是近年来发现的存在于原核生物基因组中一类短的重复序列。该序列在染色体上的分布和拷贝数具种间特异性,根据序列中心高度保守的44bp的ERIC核心序列设计反向引物,可扩增出反映细菌基因组结构特征的谱带。由于ERIC-PCR快速简便,图谱重复性好,并可作为分子标记用于细菌的分类鉴定,所以,该方法已广泛应用到了科研和生产实践中;     

Construction of a Phylogenetic Tree of Photosynthetic Prokaryotes Based on Average Similarities of Whole Genome Sequences

Phylogenetic trees have been constructed for a wide range of organisms using gene sequence information, especially through the identification of orthologous genes that have been vertically inherited. The number of available complete genome sequences is rapidly increasing, and many tools for construction of genome trees based on whole genome sequences have been proposed. However, development of a reasonable method of using complete genome sequences for construction of phylogenetic trees has not been established. We have developed a method for construction of phylogenetic trees based on the average sequence similarities of whole genome sequences. We used this method to examine the phylogeny of 115 photosynthetic prokaryotes, i.e., cyanobacteria, Chlorobi, proteobacteria, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes and nonphotosynthetic organisms including Archaea. Although the bootstrap values for the branching order of phyla were low, probably due to lateral gene transfer and saturated mutation, the obtained tree was largely consistent with the previously reported phylogenetic trees, indicating that this method is a robust alternative to traditional phylogenetic methods.     

Block alignment: New representation and comparison method to study evolution of genomes

Genomes are not random sequences because natural selection has injected information in biological sequences for billions of years. Inspired by this idea, we developed a simple method to compare genomes considering nucleotide counts in subsequences (blocks) instead of their exact sequences.We introduce the Block Alignment method for comparing two genomes and based on this comparison method, define a similarity score and a distance. The presented model ignores nucleotide order in the sequence. On the other hand, in this block comparison method, due to exclusion of point mutations and small size variations, there is no need for high coverage sequencing which is responsible for the high costs of data production and storage; moreover, the sequence comparisons could be performed with higher speed.Phylogenetic trees of two sets of bacterial genomes were constructed and the results were in full agreement with their already constructed phylogenetic trees. Furthermore, a weighted and directed similarity network of each set of bacterial genomes was inferred ab initio by this model. Remarkably, the communities of these networks are in agreement with the clades of the corresponding phylogenetic trees which means these similarity networks also contain phylogenetic information about the genomes. Moreover, the block comparison method was used to distinguish rob(15;21)c-associated iAMP21 and sporadic iAMP21 rearrangements in subgroups of chromosome 21 in acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Our results show a meaningful difference between the number of contigs that mapped to chromosomes 15 and 21 in these cases. Furthermore, the presented block alignment model can select the candidate blocks to perform more accurate analysis and it is capable to find conserved blocks on a set of genomes.     

A method for molecular phylogeny construction by direct use of nucleotide sequence data

Summary A method for molecular phylogeny construction is newly developed. The method, called the stepwise ancestral sequence method, estimates molecular phylogenetic trees and ancestral sequences simultaneously on the basis of parsimony and sequence homology. For simplicity the emphasis is placed more on parsiomony than on sequence homology in the present study, though both are certainly important. Because parsimony alone will sometimes generate plural candidate trees, the method retains not one but five candidates from which one can then single out the final tree taking other criteria into account.The properties and performance of the method are then examined by simulating an evolving gene along a model phylogenetic tree. The estimated trees are found to lie in a narrow range of the parsimony criteria used in the present study. Thus, other criteria such as biological evidence and likelihood are necessary to single out the correct tree among them, with biological evidence taking precedence over any other criterion. The computer simulation also reveals that the method satisfactorily estimates both tree topology and ancestral sequences, at least for the evolutionary model used in the present study.     

拓扑树间的通经拓扑距离

给出了一种新的系统树间的拓扑距离,使用NJ,MP,UPGMA等3种方法对13种动物的线粒体中14个基因（含组合的）DNA序列数据进行系统树的构建,利用分割拓扑距离和本文给出的通经拓扑距离对这14种系统树这间及其与真树进行比较。结果显示,NJ法对获得已知树的有效率最高,MP法次之,UPGMA法最低。这14种DNA序列所构建的系统树与已知树的拓扑距离基本上是随其DNA序列长度增加而减小,但两者的相关系数并未达到显著水平,分割拓扑距离在总体上可反映树间的拓扑结构差异,但其测度精确度比通经拓扑距离要低。     

A simple feature representation vector for phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequences

In this study, a simple 4^k-dimension feature representation vector is proposed to reconstruct phylogenetic trees, where k is the length of a word. The vector is composed of elements which characterize the relative difference of biological sequence from sequence generated by an independent random process. In addition, the variance of a vector which is obtained by averaging every column of feature representation matrix is employed to determine appropriate word length. In our experiments, reliable results can always be generated when word length is <7 which appears to be of lower computational complexity. Phylogenetic trees of 24 transferrins and 48 Hepatitis E viruses reconstructed at word length 6 are in good agreements with previous study, it shows that our method is efficient and powerful.     

Integrated gene and species phylogenies from unaligned whole genome protein sequences

MOTIVATION: Most molecular phylogenies are based on sequence alignments. Consequently, they fail to account for modes of sequence evolution that involve frequent insertions or deletions. Here we present a method for generating accurate gene and species phylogenies from whole genome sequence that makes use of short character string matches not placed within explicit alignments. In this work, the singular value decomposition of a sparse tetrapeptide frequency matrix is used to represent the proteins of organisms uniquely and precisely as vectors in a high-dimensional space. Vectors of this kind can be used to calculate pairwise distance values based on the angle separating the vectors, and the resulting distance values can be used to generate phylogenetic trees. Protein trees so derived can be examined directly for homologous sequences. Alternatively, vectors defining each of the proteins within an organism can be summed to provide a vector representation of the organism, which is then used to generate species trees. RESULTS: Using a large mitochondrial genome dataset, we have produced species trees that are largely in agreement with previously published trees based on the analysis of identical datasets using different methods. These trees also agree well with currently accepted phylogenetic theory. In principle, our method could be used to compare much larger bacterial or nuclear genomes in full molecular detail, ultimately allowing accurate gene and species relationships to be derived from a comprehensive comparison of complete genomes. In contrast to phylogenetic methods based on alignments, sequences that evolve by relative insertion or deletion would tend to remain recognizably similar.     

Disk-covering, a fast-converging method for phylogenetic tree reconstruction.

The evolutionary history of a set of species is represented by a phylogenetic tree, which is a rooted, leaf-labeled tree, where internal nodes represent ancestral species and the leaves represent modern day species. Accurate (or even boundedly inaccurate) topology reconstructions of large and divergent trees from realistic length sequences have long been considered one of the major challenges in systematic biology. In this paper, we present a simple method, the Disk-Covering Method (DCM), which boosts the performance of base phylogenetic methods under various Markov models of evolution. We analyze the performance of DCM-boosted distance methods under the Jukes-Cantor Markov model of biomolecular sequence evolution, and prove that for almost all trees, polylogarithmic length sequences suffice for complete accuracy with high probability, while polynomial length sequences always suffice. We also provide an experimental study based upon simulating sequence evolution on model trees. This study confirms substantial reductions in error rates at realistic sequence lengths.     

Application of discrete Fourier inter-coefficient difference for assessing genetic sequence similarity

Digital signal processing (DSP) techniques for biological sequence analysis continue to grow in popularity due to the inherent digital nature of these sequences. DSP methods have demonstrated early success for detection of coding regions in a gene. Recently, these methods are being used to establish DNA gene similarity. We present the inter-coefficient difference (ICD) transformation, a novel extension of the discrete Fourier transformation, which can be applied to any DNA sequence. The ICD method is a mathematical, alignment-free DNA comparison method that generates a genetic signature for any DNA sequence that is used to generate relative measures of similarity among DNA sequences. We demonstrate our method on a set of insulin genes obtained from an evolutionarily wide range of species, and on a set of avian influenza viral sequences, which represents a set of highly similar sequences. We compare phylogenetic trees generated using our technique against trees generated using traditional alignment techniques for similarity and demonstrate that the ICD method produces a highly accurate tree without requiring an alignment prior to establishing sequence similarity.     

Phylogenetic inference: how much evolutionary history is knowable?

In order to reconstruct phylogenetic trees from extremely dissimilar sequences it is necessary to estimate accurately the extent of sequence divergence. In this paper a new method of sequence analysis, Markov triple analysis, is developed for determining the relative frequencies of nucleotide substitutions within the three branches of a three-taxon dendrogram. Assuming that nucleotide sites are independently and identically distributed and assuming a Markov model for nucleotide (or protein) evolution, it is shown that the unique Markov matrices can be reconstructed given only the joint probability distribution relating three taxa. (In the much simpler case involving only two taxa and two character states, Markov matrices can also be reconstructed, provided symmetry assumptions are placed on the elements of the matrices.) The method is illustrated using sequence data from the combined first and second codon positions derived from complete human, mouse, and cow mitochondrial sequences.      

Phylogenetic Analysis of Protein Sequences Based on Distribution of Length About Common Substring

Up to now, various approaches for phylogenetic analysis have been developed. Almost all of them put stress on analyzing nucleic acid sequences or protein primary sequences. In this paper, we propose a new sequence distance for efficient reconstruction of phylogenetic trees based on the distribution of length about common subsequences between two sequences. We describe some applications of this method, which not only show the validity of the method, but also suggest a number of novel phylogenetic insights.