Description and genetics of glucose phosphate isomerase (GPI) and phosphoglucomutase (PGM) polymorphisms in Asellus aquaticus (L.)

Analysis of Western European populations of Asellus aquaticus uncovered 10 electrophoretic phenotypes of glucose phosphate isomerase (GPI) and 7 of phosphoglucomutase (PGM). Breeding studies indicate that the variation is controlled by codominant alleles at two autosomal loci. Genotype frequencies in the two sexes do not differ significantly, mating between genotypes is random, and no structural linkage is detectable between the two loci. PGM shows nongenetic, "secondary" banding, particularly in animals stored at -20 degrees C prior to electrophoresis. This secondary banding confounds the identification of the genetic variation but can be controlled by the reducing agent 2-mercaptoethanol.     

Comparison of the evolutionary dynamics of symbiotic and housekeeping loci: a case for the genetic coherence of rhizobial lineages

In prokaryotes, lateral gene transfer across chromosomal lineages may be mediated by plasmids, phages, transposable elements, and other accessory DNA elements. However, the importance of such transfer and the evolutionary forces that may restrict gene exchange remain largely unexplored in native settings. In this study, tests of phylogenetic congruence are employed to explore the range of horizontal transfer of symbiotic (sym) loci among distinct chromosomal lineages of native rhizobia, the nitrogen-fixing symbiont of legumes. Rhizobial strains isolated from nodules of several host plant genera were sequenced at three loci: symbiotic nodulation genes (nodB and nodC), the chromosomal housekeeping locus glutamine synthetase II (GSII), and a portion of the 16S rRNA gene. Molecular phylogenetic analysis shows that each locus generally subdivides strains into the same major groups, which correspond to the genera Rhizobium, Sinorhizobium, and Mesorhizobium. This broad phylogenetic congruence indicates a lack of lateral transfer across major chromosomal subdivisions, and it contrasts with previous studies of agricultural populations showing broad transfer of sym loci across divergent chromosomal lineages. A general correspondence of the three rhizobial genera with major legume groups suggests that host plant associations may be important in the differentiation of rhizobial nod and chromosomal loci and may restrict lateral transfer among strains. The second major result is a significant incongruence of nod and GSII phylogenies within rhizobial subdivisions, which strongly suggests horizontal transfer of nod genes among congenerics. This combined evidence for lateral gene transfer within, but not between, genetic subdivisions supports the view that rhizobial genera are "reproductively isolated" and diverge independently. Differences across rhizobial genera in the specificity of host associations imply that the evolutionary dynamics of the symbiosis vary considerably across lineages in native settings.      

Uncovering protein interaction in abstracts and text using a novel linear model and word proximity networks

Background:

We participated in three of the protein-protein interaction subtasks of the Second BioCreative Challenge: classification of abstracts relevant for protein-protein interaction (interaction article subtask [IAS]), discovery of protein pairs (interaction pair subtask [IPS]), and identification of text passages characterizing protein interaction (interaction sentences subtask [ISS]) in full-text documents. We approached the abstract classification task with a novel, lightweight linear model inspired by spam detection techniques, as well as an uncertainty-based integration scheme. We also used a support vector machine and singular value decomposition on the same features for comparison purposes. Our approach to the full-text subtasks (protein pair and passage identification) includes a feature expansion method based on word proximity networks.

Results:

Our approach to the abstract classification task (IAS) was among the top submissions for this task in terms of measures of performance used in the challenge evaluation (accuracy, F-score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve). We also report on a web tool that we produced using our approach: the Protein Interaction Abstract Relevance Evaluator (PIARE). Our approach to the full-text tasks resulted in one of the highest recall rates as well as mean reciprocal rank of correct passages.

Conclusion:

Our approach to abstract classification shows that a simple linear model, using relatively few features, can generalize and uncover the conceptual nature of protein-protein interactions from the bibliome. Because the novel approach is based on a rather lightweight linear model, it can easily be ported and applied to similar problems. In full-text problems, the expansion of word features with word proximity networks is shown to be useful, although the need for some improvements is discussed.