Spatio-temporal analysis of metabolite profiles during barley germination

Kölling J, Gorzolka K, Niehaus K, Nattkemper TW. Spatio-temporal analysis of metabolite profiles during barley germination. Presented at the German Conference on Bioinformatics (GCB), Bielefeld, Germany

Integrative machine learning approach for multi-class SCOP protein fold classification

Classification and prediction of protein structure has been a central research theme in structural bioinformatics. Due to the imbalanced distribution of proteins over multi SCOP classification, most discriminative machine learning suffers the well-known ‘False Positives ’ problem when learning over these types of problems. We have devised eKISS, an ensemble machine learning specifically designed to increase the coverage of positive examples when learning under multiclass imbalanced data sets. We have applied eKISS to classify 25 SCOP folds and show that our learning system improved over classical learning methods

A Phase I/II first-line study of R-CHOP plus B-cell receptor/NF-κB-double-targeting to molecularly assess therapy response

The ImbruVeRCHOP trial is an investigator-initiated, multicenter, single-arm, open label Phase I/II study for patients 61-80 years of age with newly diagnosed CD20+ diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and a higher risk profile (International Prognostic Index ≥2). Patients receive standard chemotherapy (CHOP) plus immunotherapy (Rituximab), a biological agent (the proteasome inhibitor Bortezomib) and a signaling inhibitor (the Bruton's Tyrosine Kinase-targeting therapeutic Ibrutinib). Using an all-comers approach, but subjecting patients to another lymphoma biopsy acutely under first-cycle immune-chemo drug exposure, ImbruVeRCHOP seeks to identify an unbiased molecular responder signature that marks diffuse large B-cell lymphoma patients at risk and likely to benefit from this regimen as a double, proximal and distal B-cell receptor/NF-κB-co-targeting extension of the current R-CHOP standard of care. EudraCT-Number: 2015-003429-32; ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03129828

Draft Genome Sequences of Propionibacterium acnes Type Strain ATCC6919 and Antibiotic-Resistant Strain HL411PA1.

Propionibacterium acnes is a major skin commensal and is associated with acne vulgaris, the most common skin disease. Here we report the draft genome sequences of two P. acnes strains, the type strain ATCC6919 and an antibiotic-resistant strain, HL411PA1

From predicting to analyzing {HIV}-1 resistance to broadly neutralizing antibodies

Treatment with broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) has recently proven effective against HIV-1 infections in humanized mice, non-human primates, and humans. For optimal treatment, susceptibility of the patient’s viral strains to a particular bNAb has to be ensured. Since no computational approaches are so far available, susceptibility can only be tested in expensive and time-consuming neutralization experiments. Here, we present well-performing computational models (AUC up to 0.84) that can predict HIV-1 resistance to bNAbs given the envelope sequence of the virus. Having learnt important binding sites of the bNAbs from the envelope sequence, the models are also biologically meaningful and useful for epitope recognition. Additional to the prediction result, we provide a motif logo that displays the contribution of the pivotal residues of the test sequence to the prediction. As our prediction models are based on non-linear kernels, we introduce a new visualization technique to improve the model interpretability. Moreover, we confirmed previous experimental findings that there is a trend towards antibody resistance for the subtype B population of the virus. While previous experiments considered rather small and selected cohorts, we were able to show a similar trend for the global HIV-1 population comprising all major subtypes by predicting the neutralization sensitivity for around 36,000 HIV-1 sequences- a scale-up which is very difficult to achieve in an experimental setting

Freiburg RNA Tools: a web server integrating IntaRNA, ExpaRNA and LocARNA

The Freiburg RNA tools web server integrates three tools for the advanced analysis of RNA in a common web-based user interface. The tools IntaRNA, ExpaRNA and LocARNA support the prediction of RNA–RNA interaction, exact RNA matching and alignment of RNA, respectively. The Freiburg RNA tools web server and the software packages of the stand-alone tools are freely accessible at http://rna.informatik.uni-freiburg.de

Comparing Fragmentation Trees from Electron Impact Mass Spectra with Annotated Fragmentation Pathways

Electron impact ionization (EI) is the most common form of ionization for GC-MS analysis of small molecules. This ionization method results in a mass spectrum not necessarily containing the molecular ion peak. The fragmentation of small compounds during EI is well understood, but manual interpretation of mass spectra is tedious and time-consuming. Methods for automated analysis are highly sought, but currently limited to database searching and rule-based approaches. With the computation of hypothetical fragmentation trees from high mass GC-MS data the high-throughput interpretation of such spectra may become feasible. We compare these trees with annotated fragmentation pathways. We find that fragmentation trees explain the origin of the ions found in the mass spectra in accordance to the literature. No peak is annotated with an incorrect fragment formula and 78.7% of the fragmentation processes are correctly reconstructed

Draft Genome Sequences of 12 Monophasic Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica Serotype Typhimurium 1,4,[5], 12:i:- Strains Isolated from Wild Griffon Vultures in Eastern Spain

[EN] Monophasic Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium is one of the most common zoonotic pathogens. Salmonella species reside in a wide variety of hosts, including wild animals. Thus, we report here the genome sequences of 12 monophasic S. Typhimurium strains isolated from healthy wild vultures to gain better insight into their epidemiology and host-pathogen interactions.This work was funded by Generalitat Valenciana (Government of Valencia) and by CEU-UCH (Consolidacion de Indicadores INDI15/16, INDI16/20, and INDI17/25).Marín, C.; D'auria, G.; Martínez-Priego, L.; Marco-Jiménez, F. (2019). Draft Genome Sequences of 12 Monophasic Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica Serotype Typhimurium 1,4,[5], 12:i:- Strains Isolated from Wild Griffon Vultures in Eastern Spain. Microbiology Resource Announcements. 8(42):1-3. https://doi.org/10.1128/MRA.00570-19S13842Blanco, G. (2018). Supplementary feeding as a source of multiresistantSalmonellain endangered Egyptian vultures. Transboundary and Emerging Diseases, 65(3), 806-816. doi:10.1111/tbed.12806Krawiec, M., Kuczkowski, M., Kruszewicz, A., & Wieliczko, A. (2015). Prevalence and genetic characteristics of Salmonella in free-living birds in Poland. BMC Veterinary Research, 11(1), 15. doi:10.1186/s12917-015-0332-xMolina-López, R. A., Vidal, A., Obón, E., Martín, M., & Darwich, L. (2015). Multidrug-resistantSalmonella entericaSerovar Typhimurium Monophasic Variant 4,12:i:- Isolated from Asymptomatic Wildlife in a Catalonian Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, Spain. Journal of Wildlife Diseases, 51(3), 759-763. doi:10.7589/2015-01-019Marin, C., Torres, C., Marco-Jiménez, F., Cerdà-Cuéllar, M., Sevilla, S., Ayats, T., & Vega, S. (2018). Supplementary feeding stations for conservation of vultures could be an important source of monophasic Salmonella typhimurium 1,4,[5],12:i:-. Science of The Total Environment, 636, 449-455. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.04.310Marin, C., Palomeque, M.-D., Marco-Jiménez, F., & Vega, S. (2014). Wild Griffon Vultures (Gyps fulvus) as a Source of Salmonella and Campylobacter in Eastern Spain. PLoS ONE, 9(4), e94191. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094191Schmieder, R., & Edwards, R. (2011). Quality control and preprocessing of metagenomic datasets. Bioinformatics, 27(6), 863-864. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btr026Bolger, A. M., Lohse, M., & Usadel, B. (2014). Trimmomatic: a flexible trimmer for Illumina sequence data. Bioinformatics, 30(15), 2114-2120. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu170Li, H., Handsaker, B., Wysoker, A., Fennell, T., Ruan, J., … Homer, N. (2009). The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools. Bioinformatics, 25(16), 2078-2079. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp352Quinlan, A. R., & Hall, I. M. (2010). BEDTools: a flexible suite of utilities for comparing genomic features. Bioinformatics, 26(6), 841-842. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btq033Seemann, T. (2014). Prokka: rapid prokaryotic genome annotation. Bioinformatics, 30(14), 2068-2069. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu153Lima, T., Auchincloss, A. H., Coudert, E., Keller, G., Michoud, K., Rivoire, C., … Bairoch, A. (2009). HAMAP: a database of completely sequenced microbial proteome sets and manually curated microbial protein families in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot. Nucleic Acids Research, 37(Database), D471-D478. doi:10.1093/nar/gkn661Finn, R. D., Coggill, P., Eberhardt, R. Y., Eddy, S. R., Mistry, J., Mitchell, A. L., … Bateman, A. (2015). The Pfam protein families database: towards a more sustainable future. Nucleic Acids Research, 44(D1), D279-D285. doi:10.1093/nar/gkv1344Seribelli, A. A., Frazão, M. R., Gonzales, J. C., Cao, G., Leon, M. S., Kich, J. D., … Falcão, J. P. (2018). Draft Genome Sequences of 20 Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica Serovar Typhimurium Strains Isolated from Swine in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Genome Announcements, 6(16), e00232-18. doi:10.1128/genomea.00232-1

Draft genome sequence of FT9, a novel Bacillus cereus strain isolated from a Brazilian Thermal Spring

O presente trabalho trata das bactérias formadoras da esporos, incluindo um patógeno presente na intoxicação alimentar e sistêmica e em infecções locais, trazendo uma sequência do genoma FT9