Syncope and the drive towards minimization in Colloquial Bamana

Data from two varieties of Bamana, a Mande language spoken in West Africa, illustrate that permissible syllable shapes vary between the two types. A comparison of Classic Bamana spoken in Segou, Mali and that spoken by a younger cohort of individuals in the Malian capital, Bamako, reveals that the latter variety is synchronically developing complex CCV and CVC syllable shapes, whereas the classical variety permits only maximal CV syllables. We posit that the development of these syllable shapes represents an overall drive towards word minimization in this variety of the language. This study formalizes minimization in Colloquial Bamana in an optimality theoretic framework and illustrates the support that these developing processes in Bamana provide for the Split Margin Approach to the syllable, developed in Baertsch (2002). Preferential deletion patterns, the role of phonotactics in driving these patterns, and other processes interacting with and/or preventing syncope from occurring are also explored.National Institutes of Health DC00433, RR7031K, DC00076, DC001694 (PI: Gierut

The UCSC Genome Browser Database: 2008 update

The University of California, Santa Cruz, Genome Browser Database (GBD) provides integrated sequence and annotation data for a large collection of vertebrate and model organism genomes. Seventeen new assemblies have been added to the database in the past year, for a total coverage of 19 vertebrate and 21 invertebrate species as of September 2007. For each assembly, the GBD contains a collection of annotation data aligned to the genomic sequence. Highlights of this year's additions include a 28-species human-based vertebrate conservation annotation, an enhanced UCSC Genes set, and more human variation, MGC, and ENCODE data. The database is optimized for fast interactive performance with a set of web-based tools that may be used to view, manipulate, filter and download the annotation data. New toolset features include the Genome Graphs tool for displaying genome-wide data sets, session saving and sharing, better custom track management, expanded Genome Browser configuration options and a Genome Browser wiki site. The downloadable GBD data, the companion Genome Browser toolset and links to documentation and related information can be found at: http://genome.ucsc.ed

Forces Shaping the Fastest Evolving Regions in the Human Genome

Comparative genomics allow us to search the human genome for segments that were extensively changed in the last ~5 million years since divergence from our common ancestor with chimpanzee, but are highly conserved in other species and thus are likely to be functional. We found 202 genomic elements that are highly conserved in vertebrates but show evidence of significantly accelerated substitution rates in human. These are mostly in non-coding DNA, often near genes associated with transcription and DNA binding. Resequencing confirmed that the five most accelerated elements are dramatically changed in human but not in other primates, with seven times more substitutions in human than in chimp. The accelerated elements, and in particular the top five, show a strong bias for adenine and thymine to guanine and cytosine nucleotide changes and are disproportionately located in high recombination and high guanine and cytosine content environments near telomeres, suggesting either biased gene conversion or isochore selection. In addition, there is some evidence of directional selection in the regions containing the two most accelerated regions. A combination of evolutionary forces has contributed to accelerated evolution of the fastest evolving elements in the human genome

The UCSC Genome Browser Database: update 2006

The University of California Santa Cruz Genome Browser Database (GBD) contains sequence and annotation data for the genomes of about a dozen vertebrate species and several major model organisms. Genome annotations typically include assembly data, sequence composition, genes and gene predictions, mRNA and expressed sequence tag evidence, comparative genomics, regulation, expression and variation data. The database is optimized to support fast interactive performance with web tools that provide powerful visualization and querying capabilities for mining the data. The Genome Browser displays a wide variety of annotations at all scales from single nucleotide level up to a full chromosome. The Table Browser provides direct access to the database tables and sequence data, enabling complex queries on genome-wide datasets. The Proteome Browser graphically displays protein properties. The Gene Sorter allows filtering and comparison of genes by several metrics including expression data and several gene properties. BLAT and In Silico PCR search for sequences in entire genomes in seconds. These tools are highly integrated and provide many hyperlinks to other databases and websites. The GBD, browsing tools, downloadable data files and links to documentation and other information can be found at

Tracking and coordinating an international curation effort for the CCDS Project

The Consensus Coding Sequence (CCDS) collaboration involves curators at multiple centers with a goal of producing a conservative set of high quality, protein-coding region annotations for the human and mouse reference genome assemblies. The CCDS data set reflects a ‘gold standard’ definition of best supported protein annotations, and corresponding genes, which pass a standard series of quality assurance checks and are supported by manual curation. This data set supports use of genome annotation information by human and mouse researchers for effective experimental design, analysis and interpretation. The CCDS project consists of analysis of automated whole-genome annotation builds to identify identical CDS annotations, quality assurance testing and manual curation support. Identical CDS annotations are tracked with a CCDS identifier (ID) and any future change to the annotated CDS structure must be agreed upon by the collaborating members. CCDS curation guidelines were developed to address some aspects of curation in order to improve initial annotation consistency and to reduce time spent in discussing proposed annotation updates. Here, we present the current status of the CCDS database and details on our procedures to track and coordinate our efforts. We also present the relevant background and reasoning behind the curation standards that we have developed for CCDS database treatment of transcripts that are nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) candidates, for transcripts containing upstream open reading frames, for identifying the most likely translation start codons and for the annotation of readthrough transcripts. Examples are provided to illustrate the application of these guidelines

The UCSC Genome Browser Database: 2008 update

The University of California, Santa Cruz, Genome Browser Database (GBD) provides integrated sequence and annotation data for a large collection of vertebrate and model organism genomes. Seventeen new assemblies have been added to the database in the past year, for a total coverage of 19 vertebrate and 21 invertebrate species as of September 2007. For each assembly, the GBD contains a collection of annotation data aligned to the genomic sequence. Highlights of this year's additions include a 28-species human-based vertebrate conservation annotation, an enhanced UCSC Genes set, and more human variation, MGC, and ENCODE data. The database is optimized for fast interactive performance with a set of web-based tools that may be used to view, manipulate, filter and download the annotation data. New toolset features include the Genome Graphs tool for displaying genome-wide data sets, session saving and sharing, better custom track management, expanded Genome Browser configuration options and a Genome Browser wiki site. The downloadable GBD data, the companion Genome Browser toolset and links to documentation and related information can be found at: http://genome.ucsc.edu/

The Consensus Coding Sequence (Ccds) Project: Identifying a Common Protein-Coding Gene Set for the Human and Mouse Genomes

Effective use of the human and mouse genomes requires reliable identification of genes and their products. Although multiple public resources provide annotation, different methods are used that can result in similar but not identical representation of genes, transcripts, and proteins. The collaborative consensus coding sequence (CCDS) project tracks identical protein annotations on the reference mouse and human genomes with a stable identifier (CCDS ID), and ensures that they are consistently represented on the NCBI, Ensembl, and UCSC Genome Browsers. Importantly, the project coordinates on manually reviewing inconsistent protein annotations between sites, as well as annotations for which new evidence suggests a revision is needed, to progressively converge on a complete protein-coding set for the human and mouse reference genomes, while maintaining a high standard of reliability and biological accuracy. To date, the project has identified 20,159 human and 17,707 mouse consensus coding regions from 17,052 human and 16,893 mouse genes. Three evaluation methods indicate that the entries in the CCDS set are highly likely to represent real proteins, more so than annotations from contributing groups not included in CCDS. The CCDS database thus centralizes the function of identifying well-supported, identically-annotated, protein-coding regions.National Human Genome Research Institute (U.S.) (Grant number 1U54HG004555-01)Wellcome Trust (London, England) (Grant number WT062023)Wellcome Trust (London, England) (Grant number WT077198

The completion of the Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC)

Since its start, the Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC) has sought to provide at least one full-protein-coding sequence cDNA clone for every human and mouse gene with a RefSeq transcript, and at least 6200 rat genes. The MGC cloning effort initially relied on random expressed sequence tag screening of cDNA libraries. Here, we summarize our recent progress using directed RT-PCR cloning and DNA synthesis. The MGC now contains clones with the entire protein-coding sequence for 92% of human and 89% of mouse genes with curated RefSeq (NM-accession) transcripts, and for 97% of human and 96% of mouse genes with curated RefSeq transcripts that have one or more PubMed publications, in addition to clones for more than 6300 rat genes. These high-quality MGC clones and their sequences are accessible without restriction to researchers worldwide

Identification and Classification of Conserved RNA Secondary Structures in the Human Genome

The discoveries of microRNAs and riboswitches, among others, have shown functional RNAs to be biologically more important and genomically more prevalent than previously anticipated. We have developed a general comparative genomics method based on phylogenetic stochastic context-free grammars for identifying functional RNAs encoded in the human genome and used it to survey an eight-way genome-wide alignment of the human, chimpanzee, mouse, rat, dog, chicken, zebra-fish, and puffer-fish genomes for deeply conserved functional RNAs. At a loose threshold for acceptance, this search resulted in a set of 48,479 candidate RNA structures. This screen finds a large number of known functional RNAs, including 195 miRNAs, 62 histone 3′UTR stem loops, and various types of known genetic recoding elements. Among the highest-scoring new predictions are 169 new miRNA candidates, as well as new candidate selenocysteine insertion sites, RNA editing hairpins, RNAs involved in transcript auto regulation, and many folds that form singletons or small functional RNA families of completely unknown function. While the rate of false positives in the overall set is difficult to estimate and is likely to be substantial, the results nevertheless provide evidence for many new human functional RNAs and present specific predictions to facilitate their further characterization

Prediction of overall survival for patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer : development of a prognostic model through a crowdsourced challenge with open clinical trial data

Background Improvements to prognostic models in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer have the potential to augment clinical trial design and guide treatment strategies. In partnership with Project Data Sphere, a not-for-profit initiative allowing data from cancer clinical trials to be shared broadly with researchers, we designed an open-data, crowdsourced, DREAM (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) challenge to not only identify a better prognostic model for prediction of survival in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer but also engage a community of international data scientists to study this disease. Methods Data from the comparator arms of four phase 3 clinical trials in first-line metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer were obtained from Project Data Sphere, comprising 476 patients treated with docetaxel and prednisone from the ASCENT2 trial, 526 patients treated with docetaxel, prednisone, and placebo in the MAINSAIL trial, 598 patients treated with docetaxel, prednisone or prednisolone, and placebo in the VENICE trial, and 470 patients treated with docetaxel and placebo in the ENTHUSE 33 trial. Datasets consisting of more than 150 clinical variables were curated centrally, including demographics, laboratory values, medical history, lesion sites, and previous treatments. Data from ASCENT2, MAINSAIL, and VENICE were released publicly to be used as training data to predict the outcome of interest-namely, overall survival. Clinical data were also released for ENTHUSE 33, but data for outcome variables (overall survival and event status) were hidden from the challenge participants so that ENTHUSE 33 could be used for independent validation. Methods were evaluated using the integrated time-dependent area under the curve (iAUC). The reference model, based on eight clinical variables and a penalised Cox proportional-hazards model, was used to compare method performance. Further validation was done using data from a fifth trial-ENTHUSE M1-in which 266 patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer were treated with placebo alone. Findings 50 independent methods were developed to predict overall survival and were evaluated through the DREAM challenge. The top performer was based on an ensemble of penalised Cox regression models (ePCR), which uniquely identified predictive interaction effects with immune biomarkers and markers of hepatic and renal function. Overall, ePCR outperformed all other methods (iAUC 0.791; Bayes factor >5) and surpassed the reference model (iAUC 0.743; Bayes factor >20). Both the ePCR model and reference models stratified patients in the ENTHUSE 33 trial into high-risk and low-risk groups with significantly different overall survival (ePCR: hazard ratio 3.32, 95% CI 2.39-4.62, p Interpretation Novel prognostic factors were delineated, and the assessment of 50 methods developed by independent international teams establishes a benchmark for development of methods in the future. The results of this effort show that data-sharing, when combined with a crowdsourced challenge, is a robust and powerful framework to develop new prognostic models in advanced prostate cancer.Peer reviewe