1,721,093 research outputs found

    EdiPy: A resource to simulate the evolution of plant mitochondrial genes under the RNA editing

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    EdiPy is an online resource appropriately designed to simulate the evolution of plant mitochondrial genes in a biologically realistic fashion. EdiPy takes into account the presence of sites subjected to RNA editing and provides multiple artificial alignments corresponding to both genomic and cDNA sequences. Each artificial data set can successively be submitted to main and widespread evolutionary and phylogenetic software packages such as PAUP, Phyml, PAML and Phylip. ' As an online bioinformatic resource, EdiPy is available at the following web page: http://biologia.unical.it/py_script/index.html. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

    REDItools: high-throughput RNA editing detection made easy

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    SUMMARY: The reliable detection of RNA editing sites from massive sequencing data remains challenging and, although several methodologies have been proposed, no computational tools have been released to date. Here, we introduce REDItools a suite of python scripts to perform high-throughput investigation of RNA editing using next-generation sequencing data. Availability and implementation: REDItools are in python programming language and freely available at http://code.google.com/p/reditools/. CONTACT: [email protected] or [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

    Is plant mitochondrial RNA editing a source of phylogenetic incongruence? An answer from <it>in silico</it> and <it>in vivo</it> data sets

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    Abstract Background In plant mitochondria, the post-transcriptional RNA editing process converts C to U at a number of specific sites of the mRNA sequence and usually restores phylogenetically conserved codons and the encoded amino acid residues. Sites undergoing RNA editing evolve at a higher rate than sites not modified by the process. As a result, editing sites strongly affect the evolution of plant mitochondrial genomes, representing an important source of sequence variability and potentially informative characters. To date no clear and convincing evidence has established whether or not editing sites really affect the topology of reconstructed phylogenetic trees. For this reason, we investigated here the effect of RNA editing on the tree building process of twenty different plant mitochondrial gene sequences and by means of computer simulations. Results Based on our simulation study we suggest that the editing ‘noise’ in tree topology inference is mainly manifested at the cDNA level. In particular, editing sites tend to confuse tree topologies when artificial genomic and cDNA sequences are generated shorter than 500 bp and with an editing percentage higher than 5.0%. Similar results have been also obtained with genuine plant mitochondrial genes. In this latter instance, indeed, the topology incongruence increases when the editing percentage goes up from about 3.0 to 14.0%. However, when the average gene length is higher than 1,000 bp (rps3, matR and atp1) no differences in the comparison between inferred genomic and cDNA topologies could be detected. Conclusions Our findings by the here reported in silico and in vivo computer simulation system seem to strongly suggest that editing sites contribute in the generation of misleading phylogenetic trees if the analyzed mitochondrial gene sequence is highly edited (higher than 3.0%) and reduced in length (shorter than 500 bp). In the current lack of direct experimental evidence the results presented here encourage, thus, the use of genomic mitochondrial rather than cDNA sequences for reconstructing phylogenetic events in land plants.</p

    Profiling RNA Editing in Single Cells

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    : RNA editing is a widespread molecular phenomenon occurring in a variety of organisms. In humans, it mainly involves the deamination of adenosine to inosine (A-to-I) in double-stranded RNAs by ADAR enzymes. A-to-I RNA editing has been investigated in different tissues as well as in diverse experimental and pathological conditions. By contrast, its biological role in single cells has not been explored in depth. Recent methodologies for cell sorting in combination with deep sequencing technologies have enabled the study of eukaryotic transcriptomes at single cell resolution, paving the way to the profiling of their epitranscriptomic dynamics.Here we describe a step-by-step protocol to detect and characterize A-to-I events occurring in publicly available single-cell RNAseq experiments from human alpha and beta pancreatic cells

    Striking differences in RNA editing requirements to express the rps4 gene in magnolia and sunflower mitochondria

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    The ribosomal protein S4 gene (rps4) has been identified as a single copy sequence in the mitochondrial genomes of two distant higher plants, Magnolia and Helianthus. Sequence analysis revealed that the rps4 genes present in the magnolia and sunflower mitochondrial genomes encode S4 polypeptides of 352 and 331 amino acids, respectively, longer than their counterparts in liverwort and bacteria. Expression of the rps4 genes in the investigated higher plant mitochondria was confirmed by Western blot analysis. In Helianthus, one of two short nucleotide insertions at the 3'-end introduces in the coding region a premature termination codon. Northern hybridizations and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction analysis demonstrated that the monocistronic RNA transcripts generated from the rps4 locus in Magnolia and Helianthus mitochondria are modified by RNA editing at 28 and 13 positions, respectively. Although evolutionarily conserved, RNA editing requirements of the rps4 appear more extensive in Magnolia than in Helianthus and in the other higher plants so far investigated. Furthermore, our analysis also suggests that selection of editing sites is RNA sequence-specific in a duplicated sequence context. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
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