scholarly journals On estimating evolutionary probabilities of population variants

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravi Patel ◽  
Sudhir Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Protein Sequence ◽  
Neutral Theory ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Missense Variant ◽  
Original Method ◽  
Divergence Times ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Web Resource

AbstractBackgroundThe evolutionary probability (EP) of an allele in a DNA or protein sequence predicts evolutionarily permissible (ePerm; EP ≥ 0.05) and forbidden (eForb; EP < 0.05) variants. EP of an allele represents an independent evolutionary expectation of observing an allele in a population based solely on the long-term substitution patterns captured in a multiple sequence alignment. In the neutral theory, EP and population frequencies can be compared to identify neutral and non-neutral alleles. This approach has been used to discover candidate adaptive polymorphisms in humans, which are eForbs segregating with high frequencies. The original method to compute EP requires the evolutionary relationships and divergence times of species in the sequence alignment (a timetree), which are not known with certainty for most datasets. This requirement impedes a general use of the original EP formulation. Here, we present an approach in which the phylogeny and times are inferred from the sequence alignment itself prior to the EP calculation. We evaluate if the modified EP approach produces results that are similar to those from the original method.ResultsWe compared EP estimates from the original and the modified approaches by using more than 18,000 protein sequence alignments containing orthologous sequences from 46 vertebrate species. For the original EP calculations, we used species relationships from UCSC and divergence times from TimeTree web resource, and the resulting EP estimates were considered to be the ground truth. We found that the modified approaches produced reasonable EP estimates for HGMD disease missense variant and 1000 Genomes Project missense variant datasets. Our results showed that reliable estimates of EP can be obtained without a priori knowledge of the sequence phylogeny and divergence times. We also found that, in order to obtain robust EP estimates, it is important to assemble a dataset with many sequences, sampling from a diversity of species groups.ConclusionWe conclude that the modified EP approach will be generally applicable for alignments and enable the detection of potentially neutral, deleterious, and adaptive alleles in populations.

scholarly journals Molecular homology and multiple-sequence alignment: an analysis of concepts and practice

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 46 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Morrison ◽  
Matthew J. Morgan ◽  
Scot A. Kelchner
Keyword(s):  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Multiple Sequence Alignment ◽  
Molecular Data ◽  
Simple Relationship ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Molecular Change ◽  
Nucleotide Homology ◽  
Tree Building ◽  
Molecular Homology

Sequence alignment is just as much a part of phylogenetics as is tree building, although it is often viewed solely as a necessary tool to construct trees. However, alignment for the purpose of phylogenetic inference is primarily about homology, as it is the procedure that expresses homology relationships among the characters, rather than the historical relationships of the taxa. Molecular homology is rather vaguely defined and understood, despite its importance in the molecular age. Indeed, homology has rarely been evaluated with respect to nucleotide sequence alignments, in spite of the fact that nucleotides are the only data that directly represent genotype. All other molecular data represent phenotype, just as do morphology and anatomy. Thus, efforts to improve sequence alignment for phylogenetic purposes should involve a more refined use of the homology concept at a molecular level. To this end, we present examples of molecular-data levels at which homology might be considered, and arrange them in a hierarchy. The concept that we propose has many levels, which link directly to the developmental and morphological components of homology. Of note, there is no simple relationship between gene homology and nucleotide homology. We also propose terminology with which to better describe and discuss molecular homology at these levels. Our over-arching conceptual framework is then used to shed light on the multitude of automated procedures that have been created for multiple-sequence alignment. Sequence alignment needs to be based on aligning homologous nucleotides, without necessary reference to homology at any other level of the hierarchy. In particular, inference of nucleotide homology involves deriving a plausible scenario for molecular change among the set of sequences. Our clarifications should allow the development of a procedure that specifically addresses homology, which is required when performing alignment for phylogenetic purposes, but which does not yet exist.

scholarly journals Benchmarking Statistical Multiple Sequence Alignment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nute ◽  
Ehsan Saleh ◽  
Tandy Warnow
Keyword(s):  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Multiple Sequence Alignment ◽  
Structural Alignment ◽  
Estimation Method ◽  
Simulated Data ◽  
Protein Sequences ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Simulated Data Sets

AbstractThe estimation of multiple sequence alignments of protein sequences is a basic step in many bioinformatics pipelines, including protein structure prediction, protein family identification, and phylogeny estimation. Statistical co-estimation of alignments and trees under stochastic models of sequence evolution has long been considered the most rigorous technique for estimating alignments and trees, but little is known about the accuracy of such methods on biological benchmarks. We report the results of an extensive study evaluating the most popular protein alignment methods as well as the statistical co-estimation method BAli-Phy on 1192 protein data sets from established benchmarks as well as on 120 simulated data sets. Our study (which used more than 230 CPU years for the BAli-Phy analyses alone) shows that BAli-Phy is dramatically more accurate than the other alignment methods on the simulated data sets, but is among the least accurate on the biological benchmarks. There are several potential causes for this discordance, including model misspecification, errors in the reference alignments, and conflicts between structural alignment and evolutionary alignments; future research is needed to understand the most likely explanation for our observations. multiple sequence alignment, BAli-Phy, protein sequences, structural alignment, homology

scholarly journals HPMV: Human protein mutation viewer — relating sequence mutations to protein sequence architecture and function changes

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (05) ◽  
pp. 1550028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Westley Arthur Sherman ◽  
Durga Bhavani Kuchibhatla ◽  
Vachiranee Limviphuvadh ◽  
Sebastian Maurer-Stroh ◽  
Birgit Eisenhaber ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Protein Sequence ◽  
Genetic Disorders ◽  
Human Protein ◽  
Post Translational Modification ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Sequence Architecture ◽  
Protein Mutation ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
Protein Mutations

Next-generation sequencing advances are rapidly expanding the number of human mutations to be analyzed for causative roles in genetic disorders. Our Human Protein Mutation Viewer (HPMV) is intended to explore the biomolecular mechanistic significance of non-synonymous human mutations in protein-coding genomic regions. The tool helps to assess whether protein mutations affect the occurrence of sequence-architectural features (globular domains, targeting signals, post-translational modification sites, etc.). As input, HPMV accepts protein mutations — as UniProt accessions with mutations (e.g. HGVS nomenclature), genome coordinates, or FASTA sequences. As output, HPMV provides an interactive cartoon showing the mutations in relation to elements of the sequence architecture. A large variety of protein sequence architectural features were selected for their particular relevance to mutation interpretation. Clicking a sequence feature in the cartoon expands a tree view of additional information including multiple sequence alignments of conserved domains and a simple 3D viewer mapping the mutation to known PDB structures, if available. The cartoon is also correlated with a multiple sequence alignment of similar sequences from other organisms. In cases where a mutation is likely to have a straightforward interpretation (e.g. a point mutation disrupting a well-understood targeting signal), this interpretation is suggested. The interactive cartoon can be downloaded as standalone viewer in Java jar format to be saved and viewed later with only a standard Java runtime environment. The HPMV website is: http://hpmv.bii.a-star.edu.sg/ .

scholarly journals CAUSA 2.0: accurate and consistent evolutionary analysis of proteins using codon and amino acid unified sequence alignments

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaolong Wang ◽  
Chao Yang
Keyword(s):  
Amino Acid ◽  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Novel Mutation ◽  
Genetic Diseases ◽  
Amino Acid Level ◽  
Evolutionary Analysis ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Coding Sequences ◽  
Functional Changes

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is widely used to reveal structural and functional changes leading to genetic differences among species, and to reconstruct evolutionary histories of related genes, proteins and genomes. Traditionally, proteins and their coding sequences (CDSs) are aligned and analyzed separately, but often drastically different conclusions were drawn on a same set of data. Here we present a new alignment strategy, Codon and Amino Acid Unified Sequence Alignment (CAUSA) 2.0, which aligns proteins and their coding sequences simultaneously. CAUSA 2.0 optimizes the alignment of CDSs at both codon and amino acid level efficiently. Theoretical analysis showed that CAUSA 2.0 enhances the entropy information content of MSA. Empirical data analysis demonstrated that CAUSA 2.0 is more accurate and consistent than nucleotide, protein or codon level alignments. CAUSA 2.0 locates in-frame indels more accurately, makes the alignment of coding sequences biologically more significant, and reveals several novel mutation mechanisms that relate to some genetic diseases. CAUSA 2.0 is available in website www.DNAPlusPro.com .

scholarly journals MSAC: Compression of multiple sequence alignment files

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Deorowicz ◽  
Joanna Walczyszyn ◽  
Agnieszka Debudaj-Grabysz
Keyword(s):  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Compression Ratio ◽  
Multiple Sequence Alignment ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Multiple Sequence Alignments ◽  
Link Type ◽  
Bioinformatics Databases ◽  
Supplementary Material ◽  
Burrows Wheeler Transform

AbstractMotivationBioinformatics databases grow rapidly and achieve values hardly to imagine a decade ago. Among numerous bioinformatics processes generating hundreds of GB is multiple sequence alignments of protein families. Its largest database, i.e., Pfam, consumes 40–230 GB, depending of the variant. Storage and transfer of such massive data has become a challenge.ResultsWe propose a novel compression algorithm, MSAC (Multiple Sequence Alignment Compressor), designed especially for aligned data. It is based on a generalisation of the positional Burrows–Wheeler transform for non-binary alphabets. MSAC handles FASTA, as well as Stockholm files. It offers up to six times better compression ratio than other commonly used compressors, i.e., gzip. Performed experiments resulted in an analysis of the influence of a protein family size on the compression ratio.AvailabilityMSAC is available for free at https://github.com/refresh-bio/msac and http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/REFRESH/[email protected] materialSupplementary data are available at the publisher Web site.

scholarly journals SequenceBouncer: A method to remove outlier entries from a multiple sequence alignment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cory D. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Nucleic Acid ◽  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Multiple Sequence Alignment ◽  
Phylogenetic Analyses ◽  
Protein Sequences ◽  
Mitochondrial Genomes ◽  
Dna Barcodes ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Multiple Sequence Alignments

AbstractPhylogenetic analyses can take advantage of multiple sequence alignments as input. These alignments typically consist of homologous nucleic acid or protein sequences, and the inclusion of outlier or aberrant sequences can compromise downstream analyses. Here, I describe a program, SequenceBouncer, that uses the Shannon entropy values of alignment columns to identify outlier alignment sequences in a manner responsive to overall alignment context. I demonstrate the utility of this software using alignments of available mammalian mitochondrial genomes, bird cytochrome c oxidase-derived DNA barcodes, and COVID-19 sequences.

scholarly journals A novel sequence alignment algorithm based on deep learning of the protein folding code

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mu Gao ◽  
Jeffrey Skolnick
Keyword(s):  
Protein Folding ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Protein Sequence ◽  
Protein Structures ◽  
Supplementary Information ◽  
Alignment Algorithm ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Alignment Algorithms ◽  
Structural Alignments

Abstract Motivation From evolutionary interference, function annotation to structural prediction, protein sequence comparison has provided crucial biological insights. While many sequence alignment algorithms have been developed, existing approaches often cannot detect hidden structural relationships in the ‘twilight zone’ of low sequence identity. To address this critical problem, we introduce a computational algorithm that performs protein Sequence Alignments from deep-Learning of Structural Alignments (SAdLSA, silent ‘d’). The key idea is to implicitly learn the protein folding code from many thousands of structural alignments using experimentally determined protein structures. Results To demonstrate that the folding code was learned, we first show that SAdLSA trained on pure α-helical proteins successfully recognizes pairs of structurally related pure β-sheet protein domains. Subsequent training and benchmarking on larger, highly challenging datasets show significant improvement over established approaches. For challenging cases, SAdLSA is ∼150% better than HHsearch for generating pairwise alignments and ∼50% better for identifying the proteins with the best alignments in a sequence library. The time complexity of SAdLSA is O(N) thanks to GPU acceleration. Availability and implementation Datasets and source codes of SAdLSA are available free of charge for academic users at http://sites.gatech.edu/cssb/sadlsa/. Contact [email protected] or [email protected] Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

scholarly journals Multiple Sequence Alignment Using a Genetic Algorithm and GLOCSA

2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Edgar D. Arenas-Díaz ◽  
Helga Ochoterena ◽  
Katya Rodríguez-Vázquez
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Algorithm ◽  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Scoring Function ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Indirect Measures ◽  
Multiple Alignments ◽  
Global Criterion ◽  
Minimum Number ◽  
Single Insertion

Algorithms that minimize putative synapomorphy in an alignment cannot be directly implemented since trivial cases with concatenated sequences would be selected because they would imply a minimum number of events to be explained (e.g., a single insertion/deletion would be required to explain divergence among two sequences). Therefore, indirect measures to approach parsimony need to be implemented. In this paper, we thoroughly present a Global Criterion for Sequence Alignment (GLOCSA) that uses a scoring function to globally rate multiple alignments aiming to produce matrices that minimize the number of putative synapomorphies. We also present a Genetic Algorithm that uses GLOCSA as the objective function to produce sequence alignments refining alignments previously generated by additional existing alignment tools (we recommend MUSCLE). We show that in the example cases our GLOCSA-guided Genetic Algorithm (GGGA) does improve the GLOCSA values, resulting in alignments that imply less putative synapomorphies.

scholarly journals An Evaluation of Phylogenetic Workflows in Viral Molecular Epidemiology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Young ◽  
Sarah Meng ◽  
Niema Moshiri
Keyword(s):  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Multiple Sequence Alignment ◽  
Sequence Data ◽  
Phylogenetic Inference ◽  
The Other ◽  
Computational Techniques ◽  
Viral Sequence ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Branch Lengths

AbstractThe use of computational techniques to analyze viral sequence data and ultimately inform public health intervention has become increasingly common in the realm of epidemiology. These methods typically attempt to make epidemiological inferences based on multiple sequence alignments and phylogenies estimated from the raw sequence data. Like all estimation techniques, multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic inference tools are error-prone, and the impacts of such imperfections on downstream epidemiological inferences are poorly understood. To address this, we executed multiple commonly-used workflows for conducting viral phylogenetic analyses on simulated viral sequence data modeling HIV, HCV, and Ebola, and we computed multiple methods of accuracy motivated by transmission clustering techniques. For multiple sequence alignment, MAFFT consistently outperformed MUSCLE and Clustal Omega in both accuracy and runtime. For phylogenetic inference, FastTree 2, IQ-TREE, RAxML-NG, and PhyML had similar topological accuracies, but branch lengths and pairwise distances were consistently most accurate in phylogenies inferred by RAxML-NG. However, FastTree 2 was orders of magnitude faster than the other tools, and when the other tools were used to optimize branch lengths along a fixed topology provided by FastTree 2 (i.e., no tree search), the resulting phylogenies had accuracies that were indistinguishable from their original counterparts, but with a fraction of the runtime. Our results indicate that an ideal workflow for viral phylogenetic inference is to (1) use MAFFT to perform MSA, (2) use FastTree 2 under the GTR model with discrete gamma-distributed site-rate heterogeneity to quickly obtain a reasonable tree topology, and (3) use RAxML-NG to optimize branch lengths along the fixed FastTree 2 topology.

scholarly journals CAUSA 2.0: accurate and consistent evolutionary analysis of proteins using codon and amino acid unified sequence alignments

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaolong Wang ◽  
Chao Yang
Keyword(s):  
Amino Acid ◽  
Sequence Alignment ◽  
Novel Mutation ◽  
Genetic Diseases ◽  
Amino Acid Level ◽  
Evolutionary Analysis ◽  
Sequence Alignments ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Coding Sequences ◽  
Functional Changes

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is widely used to reveal structural and functional changes leading to genetic differences among species, and to reconstruct evolutionary histories of related genes, proteins and genomes. Traditionally, proteins and their coding sequences (CDSs) are aligned and analyzed separately, but often drastically different conclusions were drawn on a same set of data. Here we present a new alignment strategy, Codon and Amino Acid Unified Sequence Alignment (CAUSA) 2.0, which aligns proteins and their coding sequences simultaneously. CAUSA 2.0 optimizes the alignment of CDSs at both codon and amino acid level efficiently. Theoretical analysis showed that CAUSA 2.0 enhances the entropy information content of MSA. Empirical data analysis demonstrated that CAUSA 2.0 is more accurate and consistent than nucleotide, protein or codon level alignments. CAUSA 2.0 locates in-frame indels more accurately, makes the alignment of coding sequences biologically more significant, and reveals several novel mutation mechanisms that relate to some genetic diseases. CAUSA 2.0 is available in website www.DNAPlusPro.com .

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