scholarly journals The Plant-Associated Microbe Gene Ontology (PAMGO) Consortium: community development of new Gene Ontology terms describing biological processes involved in microbe-host interactions

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. S1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trudy Torto-Alalibo ◽  
Candace W Collmer ◽  
Michelle Gwinn-Giglio
2010 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trudy Torto-Alalibo ◽  
Candace W. Collmer ◽  
Michelle Gwinn-Giglio ◽  
Magdalen Lindeberg ◽  
Shaowu Meng ◽  
...  

SUMMARY Microbes form intimate relationships with hosts (symbioses) that range from mutualism to parasitism. Common microbial mechanisms involved in a successful host association include adhesion, entry of the microbe or its effector proteins into the host cell, mitigation of host defenses, and nutrient acquisition. Genes associated with these microbial mechanisms are known for a broad range of symbioses, revealing both divergent and convergent strategies. Effective comparisons among these symbioses, however, are hampered by inconsistent descriptive terms in the literature for functionally similar genes. Bioinformatic approaches that use homology-based tools are limited to identifying functionally similar genes based on similarities in their sequences. An effective solution to these limitations is provided by the Gene Ontology (GO), which provides a standardized language to describe gene products from all organisms. The GO comprises three ontologies that enable one to describe the molecular function(s) of gene products, the biological processes to which they contribute, and their cellular locations. Beginning in 2004, the Plant-Associated Microbe Gene Ontology (PAMGO) interest group collaborated with the GO consortium to extend the GO to accommodate terms for describing gene products associated with microbe-host interactions. Currently, over 900 terms that describe biological processes common to diverse plant- and animal-associated microbes are incorporated into the GO database. Here we review some unifying themes common to diverse host-microbe associations and illustrate how the new GO terms facilitate a standardized description of the gene products involved. We also highlight areas where new terms need to be developed, an ongoing process that should involve the whole community.


Cells ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Maia Acuña ◽  
Lucile Maria Floeter-Winter ◽  
Sandra Marcia Muxel

An inflammatory response is essential for combating invading pathogens. Several effector components, as well as immune cell populations, are involved in mounting an immune response, thereby destroying pathogenic organisms such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites. In the past decade, microRNAs (miRNAs), a group of noncoding small RNAs, have emerged as functionally significant regulatory molecules with the significant capability of fine-tuning biological processes. The important role of miRNAs in inflammation and immune responses is highlighted by studies in which the regulation of miRNAs in the host was shown to be related to infectious diseases and associated with the eradication or susceptibility of the infection. Here, we review the biological aspects of microRNAs, focusing on their roles as regulators of gene expression during pathogen–host interactions and their implications in the immune response against Leishmania, Trypanosoma, Toxoplasma, and Plasmodium infectious diseases.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Wood ◽  
Antonia Lock ◽  
Midori A. Harris ◽  
Kim Rutherford ◽  
Jürg Bähler ◽  
...  

AbstractThe first decade of genome sequencing stimulated an explosion in the characterization of unknown proteins. More recently, the pace of functional discovery has slowed, leaving around 20% of the proteins even in well-studied model organisms without informative descriptions of their biological roles. Remarkably, many uncharacterized proteins are conserved from yeasts to human, suggesting that they contribute to fundamental biological processes. To fully understand biological systems in health and disease, we need to account for every part of the system. Unstudied proteins thus represent a collective blind spot that limits the progress of both basic and applied biosciences.We use a simple yet powerful metric based on Gene Ontology (GO) biological process terms to define characterized and uncharacterized proteins for human, budding yeast, and fission yeast. We then identify a set of conserved but unstudied proteins in S. pombe, and classify them based on a combination of orthogonal attributes determined by large-scale experimental and comparative methods. Finally, we explore possible reasons why these proteins remain neglected, and propose courses of action to raise their profile and thereby reap the benefits of completing the catalog of proteins’ biological roles.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Costantini ◽  
Mari H Muurinen ◽  
Outi Mäkitie

In the last decade, the widespread use of massively-parallel sequencing has considerably boosted the number of novel gene discoveries in monogenic skeletal diseases with short stature. Defects in genes playing a role in the maintenance and function of the growth plate, the site of longitudinal bone growth, are a well-known cause of skeletal diseases with short stature. However, several genes involved in extracellular matrix composition or maintenance as well as genes partaking in various biological processes have also been characterized. This review aims to describe the latest genetic findings in spondyloepiphyseal and spondyloepimetaphyseal dysplasias and in some monogenic forms of isolated short stature. Strategies on how to successfully characterize novel skeletal phenotypes with short stature and genetic approaches to detect and validate novel gene-disease correlations will be discussed in detail. Finally, novel genetic mechanisms in the field of skeletal diseases, including variants affecting miRNAs and disrupting the chromatin structure, will be described. In summary, we discuss the latest gene discoveries underlying skeletal diseases with short stature and emphasize the importance of characterizing novel molecular mechanisms for genetic counseling, optimal management of the disease and for therapeutic innovations.


Author(s):  
Liang Ren ◽  
Daonan Shen ◽  
Chengcheng Liu ◽  
Yi Ding

The human oral cavity harbors approximately 1,000 microbial species, and dysbiosis of the microflora and imbalanced microbiota-host interactions drive many oral diseases, such as dental caries and periodontal disease. Oral microbiota homeostasis is critical for systemic health. Over the last two decades, bacterial protein phosphorylation systems have been extensively studied, providing mounting evidence of the pivotal role of tyrosine and serine/threonine phosphorylation in oral bacterial dysbiosis and bacteria-host interactions. Ongoing investigations aim to discover novel kinases and phosphatases and to understand the mechanism by which these phosphorylation events regulate the pathogenicity of oral bacteria. Here, we summarize the structures of bacterial tyrosine and serine/threonine kinases and phosphatases and discuss the roles of tyrosine and serine/threonine phosphorylation systems in Porphyromonas gingivalis and Streptococcus mutans, emphasizing their involvement in bacterial metabolism and virulence, community development, and bacteria-host interactions.


Open Biology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 200149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Wood ◽  
Seth Carbon ◽  
Midori A. Harris ◽  
Antonia Lock ◽  
Stacia R. Engel ◽  
...  

Biological processes are accomplished by the coordinated action of gene products. Gene products often participate in multiple processes, and can therefore be annotated to multiple Gene Ontology (GO) terms. Nevertheless, processes that are functionally, temporally and/or spatially distant may have few gene products in common, and co-annotation to unrelated processes probably reflects errors in literature curation, ontology structure or automated annotation pipelines. We have developed an annotation quality control workflow that uses rules based on mutually exclusive processes to detect annotation errors, based on and validated by case studies including the three we present here: fission yeast protein-coding gene annotations over time; annotations for cohesin complex subunits in human and model species; and annotations using a selected set of GO biological process terms in human and five model species. For each case study, we reviewed available GO annotations, identified pairs of biological processes which are unlikely to be correctly co-annotated to the same gene products (e.g. amino acid metabolism and cytokinesis), and traced erroneous annotations to their sources. To date we have generated 107 quality control rules, and corrected 289 manual annotations in eukaryotes and over 52 700 automatically propagated annotations across all taxa.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
R. E. Foulger ◽  
D. Osumi-Sutherland ◽  
B. K. McIntosh ◽  
C. Hulo ◽  
P. Masson ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Yang ◽  
Juan Jin ◽  
Ding-yu Fan ◽  
Qing Hao ◽  
Jianxin Niu

Abstract Background: Heat stress (HS) is a common stress and influences the growth and reproduction of plant species. We found and bred a putative heat-resistant jujube (Ziziphus jujuba Mill.) cultivar (JHR17) in previous study. Results: In the current study, we made the seedlings of ‘JHR17’ cultivar to be under HS (45°C) for 0, 1, 3, 5 and 7 days, respectively, and the leaf samples (HR0, HR1, HR3, HR5 and HR7) were collected accordingly. Fifteen cDNA libraries from ‘JHR17’ leaves were built with a transcriptome assay. The RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) and transcriptome comparisons were performed, and the results indicated that 1642, 4080, 5160 and 2119 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in HR1 vs. HR0, HR3 vs. HR0, HR5 vs. HR0 and HR7 vs. HR0, respectively. Gene Ontology (GO) analyses of the DEGs from these comparisons were implemented. Conclusion: It revealed that a series of biological processes, involved in stress response, photosynthesis and metabolism, were enriched successfully, suggesting that lowering or up-regulating these genes of processes might play important roles in response to HS. This study may contribute to understand the molecular mechanism of ‘JHR17’ cultivar response to HS, and be beneficial for developing jujube cultivars to improve heat resistance.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Abril-Parreño ◽  
Kieran G. Meade ◽  
Anette Kristine Krogenæs ◽  
Xavier Druart ◽  
Sean Fair ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The outcome of cervical artificial insemination (AI) with frozen-thawed semen in sheep is limited by the inability of sperm to traverse the cervix of some ewe breeds. Previous research has demonstrated that cervical sperm transport is dependent on ewe breed, as sperm can traverse the cervix in greater numbers in some higher fertility ewe breeds. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying ewe breed differences in sperm transport through the cervix remain unknown. In this study, we aimed to characterise the cervical transcriptome of four European ewe breeds with known differences in pregnancy rates following cervical AI using frozen-thawed semen at the follicular phase of a natural oestrous cycle. Cervical post mortem tissue samples were collected from two Irish ewe breeds (Belclare and Suffolk; medium and low fertility, respectively) and from two Norwegian ewe breeds (Norwegian White Sheep (NWS) and Fur; high fertility compared to both Irish breeds) at the follicular phase of a natural oestrous cycle (n = 8 to 10 ewes per breed). Results High-quality RNA extracted from biopsies of the mid-region of the cervix was analysed by RNA-sequencing and Gene Ontology (GO). After stringent filtering (P <  0.05 and FC > 1.5), a total of 11, 1539 and 748 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in Belclare, Fur and NWS compared to the low fertility Suffolk breed, respectively. Gene ontology analysis identified significantly enriched biological processes involved in muscle contraction, extracellular matrix (ECM) development and the immune response. Gene co-expression analysis revealed similar patterns in muscle contraction and ECM development modules in both Norwegian ewe breeds, which differed to the Irish ewe breeds. Conclusions These breed-specific biological processes may account for impaired cervical sperm transport through the cervix in sheep during the follicular phase of the reproductive cycle. This novel and comprehensive dataset provides a rich foundation for future targeted initiatives to improve cervical AI in sheep.


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