Mycophenolic acid (MPA) is a fungal metabolite possessing antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial, antitumor and anti-psoriasis activities. It is being used as an immunosuppressive agent in kidney, heart and liver transplantation patients. In the presence of MPA, the proliferation of the B and T lymphocytes is inhibited. The MPaB and MPaE genes reside in a 25 kb gene cluster in t...

Proteins or genes that have similar sequences are likely to perform the same function. One of the most widely used techniques for sequence comparison is sequence alignment. Sequence alignment allows mismatches and insertion/deletion, which represents biological mutations. Sequence alignment is usually performed only on two sequences. Multiple sequence alignment, is a natural extension of two-se...

Obtaining high quality multiple alignments is crucial for a range of sequence analysis tasks. A common strategy is to align the sequences several times, varying the program or parameters until the best alignment according to manual inspection by human experts is found. Ideally, this should be assisted by an automatic assessment of the alignment quality. Our web-site http://msa.cgb.ki.se allows ...

When a group of aligned sequences shows significant similarity to each other, as described in Chapters 4 to 6, this can usually be taken as evidence that they are the result of divergent evolution from a common ancestral sequence. In this case, the sequence alignment will contain traces of the evolutionary history of these sequences. It is possible to infer this history by complex analysis of a...

SUMMARY Improving and ascertaining the quality of a multiple sequence alignment is a very challenging step in protein sequence analysis. This is particularly the case when dealing with sequences in the 'twilight zone', i.e. sharing < 30% identity. Here we describe INTERALIGN, a dedicated user-friendly alignment editor including a view of secondary structures and a synchronized display of carbon...