The recently completed chicken genome, and previously available human and mouse genomes provide us an opportunity to understand the evolutionary relationship between mammals and aves at the molecular level by finding groups of orthologs in these genomes. Using a recently developed tool for automatic large scale screening of candidate orthologs in a multi-genome data, we extracted candidate orth...

BACKGROUND The proportion of conserved DNA sequences with no clear function is steadily growing in bioinformatics databases. Studies of sequence and structural homology have indicated that many uncharacterized protein domain sequences are variants of functionally described domains. If these variants promote an organism's ecological fitness, they are likely to be conserved in the genome of its p...

Many methods have been developed to detect coevolution from aligned sequences. However, all the existing methods require a one-to-one mapping of candidate coevolving partners (nucleotides, amino acids) a priori. When two families of sequences have distinct duplication and loss histories, finding the one-to-one mapping of coevolving partners can be computationally involved. We propose an algorit...

We have written a fast implementation of the popular Neighbor-Joining tree building algorithm. QuickTree allows the reconstruction of phylogenies for very large protein families (including the largest Pfam alignment containing 27000 HIV GP120 glycoprotein sequences) that would be infeasible using other popular methods.

Bioactive peptide database (BioPD) is a web-based knowledge base that contains more than 1100 protein sequences from human, mouse and rat, which are putative or are known to be bioactive peptides. In addition to peptide sequences and the annotation, the database also contains gene sequences with annotation, protein interaction and disease data related to the peptides. Each entry has as many ref...

PFAM is a database of multiple alignments and hidden Markov models (HMMs) of common, conserved protein domains. PFAM HMMs complement BLAST analysis in the annotation of the C. elegans and human genome sequencing projects at Washington University and the Sanger Centre. PFAM2, based on full, gapped multiple alignments of structural and/or functional protein domains, currently contains 527 models....

The Pfam database groups regions of proteins by how well hidden Markov models (HMMs) can be trained to recognize similarities among them. Conservation pressure is probably in play here. The Pfam seed training set includes sequence and structure information, being drawn largely from the PDB. A long standing hypothesis among intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) investigators has held that conse...

One of the most reliable methods for protein function annotation is to transfer experimentally known functions from orthologous proteins in other organisms. Most methods for identifying orthologs operate on a subset of organisms with a completely sequenced genome, and treat proteins as single-domain units. However, it is well known that proteins are often made up of several independent domains,...

Protein families and domains represent a very relevant resource useful to understand protein functions and interactions among their codifying genes. To perform evaluations of gene annotations sparsely available in numerous different databanks accessible via Internet, we previously developed GFINDer, a Web server that performs statistical analysis of functional and phenotypic annotations of gene...

Accurate detection of protein families allows assignment of protein function and the analysis of functional diversity in complete genomes. Recently, we presented a novel algorithm called TribeMCL for the detection of protein families that is both accurate and efficient. This method allows family analysis to be carried out on a very large scale. Using TribeMCL, we have generated a resource calle...