Novel bioinformatics routines have been used to provide a more detailed definition of the proteome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv. Over half of the current proteins result from gene duplication or domain shuffling events while one-sixth show no similarity to polypeptides described in other organisms. Prominent among the genes that appear to have been duplicated on numerous occasions are th...

Regulatory polymorphisms play important roles in determining phenotypes and disease susceptibilities through perturbing gene expression. After genetic markers with LD have been mapped, an important task is to evaluate their functional importance based on the identification of regulatory regions and specific regulatory elements. Here we introduce the leading bioinformatics tools and invaluable r...

Myoglobin is a cytoplasmic hemoprotein, expressed solely in cardiac myocytes and oxidative skeletal muscle fibers, that reversibly binds O2 by its heme residue. Myoglobin is an essential oxygen-storage hemoprotein capable of facilitating oxygen transport and modulating nitric oxide homeostasis within cardiac and skeletal myocytes. Functionally, myoglobin is well accepted as an O2- storage prote...

Autophagy serves as a turnover mechanism for the recycling of redundant and/or damaged macromolecules present in eukaryotic cells to re-use them under starvation conditions via a double-membrane structure known as autophagosome. A set of eukaryotic genes called autophagy-related genes (ATGs) orchestrate this highly elaborative process. The existence of these genes and the role they play in diff...

More than 200 open reading frames (ORFs) from the human cytomegalovirus genome have been reported as potentially coding for proteins. We have used two pattern-based in silico approaches to analyze this set of putative viral genes. With the help of an objective annotation method that is based on the Bio-Dictionary, a comprehensive collection of amino acid patterns that describes the currently kn...

In a hospital-acquired infection with multidrug-resistant Elizabethkingia, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry and 16S rRNA gene analysis identified the pathogen as Elizabethkingia miricola. Whole-genome sequencing, genus-level core genome analysis, and in silico DNA-DNA hybridization of 35 Elizabethkingia strains indicated that the species taxonomy shou...

Characterization of impurities present in generic antimicrobial agents is not required according to the approval criteria for their sale worldwide. To assess the safety of generics, we conducted a structural estimation of impurities in six piperacillin/tazobactam generics and carried out an in silico analysis. Namely, these generics were compared with the brand name drug by HPLC and LC-MS. The ...

The molecular mechanisms and genetic risk factors underlying Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis are only partly understood. To identify new factors, which may contribute to AD, different approaches are taken including proteomics, genetics, and functional genomics. Here, we used a bioinformatics approach and found that distinct AD-related genes share modules of transcription factor binding si...

Titanium dioxide has been proven for toxicity by in vitro and in vivo approaches, however, further studies are needed in nano-toxicological research using in silico analysis. In this study, Autodock 4.0.5 was used in an attempt to evaluate the interaction of titanium dioxide with proteins. Different cellular proteins were sorted to study the interaction, binding sites, and active sites as a poc...

The peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are ligand-activated transcription factors of the nuclear receptor superfamily. Upon ligand binding, PPARs activate target gene transcription and regulate a variety of important physiological processes such as lipid metabolism, inflammation, and wound healing. Here, we describe the first database of PPAR target genes, PPARgene. Among the 2...