Authors:
Anna Marabotti
1
;
Corrado Cirielli
2
;
Daniela Agnese D’Arcangelo
2
;
Claudia Giampietri
3
;
Francesco Facchiano
4
;
Antonio Facchiano
2
and
Angelo M. Facchiano
5
Affiliations:
1
Istituto di Tecnologie Biomediche, CNR; Istituto di Scienze dell’Alimentazione and CNR, Italy
;
2
Istituto Dermopatico dell’Immacolata and IDI-IRCCS, Italy
;
3
“Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy
;
4
Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Italy
;
5
Istituto di Scienze dell’Alimentazione and CNR, Italy
Keyword(s):
Proteome comparison, Molecular mimicry, Autoimmunity, Local similarity.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Bioinformatics
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Sequence Analysis
;
Structural Bioinformatics
Abstract:
Investigating primary sequence and structural features of viral proteins/genes has revealed molecular mimicry and evolutionary relationship linking viruses to eukaryotes. The continuous improvement in sequencing-techniques makes available almost daily the whole genome/proteome of several microorganisms, making now possible systematic analyses of evolutionary correlations and accurate phylogeny investigations. In the present study we set up a methodology to identify significant and relevant similarities between viral and human proteomes. To this aim, the following steps were applied: i) identification of local similarity corresponding to continuous identity over at least 8-residues long fragments; ii) filtering results for statistical significance of the identified similarities, according to BLAST parameters for short sequences; iii) additional filters applied to the BLAST outputs, to select specific viruses. The present study indicates a novel accurate methodology to find relevant si
milarities among virus and human proteomes, useful to further investigate pathogenic mechanisms underlying infectious and non-infectious diseases.
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