Gregory E. Sims

Bio: Gregory E. Sims is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Protein sequencing & UniProt. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2097 citations.

Predicting the Functional Effect of Amino Acid Substitutions and Indels

Abstract: As next-generation sequencing projects generate massive genome-wide sequence variation data, bioinformatics tools are being developed to provide computational predictions on the functional effects of sequence variations and narrow down the search of casual variants for disease phenotypes. Different classes of sequence variations at the nucleotide level are involved in human diseases, including substitutions, insertions, deletions, frameshifts, and non-sense mutations. Frameshifts and non-sense mutations are likely to cause a negative effect on protein function. Existing prediction tools primarily focus on studying the deleterious effects of single amino acid substitutions through examining amino acid conservation at the position of interest among related sequences, an approach that is not directly applicable to insertions or deletions. Here, we introduce a versatile alignment-based score as a new metric to predict the damaging effects of variations not limited to single amino acid substitutions but also in-frame insertions, deletions, and multiple amino acid substitutions. This alignment-based score measures the change in sequence similarity of a query sequence to a protein sequence homolog before and after the introduction of an amino acid variation to the query sequence. Our results showed that the scoring scheme performs well in separating disease-associated variants (n = 21,662) from common polymorphisms (n = 37,022) for UniProt human protein variations, and also in separating deleterious variants (n = 15,179) from neutral variants (n = 17,891) for UniProt non-human protein variations. In our approach, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for the human and non-human protein variation datasets is ∼0.85. We also observed that the alignment-based score correlates with the deleteriousness of a sequence variation. In summary, we have developed a new algorithm, PROVEAN (Protein Variation Effect Analyzer), which provides a generalized approach to predict the functional effects of protein sequence variations including single or multiple amino acid substitutions, and in-frame insertions and deletions. The PROVEAN tool is available online at http://provean.jcvi.org.

CADD: predicting the deleteriousness of variants throughout the human genome.

Abstract: Combined Annotation-Dependent Depletion (CADD) is a widely used measure of variant deleteriousness that can effectively prioritize causal variants in genetic analyses, particularly highly penetrant contributors to severe Mendelian disorders. CADD is an integrative annotation built from more than 60 genomic features, and can score human single nucleotide variants and short insertion and deletions anywhere in the reference assembly. CADD uses a machine learning model trained on a binary distinction between simulated de novo variants and variants that have arisen and become fixed in human populations since the split between humans and chimpanzees; the former are free of selective pressure and may thus include both neutral and deleterious alleles, while the latter are overwhelmingly neutral (or, at most, weakly deleterious) by virtue of having survived millions of years of purifying selection. Here we review the latest updates to CADD, including the most recent version, 1.4, which supports the human genome build GRCh38. We also present updates to our website that include simplified variant lookup, extended documentation, an Application Program Interface and improved mechanisms for integrating CADD scores into other tools or applications. CADD scores, software and documentation are available at https://cadd.gs.washington.edu.

PROVEAN web server: a tool to predict the functional effect of amino acid substitutions and indels

Abstract: Summary: We present a web server to predict the functional effect of single or multiple amino acid substitutions, insertions and deletions using the prediction tool PROVEAN. The server provides rapid analysis of protein variants from any organisms, and also supports high-throughput analysis for human and mouse variants at both the genomic and protein levels. Availability and implementation: The web server is freely available and open to all users with no login requirements at http://provean.jcvi.org. Contact: gro.ivcj@nahca Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

REVEL: An Ensemble Method for Predicting the Pathogenicity of Rare Missense Variants

Abstract: The vast majority of coding variants are rare, and assessment of the contribution of rare variants to complex traits is hampered by low statistical power and limited functional data. Improved methods for predicting the pathogenicity of rare coding variants are needed to facilitate the discovery of disease variants from exome sequencing studies. We developed REVEL (rare exome variant ensemble learner), an ensemble method for predicting the pathogenicity of missense variants on the basis of individual tools: MutPred, FATHMM, VEST, PolyPhen, SIFT, PROVEAN, MutationAssessor, MutationTaster, LRT, GERP, SiPhy, phyloP, and phastCons. REVEL was trained with recently discovered pathogenic and rare neutral missense variants, excluding those previously used to train its constituent tools. When applied to two independent test sets, REVEL had the best overall performance (p −12 ) as compared to any individual tool and seven ensemble methods: MetaSVM, MetaLR, KGGSeq, Condel, CADD, DANN, and Eigen. Importantly, REVEL also had the best performance for distinguishing pathogenic from rare neutral variants with allele frequencies

The Human Gene Mutation Database: building a comprehensive mutation repository for clinical and molecular genetics, diagnostic testing and personalized genomic medicine

Abstract: The Human Gene Mutation Database (HGMD®) is a comprehensive collection of germline mutations in nuclear genes that underlie, or are associated with, human inherited disease. By June 2013, the database contained over 141,000 different lesions detected in over 5,700 different genes, with new mutation entries currently accumulating at a rate exceeding 10,000 per annum. HGMD was originally established in 1996 for the scientific study of mutational mechanisms in human genes. However, it has since acquired a much broader utility as a central unified disease-oriented mutation repository utilized by human molecular geneticists, genome scientists, molecular biologists, clinicians and genetic counsellors as well as by those specializing in biopharmaceuticals, bioinformatics and personalized genomics. The public version of HGMD (http://www.hgmd.org) is freely available to registered users from academic institutions/non-profit organizations whilst the subscription version (HGMD Professional) is available to academic, clinical and commercial users under license via BIOBASE GmbH.