Institute for Systems Biology

About: Institute for Systems Biology is a nonprofit organization based out in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Proteomics. The organization has 1277 authors who have published 2777 publications receiving 353165 citations.

Polymorphisms in Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) are associated with protection against leprosy

Abstract: Accumulating evidence suggests that polymorphisms in Toll-like receptors (TLRs) influence the pathogenesis of mycobacterial infections, including leprosy, a disease whose manifestations depend on host immune responses. Polymorphisms in TLR2 are associated with an increased risk of reversal reaction, but not susceptibility to leprosy itself. We examined whether polymorphisms in TLR4 are associated with susceptibility to leprosy in a cohort of 441 Ethiopian leprosy patients and 197 healthy controls. We found that two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in TLR4 (896G>A [D299G] and 1196C>T [T399I]) were associated with a protective effect against the disease. The 896GG, GA and AA genotypes were found in 91.7, 7.8 and 0.5% of leprosy cases versus 79.9, 19.1 and 1.0% of controls, respectively (odds ratio [OR] = 0.34, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.20-0.57, P < 0.001, additive model). Similarly, the 1196CC, CT and TT genotypes were found in 98.1, 1.9 and 0% of leprosy cases versus 91.8, 7.7 and 0.5% of controls, respectively (OR = 0.16, 95% CI 0.06--.40, P < 0.001, dominant model). We found that Mycobacterium leprae stimulation of monocytes partially inhibited their subsequent response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation. Our data suggest that TLR4 polymorphisms are associated with susceptibility to leprosy and that this effect may be mediated at the cellular level by the modulation of TLR4 signalling by M. leprae.

Analysis of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae proteome with PeptideAtlas

Abstract: We present the Saccharomyces cerevisiae PeptideAtlas composed from 47 diverse experiments and 4.9 million tandem mass spectra. The observed peptides align to 61% of Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) open reading frames (ORFs), 49% of the uncharacterized SGD ORFs, 54% of S. cerevisiae ORFs with a Gene Ontology annotation of 'molecular function unknown', and 76% of ORFs with Gene names. We highlight the use of this resource for data mining, construction of high quality lists for targeted proteomics, validation of proteins, and software development.

Comparison of MS(2)-only, MSA, and MS(2)/MS(3) methodologies for phosphopeptide identification.

Abstract: Current mass spectrometers provide a number of alternative methodologies for producing tandem mass spectra specifically for phosphopeptide analysis. In particular, generation of MS(3) spectra in a data-dependent manner upon detection of the neutral loss of a phosphoric acid in MS(2) spectra is a popular technique for circumventing the problem of poor phosphopeptide backbone fragmentation. The newer Multistage Activation method provides another option. Both these strategies require additional cycle time on the instrument and therefore reduce the number of spectra that can be measured in the same amount of time. Additional informatics is often required to make most efficient use of the additional information provided by these spectra as well. This work presents a comparison of several commonly used mass spectrometry methods for the study of phosphopeptide-enriched samples: an MS(2)-only method, a Multistage Activation method, and an MS(2)/MS(3) data-dependent neutral loss method. Several strategies for dealing effectively with the resulting MS(3) data in the latter approach are also presented and compared. The overall goal is to infer whether any one methodology performs significantly better than another for identifying phosphopeptides. On data presented here, the Multistage Activation methodology is demonstrated to perform optimally and does not result in significant loss of unique peptide identifications.

Large Sequence Polymorphisms Classify Mycobacterium tuberculosis Strains with Ancestral Spoligotyping Patterns

Abstract: Genomic deletion analysis revealed that strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis exhibiting spoligotyping patterns with almost all spacers present belong either to a strain lineage that includes the W-Beijing strain family or to the ancestral strain lineage of M. tuberculosis.

Analysis of the DNA sequence and duplication history of human chromosome 15

Abstract: Here we present a finished sequence of human chromosome 15, together with a high-quality gene catalogue As chromosome 15 is one of seven human chromosomes with a high rate of segmental duplication