Translational efficiency across healthy and tumor tissues is proliferation-related

Abstract: Different tissues express genes with particular codon usage and anticodon tRNA repertoires. However, the codon–anticodon co‐adaptation in humans is not completely understood, nor is its effect on tissue‐specific protein levels. Here, we first validated the accuracy of small RNA‐seq for tRNA quantification across five human cell lines. We then …

Protein-assisted RNA fragment docking (RnaX) for modeling RNA–protein interactions using ModelX

Abstract: RNA–protein interactions are crucial for such key biological processes as regulation of transcription, splicing, translation, and gene silencing, among many others. Knowing where an RNA molecule interacts with a target protein and/or engineering an RNA molecule to specifically bind to a protein could allow for rational interference with these …

Determination of the Gene Regulatory Network of a Genome-Reduced Bacterium Highlights Alternative Regulation Independent of Transcription Factors

Abstract: Here, we determined the relative importance of different transcriptional mechanisms in the genome-reduced bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae, by employing an array of experimental techniques under multiple genetic and environmental perturbations. Of the 143 genes tested (21% of the bacterium’s annotated proteins), only 55% showed an altered phenotype, highlighting the robustness …

SynMyco transposon: engineering transposon vectors for efficient transformation of minimal genomes.

Abstract: Mycoplasmas are important model organisms for Systems and Synthetic Biology, and are pathogenic to a wide variety of species. Despite their relevance, many of the tools established for genome editing in other microorganisms are not available for Mycoplasmas. The Tn4001 transposon is the reference tool to work with these …

Tissue-specific DNA methylation loss during ageing and carcinogenesis is linked to chromosome structure, replication timing and cell division rates

Abstract: DNA methylation is an epigenetic mechanism known to affect gene expression and aberrant DNA methylation patterns have been described in cancer. However, only a small fraction of differential methylation events target genes with a defined role in cancer, raising the question of how aberrant DNA methylation contributes to carcinogenesis. …