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      An Ambystoma mexicanum EST sequencing project: analysis of 17,352 expressed sequence tags from embryonic and regenerating blastema cDNA libraries

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          Abstract

          An EST database has been generated for the axolotl Ambystoma mexicanum. Analysis of this data has uncovered an unusual phylogenetic distribution of the cyclin dependent kinase inhibitor 1 gene family in amphibians.

          Abstract

          Background

          The ambystomatid salamander, Ambystoma mexicanum (axolotl), is an important model organism in evolutionary and regeneration research but relatively little sequence information has so far been available. This is a major limitation for molecular studies on caudate development, regeneration and evolution. To address this lack of sequence information we have generated an expressed sequence tag (EST) database for A. mexicanum.

          Results

          Two cDNA libraries, one made from stage 18-22 embryos and the other from day-6 regenerating tail blastemas, generated 17,352 sequences. From the sequenced ESTs, 6,377 contigs were assembled that probably represent 25% of the expressed genes in this organism. Sequence comparison revealed significant homology to entries in the NCBI non-redundant database. Further examination of this gene set revealed the presence of genes involved in important cell and developmental processes, including cell proliferation, cell differentiation and cell-cell communication. On the basis of these data, we have performed phylogenetic analysis of key cell-cycle regulators. Interestingly, while cell-cycle proteins such as the cyclin B family display expected evolutionary relationships, the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 1 gene family shows an unusual evolutionary behavior among the amphibians.

          Conclusions

          Our analysis reveals the importance of a comprehensive sequence set from a representative of the Caudata and illustrates that the EST sequence database is a rich source of molecular, developmental and regeneration studies. To aid in data mining, the ESTs have been organized into an easily searchable database that is freely available online.

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          Most cited references25

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          Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology

          Genomic sequencing has made it clear that a large fraction of the genes specifying the core biological functions are shared by all eukaryotes. Knowledge of the biological role of such shared proteins in one organism can often be transferred to other organisms. The goal of the Gene Ontology Consortium is to produce a dynamic, controlled vocabulary that can be applied to all eukaryotes even as knowledge of gene and protein roles in cells is accumulating and changing. To this end, three independent ontologies accessible on the World-Wide Web (http://www.geneontology.org) are being constructed: biological process, molecular function and cellular component.
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            ESTScan: a program for detecting, evaluating, and reconstructing potential coding regions in EST sequences.

            One of the problems associated with the large-scale analysis of unannotated, low quality EST sequences is the detection of coding regions and the correction of frameshift errors that they often contain. We introduce a new type of hidden Markov model that explicitly deals with the possibility of errors in the sequence to analyze, and incorporates a method for correcting these errors. This model was implemented in an efficient and robust program, ESTScan. We show that ESTScan can detect and extract coding regions from low-quality sequences with high selectivity and sensitivity, and is able to accurately correct frameshift errors. In the framework of genome sequencing projects, ESTScan could become a very useful tool for gene discovery, for quality control, and for the assembly of contigs representing the coding regions of genes.
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              CDD: a database of conserved domain alignments with links to domain three-dimensional structure.

              The Conserved Domain Database (CDD) is a compilation of multiple sequence alignments representing protein domains conserved in molecular evolution. It has been populated with alignment data from the public collections Pfam and SMART, as well as with contributions from colleagues at NCBI. The current version of CDD (v.1.54) contains 3693 such models. CDD alignments are linked to protein sequence and structure data in Entrez. The molecular structure viewer Cn3D serves as a tool to interactively visualize alignments and three-dimensional structure, and to link three-dimensional residue coordinates to descriptions of evolutionary conservation. CDD can be accessed on the World Wide Web at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/cdd.shtml. Protein query sequences may be compared against databases of position-specific score matrices derived from alignments in CDD, using a service named CD-Search, which can be found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/wrpsb.cgi. CD-Search runs reverse-position-specific BLAST (RPS-BLAST), a variant of the widely used PSI-BLAST algorithm. CD-Search is run by default for protein-protein queries submitted to NCBI's BLAST service at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Genome Biol
                Genome Biology
                BioMed Central (London )
                1465-6906
                1465-6914
                2004
                13 August 2004
                : 5
                : 9
                : R67
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Scionics Computer Innovation GmbH, Pfotenhauerstrasse 110, Dresden 01307, Germany
                [2 ]Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Pfotenhauerstrasse 108, Dresden 01307, Germany
                [3 ]Institute of Anatomy, Medical Faculty of the Carl Gustav Carus Technical University, Dresden, Fetscherstrasse 74, Dresden 01307, Germany
                [4 ]Department of Surgical Research, Medical Faculty of the Carl Gustav Carus Technical University, Dresden, Fetscherstrasse 74, Dresden 01307, Germany
                Article
                gb-2004-5-9-r67
                10.1186/gb-2004-5-9-r67
                522874
                15345051
                9b8d529d-da21-4734-a54c-7153f12622e7
                Copyright © 2004 Habermann et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

                This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 17 November 2003
                : 6 May 2004
                : 29 June 2004
                Categories
                Research

                Genetics
                Genetics

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