OLGenie: Estimating Natural Selection to Predict Functional Overlapping Genes.

ABSTRACT: Purifying (negative) natural selection is a hallmark of functional biological sequences, and can be detected in protein-coding genes using the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitutions per site (dN/dS). However, when two genes overlap the same nucleotide sites in different frames, synonymous changes in one gene may be nonsynonymous in the other, perturbing dN/dS. Thus, scalable methods are needed to estimate functional constraint specifically for overlapping genes (OLGs). We propose OLGenie, which implements a modification of the Wei-Zhang method. Assessment with simulations and controls from viral genomes (58 OLGs and 176 non-OLGs) demonstrates low false-positive rates and good discriminatory ability in differentiating true OLGs from non-OLGs. We also apply OLGenie to the unresol

SUBMITTER: Nelson CW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7531306 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature