Project description:Dieldrin is a legacy pesticide that has multiple modes of action (MOA) that include being an estrogen receptor agonist, GABA receptor antagonist, and a chemical that disrupts mitochondrial function. There is also evidence that dieldrin exposure is significantly associated with an increased risk for neurodegeneration in humans. The objective of this thesis was to clarify the effects of dieldrin in the hypothalamus, the major neuroendocrine region of the brain, in the zebrafish (Danio rerio). Zebrafish were fed pellets containing 0.03, 0.15, or 1.8 µg/g dieldrin for 21 days and a global gene expression analysis was performed to characterize cellular processes and pathways affected by dieldrin.
Project description:DNA methylation is a conserved epigenetic gene regulation mechanism. DOMAINS REARRANGED METHYLTRANSFERASE (DRM) is a key de novo methyltransferase in plants, but how DRM acts mechanistically is poorly understood. Here, we report the crystal structure of the methyltransferase domain of tobacco DRM (NtDRM) and reveal a molecular basis for its rearranged structure. NtDRM forms a functional homo-dimer critical for catalytic activity. We also show that Arabidopsis DRM2 exists in complex with the siRNA effector ARGONAUTE4 (AGO4) and preferentially methylates one DNA strand, likely the strand acting as the template for non-coding Pol V RNA transcripts. This strand-biased DNA methylation is also positively correlated with strand-biased siRNA accumulation. These data suggest a model in which DRM2 is guided to target loci by AGO4-siRNA and involves base-pairing of associated siRNAs with nascent RNA transcripts. Whole-genome bisulfite sequencing was done for a wildtype line (ecotype Col) as well as various transgenic lines in a drm2 mutant background (ecotype Col). Each transgenic line expressed a version of the DRM2 protein that was either wildtype or carried induced mutations in order to test the function of various domains in the DRM2 protein. Two sets of whole-genome bisulfite were performed (130615 or 131216) and comparisons were mainly done within sets although comparisons can also be done between sets. The drm2 mutant methylome was also analyzed in this study using a previously published whole-genome bisulfite library (GSE39901).
Project description:Theoretical models of the chemical origins of life depend on self-replication or autocatalysis, processes that arise from molecular interactions, recruitment, and cooperation. Such models often lack details about the molecules and reactions involved, giving little guidance to those seeking to detect signs of interaction, recruitment, or cooperation in the laboratory. Here, we develop minimal mathematical models of reactions involving specific chemical entities: amino acids and their condensation reactions to form de novo peptides. Reactions between two amino acids form a dipeptide product, which enriches linearly in time; subsequent recruitment of such products to form longer peptides exhibit super-linear growth. Such recruitment can be reciprocated: a peptide contributes to and benefits from the formation of one or more other peptides; in this manner, peptides can cooperate and thereby exhibit autocatalytic or exponential growth. We have started to test these predictions by quantitative analysis of de novo peptide synthesis conducted by wet-dry cycling of a five-amino acid mixture over 21 days. Using high-performance liquid chromatography, we tracked abundance changes for >60 unique peptide species. Some species were highly transient, with the emergence of up to 17 new species and the extinction of nine species between samplings, while other species persisted across many cycles. Of the persisting species, most exhibited super-linear growth, a sign of recruitment anticipated by our models. This work shows how mathematical modeling and quantitative analysis of kinetic data can guide the search for prebiotic chemistries that have the potential to cooperate and replicate.
Project description:The cohesin protein complex is essential for the formation of topologically associating domains (TADs) and chromatin loops on interphase chromosomes. For the loading onto chromosomes, cohesin requires the cohesin loader complex formed by NIPBL and MAU2. Cohesin localizes at enhancers and gene promoters with NIPBL in mammalian cells and forms enhancer-promoter loops. Cornelia de Lange syndrome (CdLS) is a rare, genetically heterogeneous disorder affecting multiple organs and systems during development, caused by mutations in the cohesin loader NIPBL gene (> 60% of patients), as well as in genes encoding cohesin, a chromatin regulator, BRD4, and cohesin-related factors. We also reported CHOPS syndrome that phenotypically overlaps with CdLS and is caused by gene mutations of a super elongation complex (SEC) core component, AFF4. Although these syndromes are associated with transcriptional dysregulation, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. In this study, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of chromosome architectural changes caused by these mutations using cell lines derived from CdLS and CHOPS syndrome patients. In both patient cells, we found a decrease in cohesin, NIPBL, BRD4, and acetylation of lysine 27 on histone H3 (H3K27ac) in most enhancers with enhancer-promoter loop attenuation. In contrast, TADs were maintained in both patient cells. These findings reveal a shared molecular mechanism in these syndromes and highlight unexpected roles for cohesin, cohesin loaders, and the SEC in maintaining the enhancer complexes. These complexes are crucial for recruiting transcriptional regulators, sustaining active histone modifications, and facilitating enhancer-promoter looping.
Project description:De novo methylation of CpG islands is seen in many tumors, but the general rules governing this process are not known. By analyzing DNA from tumors, as well as normal tissues, and by utilizing a wide range of published data, we have been able to identify a well-defined set of tumor targets, each of which has its own M-bM-^@M-^\coefficientM-bM-^@M-^] of methylation that is largely determined by its inherent relative ability to recruit the polycomb complex. This pattern is initially formed by a slow process of de novo methylation that occurs during aging and then undergoes expansion early in tumorigenesis, where it may play a role as an inhibitor of development-associated gene activation. We also demonstrate that DNA methylation patterns can be used to diagnose the primary tissue source of tumor metastases. CpG-methylated genomic DNA was enriched using a methyl-DNA immunoprecipitation (mDIP) assay. DNA from the input and bound (enriched) DNA for each sample were labeled and hybridized on the array to define the methylation state of each region.
Project description:Traditional drug discovery is very laborious, expensive, and time-consuming, due to the huge combinatorial complexity of the discrete molecular search space. Researchers have turned to machine learning methods for help to tackle this difficult problem. However, most existing methods are either virtual screening on the available database of compounds by protein-ligand affinity prediction, or unconditional molecular generation, which does not take into account the information of the protein target. In this paper, we propose a protein target-oriented de novo drug design method, called AlphaDrug. Our method is able to automatically generate molecular drug candidates in an autoregressive way, and the drug candidates can dock into the given target protein well. To fulfill this goal, we devise a modified transformer network for the joint embedding of protein target and the molecule, and a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm for the conditional molecular generation. In the transformer variant, we impose a hierarchy of skip connections from protein encoder to molecule decoder for efficient feature transfer. The transformer variant computes the probabilities of next atoms based on the protein target and the molecule intermediate. We use the probabilities to guide the look-ahead search by MCTS to enhance or correct the next-atom selection. Moreover, MCTS is also guided by a value function implemented by a docking program, such that the paths with many low docking values are seldom chosen. Experiments on diverse protein targets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, indicating that AlphaDrug is a potentially promising solution to target-specific de novo drug design.
Project description:AlvaBuilder is a software tool for de novo molecular design and can be used to generate novel molecules having desirable characteristics. Such characteristics can be defined using a simple step by step graphical interface, and they can be based on molecular descriptors, on predictions of QSAR/QSPR models, and on matching molecular fragments or used to design compounds similar to a given one. The molecules generated are always syntactically valid since they are composed by combining fragments of molecules taken from a training data set chosen by the user. In this paper, we demonstrate how the software can be used to design new compounds for a defined case study. AlvaBuilder is available at https://www.alvascience.com/alvabuilder/.
Project description:This work introduces a method to tune a sequence-based generative model for molecular de novo design that through augmented episodic likelihood can learn to generate structures with certain specified desirable properties. We demonstrate how this model can execute a range of tasks such as generating analogues to a query structure and generating compounds predicted to be active against a biological target. As a proof of principle, the model is first trained to generate molecules that do not contain sulphur. As a second example, the model is trained to generate analogues to the drug Celecoxib, a technique that could be used for scaffold hopping or library expansion starting from a single molecule. Finally, when tuning the model towards generating compounds predicted to be active against the dopamine receptor type 2, the model generates structures of which more than 95% are predicted to be active, including experimentally confirmed actives that have not been included in either the generative model nor the activity prediction model. Graphical abstract .