Molecular Biology and Genetics / Moleküler Biyoloji ve Genetik

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11147/9

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  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 11
    Citation - Scopus: 11
    The Expressed Microrna-Mrna Interactions of Toxoplasma Gondii
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2018) Acar, İlhan Erkin; Saçar Demirci, Müşerref Duygu; Groß, Uwe; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in post-transcriptional modulation of gene expression and thereby have a large influence on the resulting phenotype. We have previously shown that miRNAs may be involved in the communication between Toxoplasma gondii and its hosts and further confirmed a number of proposed specific miRNAs. Yet, little is known about the internal regulation via miRNAs in T. gondii. Therefore, we predicted pre-miRNAs directly from the type II ME49 genome and filtered them. For the confident hairpins, we predicted the location of the mature miRNAs and established their target genes. To add further confidence, we evaluated whether the hairpins and their targets were co-expressed. Such co-expressed miRNA and target pairs define a functional interaction. We extracted all such functional interactions and analyzed their differential expression among strains of all three clonal lineages (RH, PLK, and CTG) and between the two stages present in the intermediate host (tachyzoites and bradyzoites). Overall, we found ~65,000 expressed interactions of which ~5,500 are differentially expressed among strains but none are significantly differentially expressed between developmental stages. Since miRNAs and target decoys can be used as therapeutics we believe that the list of interactions we provide will lead to novel approaches in the treatment of toxoplasmosis.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 37
    Citation - Scopus: 45
    On the Performance of Pre-Microrna Detection Algorithms
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2017) Saçar Demirci, Müşerref Duygu; Baumbach, Jan; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs are crucial for post-transcriptional gene regulation, and their dysregulation has been associated with diseases like cancer and, therefore, their analysis has become popular. The experimental discovery of miRNAs is cumbersome and, thus, many computational tools have been proposed. Here we assess 13 ab initio pre-miRNA detection approaches using all relevant, published, and novel data sets while judging algorithm performance based on ten intrinsic performance measures. We present an extensible framework, izMiR, which allows for the unbiased comparison of existing algorithms, adding new ones, and combining multiple approaches into ensemble methods. In an exhaustive attempt, we condense the results of millions of computations and show that no method is clearly superior; however, we provide a guideline for biomedical researchers to select a tool. Finally, we demonstrate that combining all of the methods into one ensemble approach, for the first time, allows reliable purely computational pre-miRNA detection in large eukaryotic genomes.