Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on October 6, 2005
Bioinformatics 2005 21(23):4216-4222; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti706
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Discovering hidden viral piracy
1Compugen Ltd Tel Aviv 69512, Israel
2Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan 52900, Israel
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Motivation: Viruses and developers of anti-inflammatory therapies share a common interest in proteins that manipulate the immune response. Large double-stranded DNA viruses acquire host proteins to evade host defense mechanisms. Hence, viral pirated proteins may have a therapeutic potential. Although dozens of viral piracy events have already been identified, we hypothesized that sequence divergence impedes the discovery of many others.
Results: We developed a method to assess the number of viral/human homologs and discovered that at least 917 highly diverged homologs are hidden in low-similarity alignment hits that are usually ignored. However, these low-similarity homologs are masked by many false alignment hits. We therefore applied a filtering method to increase the proportion of viral/human homologous proteins. The homologous proteins we found may facilitate functional annotation of viral and human proteins. Furthermore, some of these proteins play a key role in immune modulation and are therefore therapeutic protein candidates.
Contact: kliger{at}compugen.co.il
Received on July 28, 2005; revised on September 15, 2005; accepted on October 5, 2005