Abstract: Essential genes play an important role in the survival of an organism. It has been shown that cancer-associated essential genes are genes necessary for cancer cell proliferation, where these genes are potential therapeutic targets. Also, it was demonstrated that mutations of the cancer-associated essential genes give rise to the resistance of immunotherapy for patients with tumors. In the present study, we focus on studying the biological effects of the essential genes from a network perspective. We hypothesize that one can analyze a biological molecular network by decomposing it into both three-node and four-node digraphs (subgraphs). These network subgraphs encode the regulatory interaction information among the network’s genetic elements. In this study, the frequency of occurrence of the subgraph-associated essential genes in a molecular network was quantified by using the statistical parameter, odds ratio. Biological effects of subgraph-associated essential genes are discussed. In summary, the subgraph approach provides a systematic method for analyzing molecular networks and it can capture useful biological information for biomedical research.
Abstract: Methicillin/multiple-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
(MRSA) are infectious bacteria that are resistant to common
antibiotics. A previous in silico study in our group has identified a
hypothetical protein SAV1226 as one of the potential drug targets. In
this study, we reported the bioinformatics characterization, as well as
cloning, expression, purification and kinetic assays of hypothetical
protein SAV1226 from methicillin/vancomycin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus Mu50 strain. MALDI-TOF/MS analysis
revealed a low degree of structural similarity with known proteins.
Kinetic assays demonstrated that hypothetical protein SAV1226 is
neither a domain of an ATP dependent dihydroxyacetone kinase nor
of a phosphotransferase system (PTS) dihydroxyacetone kinase,
suggesting that the function of hypothetical protein SAV1226 might
be misannotated on public databases such as UniProt and
InterProScan 5.