The need for standardisation in life science research - an approach to excellence and trust

Today, academic researchers benefit from the changes driven by digital technologies and the enormous growth of knowledge and data, on globalisation, enlargement of the scientific community, and the linkage between different scientific communities and the society. To fully benefit from this development, however, information needs to be shared openly and transparently. Digitalisation plays a major role here because it permeates all areas of business, science and society and is one of the key drivers for innovation and international cooperation. To address the resulting opportunities, the EU promotes the development and use of collaborative ways to produce and share knowledge and data as early as possible in the research process, but also to appropriately secure results with the European strategy for Open Science (OS). It is now widely recognised that making research results more accessible to all societal actors contributes to more effective and efficient science; it also serves as a boost for innovation in the public and private sectors. However  for research data to be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable the use of standards is essential. At the metadata level, considerable efforts in standardisation have already been made (e.g. Data Management Plan and FAIR Principle etc.), whereas in context with the raw data these fundamental efforts are still fragmented and in some cases completely missing. The CHARME consortium, funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Agency, has identified needs and gaps in the field of standardisation in the life sciences and also discussed potential hurdles for implementation of standards in current practice. Here, the authors suggest four measures in response to current challenges to ensure a high quality of life science research data and their re-usability for research and innovation.

Plant miRNAs Reduce Cancer Cell Proliferation by Targeting MALAT1 and NEAT1: A Beneficial Cross-Kingdom Interaction

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are ubiquitous regulators of gene expression, evolutionarily conserved in plants and mammals. In recent years, although a growing number of papers debate the role of plant miRNAs on human gene expression, the molecular mechanisms through which this effect is achieved are still not completely elucidated. Some evidence suggest that this interaction might be sequence specific, and in this work, we investigated this possibility by transcriptomic and bioinformatics approaches. Plant and human miRNA sequences from primary databases were collected and compared for their similarities (global or local alignments). Out of 2,588 human miRNAs, 1,606 showed a perfect match of their seed sequence with the 5′ end of 3,172 plant miRNAs. Further selections were applied based on the role of the human target genes or of the miRNA in cell cycle regulation (as an oncogene, tumor suppressor, or a biomarker for prognosis, or diagnosis in cancer). Based on these criteria, 20 human miRNAs were selected as potential functional analogous of 7 plant miRNAs, which were in turn transfected in different cell lines to evaluate their effect on cell proliferation. A significant decrease was observed in colorectal carcinoma HCT116 cell line. RNA-Seq demonstrated that 446 genes were differentially expressed 72 h after transfection. Noteworthy, we demonstrated that the plant mtr-miR-5754 and gma-miR4995 directly target the tumor-associated long non-coding RNA metastasis-associated lung adenocarcinoma transcript 1 (MALAT1) and nuclear paraspeckle assembly transcript 1 (NEAT1) in a sequence-specific manner. In conclusion, according to other recent discoveries, our study strengthens and expands the hypothesis that plant miRNAs can have a regulatory effect in mammals by targeting both protein-coding and non-coding RNA, thus suggesting new biotechnological applications.

Exploiting transfer learning for the reconstruction of the human gene regulatory network

MOTIVATION

The reconstruction of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression data has received increasing attention in recent years, due to its usefulness in the understanding of regulatory mechanisms involved in human diseases. Most of the existing methods reconstruct the network through machine learning approaches, by analyzing known examples of interactions. However, (i) they often produce poor results when the amount of labeled examples is limited, or when no negative example is available and (ii) they are not able to exploit information extracted from GRNs of other (better studied) related organisms, when this information is available.

RESULTS

In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning method that overcomes these limitations, by exploiting the knowledge about the GRN of a source organism for the reconstruction of the GRN of the target organism, by means of a novel transfer learning technique. Moreover, the proposed method is natively able to work in the positive-unlabeled setting, where no negative example is available, by fruitfully exploiting a (possibly large) set of unlabeled examples. In our experiments, we reconstructed the human GRN, by exploiting the knowledge of the GRN of Mus musculus. Results showed that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and identifies previously unknown functional relationships among the analyzed genes.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

http://www.di.uniba.it/∼mignone/systems/biosfer/index.html.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Microarray data and pathway analyses of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from healthy subjects after a three weeks grape-rich diet

Using Human Gene Expression Microarrays (Agilent) technologies, we investigated changes of the level of gene expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of healthy subjects after 21 days of fresh table grape-rich diet and after an additional 28-day washout. Several hundreds of genes were differentially expressed after grape intake or after washout. The functional analysis of these genes detected significant changes in key processes such as inflammation and immunity, thrombosis, DNA and protein repair, autophagy and mitochondrial biogenesis. Moreover, fresh grape intake was found to influence the expression of many long non-coding RNA genes. The data can be valuable for researchers interested in nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics studies and are related to the research article “Gene expression signature induced by grape intake in healthy subjects reveals wide-spread beneficial effects on PBMCs” [1].

NOTCH3 and CADASIL syndrome: a genetic and structural overview

CADASIL syndrome is a rare disease that belongs to a group of disorders called leukodystrophies. It is well established that NOTCH3 gene on chromosome 19 is primarily responsible for the development of the CADASIL syndrome. Herein, an attempt is made to shed light on the actual molecular mechanism underlying CADASIL syndrome, through insights extracted from comprehensive evolutionary studies and in silico modelling on Notch 3 protein. In particular, we suggest the use of optical coherence tomography angiography for the detection of early signs of small vessel diseases, which are the major precursors to a repertoire of neurodegenerative conditions, including CADASIL.

The joint NETTAB/Integrative Bioinformatics 2015 Meeting: aims, topics and outcomes

The 15^th International NETTAB workshop and the 11^th Integrative Bioinformatics Symposium were held together in Bari, on October 14-16, 2016, as Joint NETTAB/IB 2015 Meeting. A special topic for the meeting was "Bioinformatics for ncRNA", but the traditional topics of both meetings series were also included in the event.About 60 scientific contributions were presented, including six keynote lectures, one special guest lecture, and many oral communications and posters. A "Two-Day Hands-on Tutorial" event was organised before the workshop.Selected full papers from some of the best works presented in Bari were submitted either to the Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics or to a purpose Call for a Supplement of BMC Bioinformatics.Here, we provide an overview of meeting aims and scope. We also shortly introduce selected papers that have been either accepted for publication in this Supplement or published in the Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics, for a more complete presentation of the outcomes of the meeting.

ComiRNet: a web-based system for the analysis of miRNA-gene regulatory networks

Background

The understanding of mechanisms and functions of microRNAs (miRNAs) is fundamental for the study of many biological processes and for the elucidation of the pathogenesis of many human diseases. Technological advances represented by high-throughput technologies, such as microarray and next-generation sequencing, have significantly aided miRNA research in the last decade. Nevertheless, the identification of true miRNA targets and the complete elucidation of the rules governing their functional targeting remain nebulous. Computational tools have been proven to be fundamental for guiding experimental validations for the discovery of new miRNAs, for the identification of their targets and for the elucidation of their regulatory mechanisms.

Description

ComiRNet (Co-clustered miRNA Regulatory Networks) is a web-based database specifically designed to provide biologists and clinicians with user-friendly and effective tools for the study of miRNA-gene target interaction data and for the discovery of miRNA functions and mechanisms. Data in ComiRNet are produced by a combined computational approach based on: 1) a semi-supervised ensemble-based classifier, which learns to combine miRNA-gene target interactions (MTIs) from several prediction algorithms, and 2) the biclustering algorithm HOCCLUS2, which exploits the large set of produced predictions, with the associated probabilities, to identify overlapping and hierarchically organized biclusters that represent miRNA-gene regulatory networks (MGRNs).

Conclusions

ComiRNet represents a valuable resource for elucidating the miRNAs' role in complex biological processes by exploiting data on their putative function in the context of MGRNs. ComiRnet currently stores about 5 million predicted MTIs between 934 human miRNAs and 30,875 mRNAs, as well as 15 bicluster hierarchies, each of which represents MGRNs at different levels of granularity. The database can be freely accessed at: http://comirnet.di.uniba.it.

Integrating microRNA target predictions for the discovery of gene regulatory networks: a semi-supervised ensemble learning approach

BACKGROUND

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs which play a key role in the post-transcriptional regulation of many genes. Elucidating miRNA-regulated gene networks is crucial for the understanding of mechanisms and functions of miRNAs in many biological processes, such as cell proliferation, development, differentiation and cell homeostasis, as well as in many types of human tumors. To this aim, we have recently presented the biclustering method HOCCLUS2, for the discovery of miRNA regulatory networks. Experiments on predicted interactions revealed that the statistical and biological consistency of the obtained networks is negatively affected by the poor reliability of the output of miRNA target prediction algorithms. Recently, some learning approaches have been proposed to learn to combine the outputs of distinct prediction algorithms and improve their accuracy. However, the application of classical supervised learning algorithms presents two challenges: i) the presence of only positive examples in datasets of experimentally verified interactions and ii) unbalanced number of labeled and unlabeled examples.

RESULTS

We present a learning algorithm that learns to combine the score returned by several prediction algorithms, by exploiting information conveyed by (only positively labeled/) validated and unlabeled examples of interactions. To face the two related challenges, we resort to a semi-supervised ensemble learning setting. Results obtained using miRTarBase as the set of labeled (positive) interactions and mirDIP as the set of unlabeled interactions show a significant improvement, over competitive approaches, in the quality of the predictions. This solution also improves the effectiveness of HOCCLUS2 in discovering biologically realistic miRNA:mRNA regulatory networks from large-scale prediction data. Using the miR-17-92 gene cluster family as a reference system and comparing results with previous experiments, we find a large increase in the number of significantly enriched biclusters in pathways, consistent with miR-17-92 functions.

CONCLUSION

The proposed approach proves to be fundamental for the computational discovery of miRNA regulatory networks from large-scale predictions. This paves the way to the systematic application of HOCCLUS2 for a comprehensive reconstruction of all the possible multiple interactions established by miRNAs in regulating the expression of gene networks, which would be otherwise impossible to reconstruct by considering only experimentally validated interactions.

A platform independent RNA-Seq protocol for the detection of transcriptome complexity

BACKGROUND

Recent studies have demonstrated an unexpected complexity of transcription in eukaryotes. The majority of the genome is transcribed and only a little fraction of these transcripts is annotated as protein coding genes and their splice variants. Indeed, most transcripts are the result of antisense, overlapping and non-coding RNA expression. In this frame, one of the key aims of high throughput transcriptome sequencing is the detection of all RNA species present in the cell and the first crucial step for RNA-seq users is represented by the choice of the strategy for cDNA library construction. The protocols developed so far provide the utilization of the entire library for a single sequencing run with a specific platform.

RESULTS

We set up a unique protocol to generate and amplify a strand-specific cDNA library representative of all RNA species that may be implemented with all major platforms currently available on the market (Roche 454, Illumina, ABI/SOLiD). Our method is reproducible, fast, easy-to-perform and even allows to start from low input total RNA. Furthermore, we provide a suitable bioinformatics tool for the analysis of the sequences produced following this protocol.

CONCLUSION

We tested the efficiency of our strategy, showing that our method is platform-independent, thus allowing the simultaneous analysis of the same sample with different NGS technologies, and providing an accurate quantitative and qualitative portrait of complex whole transcriptomes.

A novel biclustering algorithm for the discovery of meaningful biological correlations between microRNAs and their target genes

BACKGROUND

microRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small non-coding RNAs which have been recognized as ubiquitous post-transcriptional regulators. The analysis of interactions between different miRNAs and their target genes is necessary for the understanding of miRNAs' role in the control of cell life and death. In this paper we propose a novel data mining algorithm, called HOCCLUS2, specifically designed to bicluster miRNAs and target messenger RNAs (mRNAs) on the basis of their experimentally-verified and/or predicted interactions. Indeed, existing biclustering approaches, typically used to analyze gene expression data, fail when applied to miRNA:mRNA interactions since they usually do not extract possibly overlapping biclusters (miRNAs and their target genes may have multiple roles), extract a huge amount of biclusters (difficult to browse and rank on the basis of their importance) and work on similarities of feature values (do not limit the analysis to reliable interactions).

RESULTS

To overcome these limitations, HOCCLUS2 i) extracts possibly overlapping biclusters, to catch multiple roles of both miRNAs and their target genes; ii) extracts hierarchically organized biclusters, to facilitate bicluster browsing and to distinguish between universe and pathway-specific miRNAs; iii) extracts highly cohesive biclusters, to consider only reliable interactions; iv) ranks biclusters according to the functional similarities, computed on the basis of Gene Ontology, to facilitate bicluster analysis.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results show that HOCCLUS2 is a valid tool to support biologists in the identification of context-specific miRNAs regulatory modules and in the detection of possibly unknown miRNAs target genes. Indeed, results prove that HOCCLUS2 is able to extract cohesiveness-preserving biclusters, when compared with competitive approaches, and statistically confirm (at a confidence level of 99%) that mRNAs which belong to the same biclusters are, on average, more functionally similar than mRNAs which belong to different biclusters. Finally, the hierarchy of biclusters provides useful insights to understand the intrinsic hierarchical organization of miRNAs and their potential multiple interactions on target genes.

The 20th anniversary of EMBnet: 20 years of bioinformatics for the Life Sciences community

The EMBnet Conference 2008, focusing on 'Leading Applications and Technologies in Bioinformatics', was organized by the European Molecular Biology network (EMBnet) to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Since its foundation in 1988, EMBnet has been working to promote collaborative development of bioinformatics services and tools to serve the European community of molecular biology laboratories. This conference was the first meeting organized by the network that was open to the international scientific community outside EMBnet. The conference covered a broad range of research topics in bioinformatics with a main focus on new achievements and trends in emerging technologies supporting genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics analyses such as high-throughput sequencing and data managing, text and data-mining, ontologies and Grid technologies. Papers selected for publication, in this supplement to BMC Bioinformatics, cover a broad range of the topics treated, providing also an overview of the main bioinformatics research fields that the EMBnet community is involved in.

The MitoDrome database annotates and compares the OXPHOS nuclear genes of Drosophila melanogaster, Drosophila pseudoobscura and Anopheles gambiae

The oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) is the primary energy-producing process of all aerobic organisms and the only cellular function under the dual control of both the mitochondrial and the nuclear genomes. Functional characterization and evolutionary study of the OXPHOS system is of great importance for the understanding of many as yet unclear aspects of nucleus-mitochondrion genomic co-evolution and co-regulation gene networks. The MitoDrome database is a web-based database which provides genomic annotations about nuclear genes of Drosophila melanogaster encoding for mitochondrial proteins. Recently, MitoDrome has included a new section annotating genomic information about OXPHOS genes in Drosophila pseudoobscura and Anopheles gambiae and their comparative analysis with their Drosophila melanogaster and human counterparts. The introduction of this new comparative annotation section into MitoDrome is expected to be a useful resource for both functional and structural genomics related to the OXPHOS system.

MitoRes: a resource of nuclear-encoded mitochondrial genes and their products in Metazoa

Background

Mitochondria are sub-cellular organelles that have a central role in energy production and in other metabolic pathways of all eukaryotic respiring cells. In the last few years, with more and more genomes being sequenced, a huge amount of data has been generated providing an unprecedented opportunity to use the comparative analysis approach in studies of evolution and functional genomics with the aim of shedding light on molecular mechanisms regulating mitochondrial biogenesis and metabolism.

In this context, the problem of the optimal extraction of representative datasets of genomic and proteomic data assumes a crucial importance. Specialised resources for nuclear-encoded mitochondria-related proteins already exist; however, no mitochondrial database is currently available with the same features of MitoRes, which is an update of the MitoNuc database extensively modified in its structure, data sources and graphical interface. It contains data on nuclear-encoded mitochondria-related products for any metazoan species for which this type of data is available and also provides comprehensive sequence datasets (gene, transcript and protein) as well as useful tools for their extraction and export.

Description

MitoRes consolidates information from publicly external sources and automatically annotates them into a relational database. Additionally, it also clusters proteins on the basis of their sequence similarity and interconnects them with genomic data. The search engine and sequence management tools allow the query/retrieval of the database content and the extraction and export of sequences (gene, transcript, protein) and related sub-sequences (intron, exon, UTR, CDS, signal peptide and gene flanking regions) ready to be used for in silico analysis.

Conclusion

The tool we describe here has been developed to support lab scientists and bioinformaticians alike in the characterization of molecular features and evolution of mitochondrial targeting sequences. The way it provides for the retrieval and extraction of sequences allows the user to overcome the obstacles encountered in the integrative use of different bioinformatic resources and the completeness of the sequence collection allows intra- and interspecies comparison at different biological levels (gene, transcript and protein).

Evolution of nuclearly encoded mitochondrial genes in Metazoa

All Metazoan nuclear genomes underwent a continuous process of both complete and partial genetic material gain and loss. The forces modulating these events are also subject to the strict interaction between nuclear and mitochondrial (mt) genome. In this context we investigate the evolution of nuclear genes encoding proteins which target the mitochondrion, with a particular attention to genes involved in oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), one of the most ancient and conserved functions. To examine thoroughly the evolutionary strategies that preserve OXPHOS and coordinate the two cellular genomes, a comparative analysis has been carried out for 78 OXPHOS gene families in several Metazoa (insects, tunicates, fishes and mammals). We demonstrate that the duplication rate of OXPHOS genes increases passing from invertebrates to vertebrates consistently with the total increase in genome size, but all species are prone to negatively select OXPHOS duplicates compared to the general trend of nuclear gene families. These results are consistent with the 'balance hypothesis' and, at least in insects, the expression of duplicate genes is low and strongly testis-biased.

Comparison of the oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) nuclear genes in the genomes of Drosophila melanogaster, Drosophila pseudoobscura and Anopheles gambiae

An analysis of nuclear-encoded oxidative phosphorylation genes in Drosophila and Anopheles reveals that pairs of duplicated genes have strikingly different expression patterns.

Background

In eukaryotic cells, oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) uses the products of both nuclear and mitochondrial genes to generate cellular ATP. Interspecies comparative analysis of these genes, which appear to be under strong functional constraints, may shed light on the evolutionary mechanisms that act on a set of genes correlated by function and subcellular localization of their products.

Results

We have identified and annotated the Drosophila melanogaster, D. pseudoobscura and Anopheles gambiae orthologs of 78 nuclear genes encoding mitochondrial proteins involved in oxidative phosphorylation by a comparative analysis of their genomic sequences and organization. We have also identified 47 genes in these three dipteran species each of which shares significant sequence homology with one of the above-mentioned OXPHOS orthologs, and which are likely to have originated by duplication during evolution. Gene structure and intron length are essentially conserved in the three species, although gain or loss of introns is common in A. gambiae. In most tissues of D. melanogaster and A. gambiae the expression level of the duplicate gene is much lower than that of the original gene, and in D. melanogaster at least, its expression is almost always strongly testis-biased, in contrast to the soma-biased expression of the parent gene.

Conclusions

Quickly achieving an expression pattern different from the parent genes may be required for new OXPHOS gene duplicates to be maintained in the genome. This may be a general evolutionary mechanism for originating phenotypic changes that could lead to species differentiation.

Update of KEYnet: a gene and protein names database for biosequences functional organisation

KEYnet is a database where gene and protein names are hierarchically structured. Particular care has been devoted to the search and organisation of synonyms. The structuring is based on biological criteria in order to assist the user in data search and to minimise the risk of information loss. Links to the EMBL data library by the entry name and the accession number are implemented. KEYnet is available through the WWW at the following site: http://www.ba.cnr.it/keynet.html

MitBASE : a comprehensive and integrated mitochondrial DNA database. The present status

MitBASE is an integrated and comprehensive database of mitochondrial DNA data which collects, under a single interface, databases for Plant, Vertebrate, Invertebrate, Human, Protist and Fungal mtDNA and a Pilot database on nuclear genes involved in mitochondrial biogenesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. MitBASE reports all available information from different organisms and from intraspecies variants and mutants. Data have been drawn from the primary databases and from the literature; value adding information has been structured, e.g., editing information on protist mtDNA genomes, pathological information for human mtDNA variants, etc. The different databases, some of which are structured using commercial packages (Microsoft Access, File Maker Pro) while others use a flat-file format, have been integrated under ORACLE. Ad hoc retrieval systems have been devised for some of the above listed databases keeping into account their peculiarities. The database is resident at the EBI and is available at the following site: http://www3.ebi.ac.uk/Research/Mitbase/mitbas e.pl. The impact of this project is intended for both basic and applied research. The study of mitochondrial genetic diseases and mitochondrial DNA intraspecies diversity are key topics in several biotechnological fields. The database has been funded within the EU Biotechnology programme.

Update of the Human MitBASE database

Human MitBASE is a database collecting human mtDNA variants. This database is part of a greater mitochondrial genome database (MitBASE) funded within the EU Biotech Program. The present paper reports the recent improvements in data structure, data quality and data quantity. As far as the database structure is concerned it is now fully designed and implemented. Based on the previously described structure some changes have been made to optimise both data input and data quality. Cross-references with other bio-databases (EMBL, OMIM, MEDLINE) have been implemented. Human MitBASE data can be queried with the MitBASE Simple Query System (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/htbin/Mitbase/mit base.pl) and with SRS at the EBI under the 'Mutation' section (http://srs.ebi.ac.uk/srs5/). At present the HumanMitBASE node contains approximately 5000 variants related to studies investigating population polymorphisms and pathologies.

MitBASE: a comprehensive and integrated mitochondrial DNA database

MitBASE is an integrated and comprehensive database of mitochondrial DNA data which collects all available information from different organisms and from intraspecie variants and mutants. Research institutions from different countries are involved, each in charge of developing, collecting and annotating data for the organisms they are specialised in. The design of the actual structure of the database and its implementation in a user-friendly format are the care of the European Bioinformatics Institute. The database can be accessed on the Web at the following address: http://www.ebi.ac. uk/htbin/Mitbase/mitbase.pl. The impact of this project is intended for both basic and applied research. The study of mitochondrial genetic diseases and mitochondrial DNA intraspecie diversity are key topics in several biotechnological fields. The database has been funded within the EU Biotechnology programme.

KEYnet: a keywords database for biosequences functional organization

KEYnet is a database where gene and protein names are hierarchically structured. Particular care has been devoted to the search and organisation of synonyms. The structuring is based on biological criteria in order to assist the user in the data search and to minimise the risk of loss of information. Links to the EMBL data library by the entry name and the accession number have been implemented. KEYnet is available through the World Wide Web at the following site: http://www.ba.cnr.it/keynet.html. Recently KEYnet has incorporated specific gene name classifications, which can be browsed starting from the above-mentioned KEYnet home page: the Mitochondrial Gene Names classification and the Rat Gene Names classification. KEYnet database has also been structured in a flatfile format and can be queried through SRS (http://bio-www.ba.cnr.t:8000/srs).

In organello footprinting analysis of rat mitochondrial DNA: protein interaction upstream of the Ori-L

An in organello footprinting approach has been used to probe a protein-DNA interaction of a nuclear coded 25 kDa protein, previously isolated in our laboratory, that binds "in vitro" a region within the ND2 gene, located upstream of the Ori-L. Footprinting studies with the purine-modifying reagent dimethyl sulfate and the pirimidine-modifying reagent potassium permanganate were carried out in isolated mitochondria from rat liver. Dimethyl sulfate footprinting has allowed the detection of a protein-DNA interaction within the curved ND2 region with contact sites located in both the strands. Potassium permanganate footprinting allowed detection of an adjacent permanganate-reactive region. We hypothesize that the permanganate-reactive region is a single stranded DNA due to a profound helix distortion induced by a 25 kDa protein binding to the nearest region.

Isolation of a 25-kDa protein binding to a curved DNA upstream the origin of the L strand replication in the rat mitochondrial genome

The presence of a curved DNA sequence in the gene for the NADH-dehydrogenase subunit 2 of rat mitochondrial genome, upstream from the origin of the light strand replication have been demonstrated through theoretical analysis and experimental approaches. Gel retardation assays showed that this structure makes a complex with a protein component extracted from the mitochondrial matrix. The isolation and purification of this protein is reported. With a Sepharose CL-6B and magnetic DNA affinity chromatography a polypeptide was purified to homogeneity having 25-kDa mass as shown by gel electrophoresis. To functionally characterize this protein, its capability to bind to other sequences of the homologous or heterologous DNA and to specific riboprobes was also investigated. A role for this protein as a trans-acting agent required for the expression of the mammalian mitochondrial genome is suggested.

A 67-kDa protein binding to the curved DNA in the main regulatory region of the rat mitochondrial genome

We have purified, by sequence-specific affinity chromatography, a mitochondrial (mt) matrix protein which binds to the curved DNA located between the replication origin (ori) of the leading strand (ori-H) and the two transcription promoters in the rat mt genome. The protein was characterized by gel electrophoresis as a 67-kDa polypeptide and seems to be involved in the DNA contact on the mt light strand. This protein differs (in the size and location of its DNA-binding site) from other DNA-binding proteins studied so far in animal mt systems. We suggest a role for the 67-kDa protein, assisted by other proteins, in regulating the initiation of leading-strand replication.

[Craniometaphyseal dysplasia. Description of a clinical case]

The case of a 1 year and five month-old male infant with craniometaphyseal dysplasia is reported. Several clinical examinations showed weight and height greater than 97%.