Although strand-biased gene distribution （SGD） was described some two decades ago, the underlying molecular mechanisms and their relationship remain elusive. Its facets include, but are not limited to, the degree of biases, the strand-preference of genes, and the influence of background nucleotide composition variations. Using a dataset composed of 364 non-redundant bacterial genomes, we sought to illus- trate our current understanding of SGD. First, when we divided the collection of bacterial genomes into non-polC and polC groups according to their possession of DnaE isoforms that correlate closely with taxonomy, the SGD of the polC group stood out more sig- nificantly than that of the non-polC group. Second, when examining horizontal gene transfer, coupled with gene functional conservation （essentiality） and expressivity （level of expression）, we realized that they all contributed to SGD. Third, we further demonstrated a weaker G-dominance on the leading strand of the non-polC group but strong purine dominance （both G and A） on the leading strand of the polC group. We propose that strand-biased nucleotide composition plays a decisive role for SGD since the polC-bearing genomes are not only AT-rich but also have pronounced purine-rich leading strands, and we believe that a special mutation spectrum that leads to a strong purine asymmetry and a strong strand-biased nucleotide composition coupled with functional selections for genes and their functions are both at work.
Plant non-specific lipid transfer proteins （nsLtps） have been reported to be involved in plant defense activity against bacterial and fungal pathogens. In this study, we identified 135 （122 putative and 13 previously identified） Solanaceae nsLtps, which are clustered into 8 different groups. By comparing with Boutrot’s nsLtp classification, we classified these eight groups into five types （I, II, IV, IX and X）. We compared Solanaceae nsLtps with Arabidopsis and Gramineae nsLtps and found that （1） Types I, II and IV are shared by Solanaceae, Gramineae and Arabidopsis; （2） Types III, V, VI and VIII are shared by Gramineae and Arabidopsis but not detected in Solanaceae so far; （3） Type VII is only found in Gramineae whereas type IX is present only in Arabidopsis and Solanaceae; （4） Type X is a new type that accounts for 52.59% Solanaceae nsLtps in our data, and has not been reported in any other plant so far. We further built and compared the three-dimensional structures of the eight groups, and found that the major functional diversification within the nsLtp family could be predated to the monocot/dicot divergence, and many gene duplications and sequence variations had happened in the nsLtp family after the monocot/dicot divergence, especially in Solanaceae.
Wanfei LiuDawei HuangKan LiuSongnian HuJun YuGang GaoShuhui Song
Histone H3 lysine 4 trimethylation （H3K4me3） is well known to occur in the promoter region of genes for transcription activation. How- ever, when investigating the H3K4me3 profiles in the mouse cerebrum and testis, we discovered that H3K4me3 also has a significant enrichment at the 3＇ end of actively transcribed （sense） genes, named as 3＇-H3K4me3. 3＇-H3K4me3 is associated with ~15% of pro- tein-coding genes in both tissues. In addition, we examined the transcriptional initiation signals including RNA polymerase II （RNAPII） binding sites and Y-CAGE-tag that marks transcriptional start sites. Interestingly, we found that 3＇-H3K4me3 is associated with the ini- tiation of antisense transcription. Furthermore, 3＇-H3K4me3 modification levels correlate positively with the antisense expression levels of the associated sense genes, implying that 3＇-H3K4me3 is involved in the activation of antisense transcription. Taken together, our findings suggest that H3K4me3 may be involved in the regulation of antisense transcription that initiates from the 3＇ end of sense genes. In addition, a positive correlation was also observed between the expression of antisense and the associated sense genes with 3＇-H3K4me3 modification. More importantly, we observed the 3＇-H3K4me3 enrichment among genes in human, fruitfly and Arabidopsis, and found that the sequences of 3＇-H3K4me3-marked regions are highly conserved and essentially indistinguishable from known promoters in ver- tebrate. Therefore, we speculate that these 3＇-H3K4me3-marked regions may serve as potential promoters for antisense transcription and 3＇-H3K4me3 appear to be a universal epigenetic feature in eukaryotes. Our results provide a novel insight into the epigenetic roles of H3K4me3 and the regulatory mechanism of antisense transcription.
RNA modifications, especially methylation of the N6 position of adenosine （A）--m6A, rep- resent an emerging research frontier in RNA biology. With the rapid development of high-throughput sequencing technology, in-depth study of m6A distribution and function relevance becomes feasible. However, a robust method to effectively identify m6A-modified regions has not been available yet. Here, we present a novel high-efficiency and user-friendly analysis pipeline called MeRIP-PF for the signal identification of MeRIP-Seq data in reference to controls. MeRIP-PF provides a statistical P-value for each identified m6A region based on the difference of read distribution when compared to the con- trols and also calculates false discovery rate （FDR） as a cut offto differentiate reliable m6A regions from the background. Furthermore, MeRIP-PF also achieves gene annotation ofm6A signals or peaks and produce outputs in both XLS and graphical format, which are useful for further study. MeRIP-PF is implemented in Perl and is freely available at http：//software.big.ac.cn/MeRIP-PF.html.
