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Motivation: Over the last decades, vast numbers of sequences were deposited in public databases. Bioinformatics tools allow homology and consequently functional inference for these sequences. New profile-based homology search tools have been introduced, allowing reliable detection of remote homologs, but have not been systematically benchmarked. To provide such a comparison, which can guide bioinformatics workflows, we extend and apply our previously developed benchmark approach to evaluate the 'next generation' of profile-based approaches, including CS-BLAST, HHSEARCH and PHMMER, in comparison with the non-profile based search tools NCBI-BLAST, USEARCH, UBLAST and FASTA. Method: We generated challenging benchmark datasets based on protein domain architectures within either the PFAM+Clan, SCOP/Superfamily or CATH/Gene3D domain definition schemes. From each dataset, homologous and non-homologous protein pairs were aligned using each tool, and standard performance metrics calculated. We further measured congruence of domain architecture assignments in the three domain databases. Results: CSBLAST and PHMMER had overall highest accuracy. FASTA, UBLAST and USEARCH showed large trade-offs of accuracy for speed optimization. Conclusion: Profile methods are superior at inferring remote homologs but the difference in accuracy between methods is relatively small. PHMMER and CSBLAST stand out with the highest accuracy, yet still at a reasonable computational cost. Additionally, we show that less than 0.1% of Swiss-Prot protein pairs considered homologous by one database are considered non-homologous by another, implying that these classifications represent equivalent underlying biological phenomena, differing mostly in coverage and granularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: Analyzing groups of functionally coupled genes or proteins in the context of global interaction networks has become an important aspect of bioinformatic investigations. Assessing the statistical significance of crosstalk enrichment between or within groups of genes can be a valuable tool for functional annotation of experimental gene sets. Results: Here we present CrossTalkZ, a statistical method and software to assess the significance of crosstalk enrichment between pairs of gene or protein groups in large biological networks. We demonstrate that the standard z-score is generally an appropriate and unbiased statistic. We further evaluate the ability of four different methods to reliably recover crosstalk within known biological pathways. We conclude that the methods preserving the second-order topological network properties perform best. Finally, we show how CrossTalkZ can be used to annotate experimental gene sets using known pathway annotations and that its performance at this task is superior to gene enrichment analysis (GEA). Availability and Implementation: CrossTalkZ (available at http://sonnhammer.sbc.su.se/download/software/CrossTalkZ/) is implemented in C++, easy to use, fast, accepts various input file formats, and produces a number of statistics. These include z-score, p-value, false discovery rate, and a test of normality for the null distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of orthologs—genes pairs descended from a common ancestor through speciation, rather than duplication—has emerged as an essential component of many bioinformatics applications, ranging from the annotation of new genomes to experimental target prioritization. Yet, the development and application of orthology inference methods is hampered by the lack of consensus on source proteomes, file formats and benchmarks. The second ‘Quest for Orthologs’ meeting brought together stakeholders from various communities to address these challenges. We report on achievements and outcomes of this meeting, focusing on topics of particular relevance to the research community at large. The Quest for Orthologs consortium is an open community that welcomes contributions from all researchers interested in orthology research and applications.Contact: dessimoz@ebi.ac.uk [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Low-complexity sequence regions present a common problem in finding true homologs to a protein query sequence. Several solutions to this have been suggested, but a detailed comparison between these on challenging data has so far been lacking. A common benchmark for homology detection procedures is to use SCOP/ASTRAL domain sequences belonging to the same or different superfamilies, but these contain almost no low complexity sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: High quality multiple alignments are crucial in the transfer of annotation from one genome to another. Multiple alignment methods strive to achieve ever increasing levels of average accuracy on benchmark sets while the accuracy of individual alignments is often overlooked. Results: We have previously developed a method to automatically assess the accuracy and overall difficulty of multiple alignments. This was achieved by a per-residue comparison between alternate alignments of the same sequences. Here we present a key extension to this method, an algorithm to extract similarly aligned regions from several alignments and merge them into a new consensus alignment. Conclusion: We demonstrate that the fraction of correctly aligned residues within the resulting alignments is increased by 25 - 100 percent compared to the original input alignments, as only the most reliably aligned parts are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The alignment of multiple protein sequences is a fundamental step in the analysis of biological data. It has traditionally been applied to analyzing protein families for conserved motifs, phylogeny, structural properties, and to improve sensitivity in homology searching. The availability of complete genome sequences has increased the demands on multiple sequence alignment (MSA) programs. Current MSA methods suffer from being either too inaccurate or too computationally expensive to be applied effectively in large-scale comparative genomics. Results: We developed Kalign, a method employing the Wu-Manber string-matching algorithm, to improve both the accuracy and speed of multiple sequence alignment. We compared the speed and accuracy of Kalign to other popular methods using Balibase, Prefab, and a new large test set. Kalign was as accurate as the best other methods on small alignments, but significantly more accurate when aligning large and distantly related sets of sequences. In our comparisons, Kalign was about 10 times faster than ClustalW and, depending on the alignment size, up to 50 times faster than popular iterative methods. Conclusion: Kalign is a fast and robust alignment method. It is especially well suited for the increasingly important task of aligning large numbers of sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Distance-based methods are popular for reconstructing evolutionary trees thanks to their speed and generality. A number of methods exist for estimating distances from sequence alignments, which often involves some sort of correction for multiple substitutions. The problem is to accurately estimate the number of true substitutions given an observed alignment. So far, the most accurate protein distance estimators have looked for the optimal matrix in a series of transition probability matrices, e.g. the Dayhoff series. The evolutionary distance between two aligned sequences is here estimated as the evolutionary distance of the optimal matrix. The optimal matrix can be found either by an iterative search for the Maximum Likelihood matrix, or by integration to find the Expected Distance. As a consequence, these methods are more complex to implement and computationally heavier than correction-based methods. Another problem is that the result may vary substantially depending on the evolutionary model used for the matrices. An ideal distance estimator should produce consistent and accurate distances independent of the evolutionary model used. Results: We propose a correction-based protein sequence estimator called Scoredist. It uses a logarithmic correction of observed divergence based on the alignment score according to the BLOSUM62 score matrix. We evaluated Scoredist and a number of optimal matrix methods using three evolutionary models for both training and testing Dayhoff, Jones-Taylor-Thornton, and Müller-Vingron, as well as Whelan and Goldman solely for testing. Test alignments with known distances between 0.01 and 2 substitutions per position (1-200 PAM) were simulated using ROSE. Scoredist proved as accurate as the optimal matrix methods, yet substantially more robust. When trained on one model but tested on another one, Scoredist was nearly always more accurate. The Jukes-Cantor and Kimura correction methods were also tested, but were substantially less accurate. Conclusion: The Scoredist distance estimator is fast to implement and run, and combines robustness with accuracy. Scoredist has been incorporated into the Belvu alignment viewer, which is available at ftp://ftp.cgb.ki.se/pub/prog/belvu/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: MaxLink, a guilt-by-association network search algorithm, has been made available as a web resource and a stand-alone version. Based on a user-supplied list of query genes, MaxLink identifies and ranks genes that are tightly linked to the query list. This functionality can be used to predict potential disease genes from an initial set of genes with known association to a disease. The original algorithm, used to identify and rank novel genes potentially involved in cancer, has been updated to use a more statistically sound method for selection of candidate genes and made applicable to other areas than cancer. The algorithm has also been made faster by re-implementation in C++, and the Web site uses FunCoup 3.0 as the underlying network.Availability and implementation: MaxLink is freely available at http://maxlink.sbc.su.se both as a web service and a stand-alone application for download.Contact: dimitri.guala@scilifelab.seSupplementary information: Supplementary materials are available at Bioinformatics online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]