BACKGROUND: In recent years the number of human genetic variants deposited into the publicly available databases has been increasing exponentially. The latest version of dbSNP, for example, contains ~50 million validated Single Nucleotide Variants …
Mercury (Hg) resistance (mer) by the reduction of mercuric to elemental Hg is broadly distributed among the Bacteria and Archaea and plays an important role in Hg detoxification and biogeochemical cycling. MerA is the protein subunit of the …
Acidobacteria are among the most abundant bacterial phyla found in terrestrial ecosystems, but relatively little is known about their diversity, distribution and most critically, their function. Understanding the functional activities encoded in …
Non-equilibrium catalysis of electron transfer reactions (i.e. redox) regulates the flux of key elements found in biological macromolecules. The enzymes responsible, oxidoreductases, contain specific transition metals in poorly sequence-conserved …
An international consortium released the first draft sequence of the human genome 10 years ago. Although the analysis of this data has suggested the genetic underpinnings of many diseases, we have not yet been able to fully quantify the relationship …
BACKGROUND: Non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) alter the protein sequence and can cause disease. The impact has been described by reliable experiments for relatively few mutations. Here, we study predictions for functional impact …
UNLABELLED: Many existing databases annotate experimentally characterized single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Each non-synonymous SNP (nsSNP) changes one amino acid in the gene product (single amino acid substitution;SAAS). This change can either …
The discrimination between functionally neutral amino acid substitutions and non-neutral mutations, affecting protein function, is very important for our understanding of diseases. The rapidly growing amounts of experimental data enable the …