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Biology subjects

Klausen, M. S.

Publications and source records attributed to Klausen, M. S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Benchmarking freely available human leukocyte antigen typing algorithms across varying genes, coverages and typing resolutions

The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system is a group of genes coding for proteins that are central to the adaptive immune system and identifying the specific HLA allele combination of a patient is relevant in organ donation, risk assessment of autoimmune and infectious diseases and cancer immunotherapy. However, due to the high genetic polymorphism in this region, HLA typing requires specialized methods. We investigated the performance of five next-generation-sequencing (NGS) based HLA typing tools with a non-restricted license namely HLA*LA, Optitype, HISAT-genotype, Kourami and STC-Seq. This evaluation was done for the five HLA loci, HLA-A, -B, -C, -DRB1 and -DQB1 using whole-exome sequencing (WES) samples from 829 individuals. The robustness of the tools to lower coverage was evaluated by subsampling and HLA typing 230 WES samples at coverages ranging from 1X to 100X. The typing accuracy was measured across four typing resolutions. Among these, we present two clinically-relevant typing resolutions, which specifically focus on the peptide binding region. On average, across the five HLA genes, HLA*LA was found to have the highest typing accuracy. For the individual genes, HLA-A, -B and -C, Optitypes typing accuracy was highest and HLA*LA had the highest typing accuracy for HLA-DRB1 and -DQB1. The tools robustness to lower coverage data varied widely and further depended on the specific HLA locus. For all class I loci, Optitype had a typing accuracy above 95% (according to the modification of the amino acids in the functionally relevant portion of the protein) at 50X, but increasing the depth of coverage beyond even 100X could still improve the typing accuracy of HISAT-genotype, Kourami, and STC-seq across all five HLA genes as well as HLA*LAs typing accuracy for HLA-DQB1. HLA typing is also used in studies of ancient DNA (aDNA), which often is based on lower quality sequencing data. Interestingly, we found that Optitypes typing accuracy is not notably impaired by short read length or by DNA damage, which is typical of aDNA, as long as the depth of coverage is sufficiently high.

bioinformatics↗

NetSurfP-2.0: improved prediction of protein structural features by integrated deep learning

The ability to predict local structural features of a protein from the primary sequence is of paramount importance for unravelling its function in absence of experimental structural information. Two main factors affect the utility of potential prediction tools: their accuracy must enable extraction of reliable structural information on the proteins of interest, and their runtime must be low to keep pace with sequencing data being generated at a constantly increasing speed.\n\nHere, we present an updated and extended version of the NetSurfP tool (http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/services/NetSurfP-2.0/), that can predict the most important local structural features with unprecedented accuracy and runtime. NetSurfP-2.0 is sequence-based and uses an architecture composed of convolutional and long short-term memory neural networks trained on solved protein structures. Using a single integrated model, NetSurfP-2.0 predicts solvent accessibility, secondary structure, structural disorder, and backbone dihedral angles for each residue of the input sequences.\n\nWe assessed the accuracy of NetSurfP-2.0 on several independent test datasets and found it to consistently produce state-of-the-art predictions for each of its output features. We observe a correlation of 80% between predictions and experimental data for solvent accessibility, and a precision of 85% on secondary structure 3-class predictions. In addition to improved accuracy, the processing time has been optimized to allow predicting more than 1,000 proteins in less than 2 hours, and complete proteomes in less than 1 day.

bioinformatics↗

The Resistome Of Important Human Pathogens

Genes capable of conferring resistance to clinically used antibiotics have been found in many different natural environments. However, a concise overview of the resistance genes found in common human bacterial pathogens is lacking, which complicates risk ranking of environmental reservoirs. Here, we present an analysis of potential antibiotic resistance genes in the 17 most common bacterial pathogens isolated from humans. We analyzed more than 20,000 bacterial genomes and defined a clinical resistome as the set of resistance genes found across these genomes. Using this database, we uncovered the co-occurrence frequencies of the resistance gene clusters within each species enabling identification of co-dissemination and co-selection patterns. The resistance genes identified in this study represent the subset of the environmental resistome that is clinically relevant and the dataset and approach provides a baseline for further investigations into the abundance of clinically relevant resistance genes across different environments. To facilitate an easy overview the data is presented at the species level at www.resistome.biosustain.dtu.dk.

microbiology↗