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Biology subjects

Stemerdink, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Stemerdink, M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

A proteogenomic atlas of the human neural retina

The human neural retina is a complex tissue with abundant alternative splicing and more than 10% of genetic variants linked to inherited retinal diseases (IRDs) alter splicing. Traditional short-read RNA-sequencing methods have been used for understanding retina-specific splicing but have limitations in detailing transcript isoforms. To address this, we generated a proteogenomic atlas that combines PacBio long-read RNA-sequencing data with mass spectrometry and whole genome sequencing data of three healthy human neural retina samples. We identified nearly 60,000 transcript isoforms, of which approximately one-third are novel. Additionally, ten novel peptides confirmed novel transcript isoforms. For instance, we identified a novel IMPDH1 isoform with a novel combination of known exons that is supported by peptide evidence. Our research underscores the potential of in-depth tissue-specific transcriptomic analysis to enhance our grasp of tissue-specific alternative splicing. The data underlying the proteogenomic atlas are available via EGA with identifier EGAD50000000101, via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD045187, and accessible through the UCSC genome browser. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=149 SRC="FIGDIR/small/595273v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (30K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1e0810org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1a382b6org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1da7d9eorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@16d29a3_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

genetics↗

Multi-omic profiling of pathogen-stimulated primary immune cells

We performed long-read transcriptome and proteome profiling of pathogen-stimulated peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from healthy donors to discover new transcript and protein isoforms expressed during immune responses to diverse pathogens. Long-read transcriptome profiling reveals novel sequences and isoform switching induced upon pathogen stimulation, including transcripts that are difficult to detect using traditional short-read sequencing. Widespread loss of intron retention occurs as a common result of all pathogen stimulations. We highlight novel transcripts of NFKB1 and CASP1 that may indicate novel immunological mechanisms. RNA expression differences did not result in differences in the amounts of secreted proteins. Clustering analysis of secreted proteins revealed a correlation between chemokine (receptor) expression on the RNA and protein levels in C. albicans- and Poly(I:C)-stimulated PBMCs. Isoform aware long-read sequencing of pathogen-stimulated immune cells highlights the potential of these methods to identify novel transcripts, revealing a more complex transcriptome landscape than previously appreciated.

immunology↗

SUsPECT: A pipeline for variant effect prediction based on custom long-read transcriptomes for improved clinical variant annotation

Our incomplete knowledge of the human transcriptome impairs the detection of disease-causing variants, in particular in transcripts only expressed under certain conditions. These transcripts are often lacking from reference transcript sets, such as Ensembl/GENCODE and RefSeq, and could be relevant for establishing genetic diagnoses. We present SUsPECT (Solving Unsolved Patient Exomes/gEnomes using Custom Transcriptomes), a pipeline based on the Ensembl Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) to predict variant impact on custom transcript sets, such as those generated by long-read RNA-sequencing, for downstream prioritization. Our pipeline predicts the functional consequence and likely deleteriousness scores for missense variants in the context of novel open reading frames predicted from any transcriptome. We demonstrate the utility of SUsPECT by uncovering potential mutational mechanisms of pathogenic variants in ClinVar that are predicted to be benign using the reference transcript annotation. In further support of SUsPECTs utility, we identified an enrichment of immune-related variants predicted to have a more severe molecular consequence when annotating with a newly generated transcriptome from stimulated immune cells instead of the reference transcriptome. Our pipeline outputs crucial information for further prioritization of potentially disease-causing variants for any disease and will become increasingly useful as more long-read RNA sequencing datasets become available.

bioinformatics↗