MOTIVATION: The identification of orthologous gene pairs is generally based on sequence similarity. Gene pairs that are mutually 'best hits' between the genomes being compared are asserted to be orthologs. Although this method identifies most orthologous gene pairs with high confidence, it will miss a fraction of them, especially genes in duplicated gene families. In addition, the approach depends heavily on the completeness and quality of gene annotation. When the gene sequences are not correctly represented the approach is unlikely to find the correct ortholog. To overcome these limitations, we have developed an approach to identify orthologous gene pairs using shared chromosomal synteny and the annotation of protein function. RESULTS: Assembled mouse and human genomes were used to identify the regions of conserved synteny between these genomes. 'Syntenic anchors' are conserved non-repetitive locations between mouse and human genomes. Using these anchors, we identified blocks of sequences that contain consistently ordered anchors between the two genomes (syntenic blocks). The synteny information has been used to help us identify orthologous gene pairs between mouse and human genomes. The approach combines the mutual selection of the best tBlastX hits between human and mouse transcripts, and inferring gene orthologous relationships based on sharing syntenic anchors, collocating in the same syntenic blocks and sharing the same annotated protein function. Using this approach, we were able to find 19,357 orthologous gene pairs between human and mouse genomes, a 20% increase in the number of orthologs identified by conventional approaches.

Identifying genes within large regions of uncharacterized DNA is a difficult undertaking and is currently the focus of many research efforts. We describe a gene localization and modeling system, called GRAIL. GRAIL is a multiple sensor-neural network-based system. It localizes genes in anonymous DNA sequence by recognizing features related to protein-coding regions and the boundaries of coding regions, and then combines the recognized features using a neural network system. Localized coding regions are then "optimally" parsed into a gene model. Through years of extensive testing GRAIL consistently achieves about 90% of coding portions of test genes with a false positive rate of about 10% A number of genes for major genetic diseases have been located through the use of GRAIL, and over 1000 research laboratories worldwide use GRAIL on regular bases for localization of genes on their newly sequenced DNA.

Liver transplantation k a well-established therapeutic option forpatients with end-stage liver dkease.However, up to 20% of transplanted livers fail to have adequate function initially, and at least harf of those will eventually fail.Accurate, early prediction of outcome may ameliorate thk situation by encouraging retransplantation before the patient's condition becomes irreversible.In thk shrdy, clinical information was gathered prospectively for 295 patients who underwent liver transplantation at the Universiy of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and was divided into sets.The feed-forward, fully connected, neural networks had 7 or 8 inputs, a single hidden layer conskting of 3 nodes and a single output node cfailure=I, success=O).The networks were trained with data from a randomly selected subset of 240 patients while the remaining 55 patients made up the test set.The preoperative (day 0) data conskted of patient demographics plus the results of standard liver function tests.The "day 1" data consisted information gathered during surgery plus the prediction of outcome from day 0. Data for days 2-5 included resultsfrom standard liver function tests plus the prediction of outcome from the previous day's network The network was trained using a standard back propagation algorithm.naining was assessed by testing the abiliy of the network to correctly predict the outcome of the 55 patients in the test set.The accuracy of prediction by the neural network improved each day and so by day 5, 98% of the grafi survivors in the test set were correctly predicted while 88% of grafi failures in the test set were correctly predicted.

This paper presents an algorithm for detecting and 'correcting' sequencing errors that occur in DNA coding regions. The types of sequencing errors addressed are insertions and deletions (indels) of DNA bases. The goal is to provide a capability which makes single-pass or low-redundancy sequence data more informative, reducing the need for high-redundancy sequencing for gene identification and characterization purposes. This would permit improved sequencing efficiency and reduce genome sequencing costs. The algorithm detects sequencing errors by discovering changes in the statistically preferred reading frame within a putative coding region and then inserts a number of 'neutral' bases at a perceived reading frame transition point to make the putative exon candidate frame consistent. We have implemented the algorithm as a front-end subsystem of the GRAIL DNA sequence analysis system to construct a version which is very error tolerant and also intend to use this as a testbed for further development of sequencing error-correction technology. Preliminary test results have shown the usefulness of this algorithm and also exhibited some of its weakness, providing possible directions for further improvement. On a test set consisting of 68 human DNA sequences with 1% randomly generated indels in coding regions, the algorithm detected and corrected 76% of the indels. The average distance between the position of an indel and the predicted one was 9.4 bases. With this subsystem in place, GRAIL correctly predicted 89% of the coding messages with 10% false message on the 'corrected' sequences, compared to 69% correctly predicted coding messages and 11% falsely predicted messages on the 'corrupted' sequences using standard GRAIL II method (version 1.2).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

This paper presents a computationally efficient algorithm, the Gene Assembly Program III (GAP III), for constructing gene models from a set of accurately-predicted 'exons'. The input to the algorithm is a set of clusters of exon candidates, generated by a new version of the GRAIL coding region recognition system. The exon candidates of a cluster differ in their presumed edges and occasionally in their reading frames. Each exon candidate has a numerical score representing its 'probability' of being an actual exon. GAP III uses a dynamic programming algorithm to construct a gene model, complete or partial, by optimizing a predefined objective function. The optimal gene models constructed by GAP III correspond very well with the structures of genes which have been determined experimentally and reported in the Genome Sequence Database (GSDB). On a test set of 137 human and mouse DNA sequences consisting of 954 true exons, GAP III constructed 137 gene models using 892 exons, among which 859 (859/954 = 90%) are true exons and 33 (33/892 = 3%) are false positive. Among the 859 true positives, 635 (74%) match the actual exons exactly, and 838 (98%) have at least one edge correct. GAP III is computationally efficient. If we use E and C to represent the total number of exon candidates in all clusters and the number of clusters, respectively, the running time of GAP III is proportional to (E x C).