Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 1111.6172

Non-alignment comparison of human and high primate genomes

Abstract

Compositional spectra (CS) analysis based on k-mer scoring of DNA sequences was employed in this study for dot-plot comparison of human and primate genomes. The detection of extended conserved synteny regions was based on continuous fuzzy similarity rather than on chains of discrete anchors (genes or highly conserved noncoding elements). In addition to the high correspondence found in the comparisons of whole-genome sequences, a good similarity was also found after masking gene sequences, indicating that CS analysis manages to reveal phylogenetic signal in the organization of noncoding part of the genome sequences, including repetitive DNA and the genome "dark matter". Obviously, the possibility to reveal parallel ordering depends on the signal of common ancestor sequence organization varying locally along the corresponding segments of the compared genomes. We explored two sources contributing to this signal: sequence composition (GC content) and sequence organization (abundances of k-mers in the usual A,T,G,C or purine-pyrimidine alphabets). Whole-genome comparisons based on GC distribution along the analyzed sequences indeed gives reasonable results, but combining it with k-mer abundances dramatically improves the ordering quality, indicating that compositional and organizational heterogeneity comprise complementary sources of information on evolutionary conserved similarity of genome sequences.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

V. M. Kirzhner, S. Frenkel, A. B. Korol. 2011-11-26. Non-alignment comparison of human and high primate genomes. https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.923303

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Transcriptomic Models for Immunotherapy Response Prediction Show Limited Cross-cohort Generalisability

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have transformed cancer therapy; yet substantial proportion of patients exhibit intrinsic or acquired resistance, making accurate pre-treatment response prediction a critical unmet need. Transcriptomics-based biomarkers derived from bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) offer a promising avenue for capturing tumour-immune interactions, yet the cross-cohort generalisability of existing prediction models remains unclear.We systematically benchmark nine state-of-the-art transcriptomic ICI response predictors, five bulk RNA-seq-based models (COMPASS, IRNet, NetBio, IKCScore, and TNBC-ICI) and four scRNA-seq-based models (PRECISE, DeepGeneX, Tres and scCURE), using publicly available independent datasets unseen during model development. Overall, predictive performance was modest: bulk RNA-seq models performed at or near chance level across most cohorts, while scRNA-seq models showed only marginal improvements. Pathway-level analyses revealed sparse and inconsistent biomarker signals across models. Although scRNA-seq-based predictors converged on immune-related programs such as allograft rejection, bulk RNA-seq-based models exhibited little reproducible overlap. PRECISE and NetBio identified the most coherent immune-related themes, whereas IRNet predominantly captured metabolic pathways weakly aligned with ICI biology. Together, these findings demonstrate the limited cross-cohort robustness and biological consistency of current transcriptomic ICI prediction models, underscoring the need for improved domain adaptation, standardised preprocessing, and biologically grounded model design.

q-bio.GN

Large Language Model Agents for Evidence Based Genetic Disease Severity Classification

Disease severity classification for genetic conditions is subjective and labor-intensive, creating bottlenecks in genomic screening, where commercial panels vary widely in size and overlap. We developed an autonomous AI agent integrating Reasoning and Acting (ReAct) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to classify 10,211 Human Phenotype Ontology terms. It uses American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG)-endorsed severity guidelines and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) quality-of-life criteria to retrieve PubMed literature, generate interpretable reasoning chains, and independently verify claims. At the phenotype level, using expert-curated cohorts, the agent achieved 93.55% accuracy (MCC 0.9237) with 82.6% to 91.4% of claims supported by direct evidence or valid inferences. Gene-level severity was aggregated across 8,738 pairs, identifying 3,283 autosomal recessive pairs with severe or profound presentations. External validation showed 95.2% concordance with Mackenzie's Mission gene list. This system enables standardized panel design by providing reliable, automated classification supported by direct evidence.

q-bio.GN

Harmonised benchmarking of foundation models for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics reveals context-dependent generalisation

Single-cell and spatial foundation models promise transferable biological representations, yet their generality remains largely untested across modalities, biological domains and analytical tasks. We benchmarked six representative models, Nicheformer, CellPLM, scGPT-spatial, GenePT, scELMo and Novae, using a harmonised framework spanning scRNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics and Perturb-seq. We evaluated zero-shot and continually pretrained clustering, supervised annotation, marker-gene concordance and perturbation prediction. Model performance was strongly conditional: expression-trained cell-level transformers best resolved many cell-identity tasks, spatial and graph-aware models better preserved tissue architecture, and language-derived gene embeddings were competitive for selected perturbation-response metrics. No model dominated across tasks, and rankings shifted with modality, preprocessing, tokenisation, biological prior, domain shift and metric choice. This benchmark provides practical guidance for model selection and argues that future models should be judged by biological generalisation, interpretability and perturbation-grounded validity, not by scale or leaderboard performance alone.

q-bio.GN