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Large palindromes on the primate X Chromosome are preserved by natural selection.

Genome research | 2021

Mammalian sex chromosomes carry large palindromes that harbor protein-coding gene families with testis-biased expression. However, there are few known examples of sex-chromosome palindromes conserved between species. We identified 26 palindromes on the human X Chromosome, constituting more than 2% of its sequence, and characterized orthologous palindromes in the chimpanzee and the rhesus macaque using a clone-based sequencing approach that incorporates full-length nanopore reads. Many of these palindromes are missing or misassembled in the current reference assemblies of these species' genomes. We find that 12 human X palindromes have been conserved for at least 25 million years, with orthologs in both chimpanzee and rhesus macaque. Insertions and deletions between species are significantly depleted within the X palindromes' protein-coding genes compared to their noncoding sequence, demonstrating that natural selection has preserved these gene families. The spacers that separate the left and right arms of palindromes are a site of localized structural instability, with seven of 12 conserved palindromes showing no spacer orthology between human and rhesus macaque. Analysis of the 1000 Genomes Project data set revealed that human X-palindrome spacers are enriched for deletions relative to arms and flanking sequence, including a common spacer deletion that affects 13% of human X Chromosomes. This work reveals an abundance of conserved palindromes on primate X Chromosomes and suggests that protein-coding gene families in palindromes (most of which remain poorly characterized) promote X-palindrome survival in the face of ongoing structural instability.

Pubmed ID: 34290043 RIS Download

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This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


Ensembl (tool)

RRID:SCR_002344

Collection of genome databases for vertebrates and other eukaryotic species with DNA and protein sequence search capabilities. Used to automatically annotate genome, integrate this annotation with other available biological data and make data publicly available via web. Ensembl tools include BLAST, BLAT, BioMart and the Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) for all supported species.

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Bowtie (tool)

RRID:SCR_005476

Software ultrafast memory efficient tool for aligning sequencing reads. Bowtie is short read aligner.

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OMIM (tool)

RRID:SCR_006437

Online catalog of human genes and genetic disorders, for clinical features, phenotypes and genes. Collection of human genes and genetic phenotypes, focusing on relationship between phenotype and genotype. Referenced overviews in OMIM contain information on all known mendelian disorders and variety of related genes. It is updated daily, and entries contain copious links to other genetics resources.

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NCBI (tool)

RRID:SCR_006472

A portal to biomedical and genomic information. NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease.

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1000 Genomes: A Deep Catalog of Human Genetic Variation (tool)

RRID:SCR_006828

International collaboration producing an extensive public catalog of human genetic variation, including SNPs and structural variants, and their haplotype contexts, in an effort to provide a foundation for investigating the relationship between genotype and phenotype. The genomes of about 2500 unidentified people from about 25 populations around the world were sequenced using next-generation sequencing technologies. Redundant sequencing on various platforms and by different groups of scientists of the same samples can be compared. The results of the study are freely and publicly accessible to researchers worldwide. The consortium identified the following populations whose DNA will be sequenced: Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria; Japanese in Tokyo; Chinese in Beijing; Utah residents with ancestry from northern and western Europe; Luhya in Webuye, Kenya; Maasai in Kinyawa, Kenya; Toscani in Italy; Gujarati Indians in Houston; Chinese in metropolitan Denver; people of Mexican ancestry in Los Angeles; and people of African ancestry in the southwestern United States. The goal Project is to find most genetic variants that have frequencies of at least 1% in the populations studied. Sequencing is still too expensive to deeply sequence the many samples being studied for this project. However, any particular region of the genome generally contains a limited number of haplotypes. Data can be combined across many samples to allow efficient detection of most of the variants in a region. The Project currently plans to sequence each sample to about 4X coverage; at this depth sequencing cannot provide the complete genotype of each sample, but should allow the detection of most variants with frequencies as low as 1%. Combining the data from 2500 samples should allow highly accurate estimation (imputation) of the variants and genotypes for each sample that were not seen directly by the light sequencing. All samples from the 1000 genomes are available as lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) and LCL derived DNA from the Coriell Cell Repository as part of the NHGRI Catalog. The sequence and alignment data generated by the 1000genomes project is made available as quickly as possible via their mirrored ftp sites. ftp://ftp.1000genomes.ebi.ac.uk ftp://ftp-trace.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1000genomes

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1000 Genomes Project and AWS (tool)

RRID:SCR_008801

A dataset containing the full genomic sequence of 1,700 individuals, freely available for research use. The 1000 Genomes Project is an international research effort coordinated by a consortium of 75 companies and organizations to establish the most detailed catalogue of human genetic variation. The project has grown to 200 terabytes of genomic data including DNA sequenced from more than 1,700 individuals that researchers can now access on AWS for use in disease research free of charge. The dataset containing the full genomic sequence of 1,700 individuals is now available to all via Amazon S3. The data can be found at: http://s3.amazonaws.com/1000genomes The 1000 Genomes Project aims to include the genomes of more than 2,662 individuals from 26 populations around the world, and the NIH will continue to add the remaining genome samples to the data collection this year. Public Data Sets on AWS provide a centralized repository of public data hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The data can be seamlessly accessed from AWS services such Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), which provide organizations with the highly scalable compute resources needed to take advantage of these large data collections. AWS is storing the public data sets at no charge to the community. Researchers pay only for the additional AWS resources they need for further processing or analysis of the data. All 200 TB of the latest 1000 Genomes Project data is available in a publicly available Amazon S3 bucket. You can access the data via simple HTTP requests, or take advantage of the AWS SDKs in languages such as Ruby, Java, Python, .NET and PHP. Researchers can use the Amazon EC2 utility computing service to dive into this data without the usual capital investment required to work with data at this scale. AWS also provides a number of orchestration and automation services to help teams make their research available to others to remix and reuse. Making the data available via a bucket in Amazon S3 also means that customers can crunch the information using Hadoop via Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and take advantage of the growing collection of tools for running bioinformatics job flows, such as CloudBurst and Crossbow.

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BLAT (tool)

RRID:SCR_011919

Software designed to quickly find sequences of 95% and greater similarity of length 25 bases or more.

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RepeatMasker (tool)

RRID:SCR_012954

Software tool that screens DNA sequences for interspersed repeats and low complexity DNA sequences. The output of the program is a detailed annotation of the repeats that are present in the query sequence as well as a modified version of the query sequence in which all the annotated repeats have been masked (default: replaced by Ns). Currently over 56% of human genomic sequence is identified and masked by the program. Sequence comparisons in RepeatMasker are performed by one of several popular search engines including nhmmer, cross_match, ABBlast/WUBlast, RMBlast and Decypher. RepeatMasker makes use of curated libraries of repeats and currently supports Dfam ( profile HMM library ) and RepBase ( consensus sequence library ).

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PAML (tool)

RRID:SCR_014932

Package of programs for phylogenetic analyses of DNA or protein sequences using maximum likelihood. PAML estimates parameters and tests hypotheses to study the evolutionary process from a phylogenetic tree.

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GENCODE (tool)

RRID:SCR_014966

Human and mouse genome annotation project which aims to identify all gene features in the human genome using computational analysis, manual annotation, and experimental validation.

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ClustalW (tool)

RRID:SCR_017277

Web sevice of ClustalW provided by DNA data bank of Japan.

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biomaRt (tool)

RRID:SCR_019214

Software package that integrates BioMart data resources with data analysis software in Bioconductor. Can annotate range of gene or gene product identifiers including Entrez Gene and Affymetrix probe identifiers with information such as gene symbol, chromosomal coordinates, Gene Ontology and OMIM annotation. Enables retrieval of genomic sequences and single nucleotide polymorphism information, which can be used in data analysis.

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