Detecting novel genes with sparse arrays

Mikko Arvas* (Corresponding Author), Niina Haiminen, Bart Smit, Jari Rautio, Marika Vitikainen, Marilyn Wiebe, Diego Martinez, Christine Chee, Joe Kunkel, Charles Sanchez, Mary Anne Nelson, Tiina Pakula, Markku Saloheimo, Merja Penttilä, Teemu Kivioja

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

    9 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Species-specific genes play an important role in defining the phenotype of an organism. However, current gene prediction methods can only efficiently find genes that share features such as sequence similarity or general sequence characteristics with previously known genes. Novel sequencing methods and tiling arrays can be used to find genes without prior information and they have demonstrated that novel genes can still be found from extensively studied model organisms. Unfortunately, these methods are expensive and thus are not easily applicable, e.g., to finding genes that are expressed only in very specific conditions.We demonstrate a method for finding novel genes with sparse arrays, applying it on the 33.9. Mb genome of the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei. Our computational method does not require normalisations between arrays and it takes into account the multiple-testing problem typical for analysis of microarray data. In contrast to tiling arrays, that use overlapping probes, only one 25mer microarray oligonucleotide probe was used for every 100. b. Thus, only relatively little space on a microarray slide was required to cover the intergenic regions of a genome. The analysis was done as a by-product of a conventional microarray experiment with no additional costs. We found at least 23 good candidates for novel transcripts that could code for proteins and all of which were expressed at high levels. Candidate genes were found to neighbour ire1 and cre1 and many other regulatory genes. Our simple, low-cost method can easily be applied to finding novel species-specific genes without prior knowledge of their sequence properties.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)41-51
    JournalGene
    Volume467
    Issue number1-2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2010
    MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

    Keywords

    • Gene prediction
    • Microarray
    • Moulds
    • Transcript

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Detecting novel genes with sparse arrays'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this