Characterization of Toxoplasma gondii 5' UTR with Encyclopedic TSS Information

J Parasitol. 2011 Oct 19. [Epub ahead of print]

Characterization of Toxoplasma gondii 5' UTR with Encyclopedic TSS Information.

Yamagishi J, Watanabe J, Goo YK, Masatani T, Suzuki Y, Xuan X.

SourceObihiro University of Agriculture and Veterynary Medicine, Professor, National Research Center for Protozoan Diseases, Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterynary Medicine.

Abstract
Abstract The 5' UTR is widely involved in gene expression via post-transcriptional regulation. However, the detail profile of the 5' UTR for Toxoplasma gondii has not demonstrated yet. To investigate the issue, we compared the predicted ORFs and transcription start sites (TSSs) of T. gondii obtained by TSS-seq, a method which enables to analyze encyclopedic TSSs with next-generation sequencers. As a result, it was demonstrated that the mode length of the 5' UTR distributes between 120 and 140 nts when a subset of genes with predicted signal peptides was examined. On the contrary, when genes without the signal peptide were examined, the length was extended to around 600 nts (nucleotides). Because additional information on the predicted signal peptide endows increased reliability to the 5' end estimation of each ORF, we believe that the former value was more reliable as a representative 5' UTR length of T. gondii and that the discrepancy indicates that current predictions of the 5' end of the ORF were less accurate and considerably more discordant with the natural status.

PMID:22010783[PubMed - as supplied by publisher]