Affiliations: Departamento de Bioquímica e Imunologia,
ICB-UFMG, 31270-010, Brazil | Departamento de Ciência da Computação,
ICEX-UFMG, 31270-010, Brazil | Departamento de Biologia Geral, ICB-UFMG, 31270-010,
Brazil | Departamento de Estatística, ICEX-UFMG,
31270-010, Brazil. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Abstract: The use of sequences from specific organisms for annotation requires
that it does not represent great loss of information and that the sequences
available suffice for annotation. In order to investigate whether or not
sequences from model organisms may suffice for annotation of sequences from the
trematode Schistosoma mansoni, we performed local BLAST searches of
S. mansoni sequences against other organisms sequences present in the NCBI
database nr. Results have been inserted into a relational database and
hits to sequences from three model organisms, Caenorhabditis elegans,
Drosophila melanogaster and Homo sapiens have been computed and
compared to hits to sequences from other organisms present in nr; score
values of each alignment have also been registered. Our observations have shown
that a large fraction of orthologous proteins exists in the set of sequences
from the three model organisms selected, and therefore a similar fraction of
transcripts can be annotated when using either nr or model organism
datasets. Moreover, hits to model organisms' sequences are largely as
informative as nr. Results suggest that model organisms provide a
reliable set of sequences to use as a reference database for S. mansoni
sequence annotation, showing the clear possibility of using a restricted
dataset of expected better quality for functional annotation and therefore
supporting secondary database driven annotation approaches.
