Background: The identification of genes essential for survival is of theoretical importance in the understanding of the minimal requirements for cellular life, and of practical importance in the identification of potential drug targets in novel pathogens. With the great time and expense required for experimental studies aimed at constructing a catalog of essential genes in a given organism, a computational approach which could identify essential genes with high accuracy would be of great value.
Results: We gathered numerous features which could be generated automatically from genome sequence data and assessed their relationship to essentiality, and subsequently utilized machine learning to construct an integrated classifier of essential genes in both S. cerevisiae and E. coli. When looking at single features, phyletic retention, a measure of the number of organisms an ortholog is present in, was the most predictive of essentiality. Furthermore, during construction of our phyletic retention feature we for the first time explored the evolutionary relationship among the set of organisms in which the presence of a gene is most predictive of essentiality. We found that in both E. coli and S. cerevisiae the optimal sets always contain host-associated organisms with small genomes which are closely related to the reference. Using five optimally selected organisms, we were able to improve predictive accuracy as compared to using all available sequenced organisms. We hypothesize the predictive power of these genomes is a consequence of the process of reductive evolution, by which many parasites and symbionts evolved their gene content. In addition, essentiality is measured in rich media, a condition which resembles the environments of these organisms in their hosts where many nutrients are provided. Finally, we demonstrate that integration of our most highly predictive features using a probabilistic classifier resulted in accuracies surpassing any individual feature.
Conclusion: Using features obtainable directly from sequence data, we were able to construct a classifier which can predict essential genes with high accuracy. Furthermore, our analysis of the set of genomes in which the presence of a gene is most predictive of essentiality may suggest ways in which targeted sequencing can be used in the identification of essential genes. In summary, the methods presented here can aid in the reduction of time and money invested in essential gene identification by targeting those genes for experimentation which are predicted as being essential with a high probability.
Increase the total number of rows showing on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table.
Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Gene/Complex | Systematic Name/Complex Accession | Qualifier | Gene Ontology Term ID | Gene Ontology Term | Aspect | Annotation Extension | Evidence | Method | Source | Assigned On | Reference |
---|
Increase the total number of rows showing on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table; click on the small "i" buttons located within a cell for an annotation to view further details.
Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Gene | Gene Systematic Name | Phenotype | Experiment Type | Experiment Type Category | Mutant Information | Strain Background | Chemical | Details | Reference |
---|
Increase the total number of rows showing on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table.
Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Gene | Gene Systematic Name | Disease Ontology Term | Disease Ontology Term ID | Qualifier | Evidence | Method | Source | Assigned On | Reference |
---|
Increase the total number of rows displayed on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; to filter the table by a specific experiment type, type a keyword into the Filter box (for example, “microarray”); download this table as a .txt file using the Download button or click Analyze to further view and analyze the list of target genes using GO Term Finder, GO Slim Mapper, SPELL, or YeastMine.
Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Regulator | Regulator Systematic Name | Target | Target Systematic Name | Direction | Regulation of | Happens During | Regulator Type | Direction | Regulation Of | Happens During | Method | Evidence | Strain Background | Reference |
---|
Increase the total number of rows showing on this page by using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through its pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table.
Site | Modification | Modifier | Source | Reference |
---|
Increase the total number of rows showing on this page by using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table; click on the small "i" buttons located within a cell for an annotation to view further details about experiment type and any other genes involved in the interaction.
Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Interactor | Interactor Systematic Name | Interactor | Interactor Systematic Name | Allele | Assay | Annotation | Action | Phenotype | SGA score | P-value | Source | Reference | Note |
---|
Increase the total number of rows showing on this page by using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table; click on the small "i" buttons located within a cell for an annotation to view further details about experiment type and any other genes involved in the interaction.
Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Interactor | Interactor Systematic Name | Interactor | Interactor Systematic Name | Assay | Annotation | Action | Modification | Source | Reference | Note |
---|
Increase the total number of rows showing on this page by using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through its pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table.
Complement ID | Locus ID | Gene | Species | Gene ID | Strain background | Direction | Details | Source | Reference |
---|
Increase the total number of rows displayed on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table; download this table as a .txt file using the Download button;
Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Dataset | Description | Keywords | Number of Conditions | Reference |
---|
Increase the total number of rows displayed on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table; download this table as a .txt file using the Download button;
Evidence ID | Analyze ID | File | Description |
---|