Background: Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for all life forms. Like most unicellular organisms, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae transports and catabolizes good nitrogen sources in preference to poor ones. Nitrogen catabolite repression (NCR) refers to this selection mechanism. All known nitrogen catabolite pathways are regulated by four regulators. The ultimate goal is to infer the complete nitrogen catabolite pathways. Bioinformatics approaches offer the possibility to identify putative NCR genes and to discard uninteresting genes.
Results: We present a machine learning approach where the identification of putative NCR genes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is formulated as a supervised two-class classification problem. Classifiers predict whether genes are NCR-sensitive or not from a large number of variables related to the GATA motif in the upstream non-coding sequences of the genes. The positive and negative training sets are composed of annotated NCR genes and manually-selected genes known to be insensitive to NCR, respectively. Different classifiers and variable selection methods are compared. We show that all classifiers make significant and biologically valid predictions by comparing these predictions to annotated and putative NCR genes, and by performing several negative controls. In particular, the inferred NCR genes significantly overlap with putative NCR genes identified in three genome-wide experimental and bioinformatics studies.
Conclusion: These results suggest that our approach can successfully identify potential NCR genes. Hence, the dimensionality of the problem of identifying all genes involved in NCR is drastically reduced.
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| 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 |
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| Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Gene | Gene Systematic Name | Phenotype | Experiment Type | Experiment Type Category | Mutant Information | Strain Background | Chemical | Details | Reference |
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| Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Gene | Gene Systematic Name | Disease Ontology Term | Disease Ontology Term ID | Qualifier | Evidence | Method | Source | Assigned On | Reference |
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| 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 |
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| Site | Modification | Modifier | Source | Reference |
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| Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Interactor | Interactor Systematic Name | Interactor | Interactor Systematic Name | Allele | Assay | Annotation | Action | Phenotype | SGA score | P-value | Source | Reference | Note |
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| Evidence ID | Analyze ID | Interactor | Interactor Systematic Name | Interactor | Interactor Systematic Name | Assay | Annotation | Action | Modification | Source | Reference | Note |
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| Complement ID | Locus ID | Gene | Species | Gene ID | Strain background | Direction | Details | Source | Reference |
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