Race, Ethics and Equity Course

 

Good explanation of relevance of Society and Ethics

Lee Min says:

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The genesis of this paper is the proposal that genomes containing a poor percentage of guanosine and cytosine (GC) nucleotide pairs lead to proteomes more prone to aggregation than those encoded by GC-rich genomes. As a consequence these organisms are also more dependent on the protein folding machinery. If true, this interesting hypothesis could establish a direct link between the tendency to aggregate and the genomic code.

In their paper, the authors have tested the hypothesis on the genomes of eubacteria using a genome-wide approach based on multiple machine learning models. Eubacteria are an interesting set of organisms which have an appreciably high variation in their nucleotide composition with the percentage of CG genetic material ranging from 20% to 70%. The authors classified different eubacterial proteomes in terms of their aggregation propensity and chaperone-dependence. For this purpose, new classifiers had to be developed which were based on carefully curated data. They took account for twenty-four different features among which are sequence patterns, the pseudo amino acid composition of phenylalanine, aspartic and glutamic acid, the distribution of positively...