Shewanella oneidensis is a highly motile organism by virtue of a polar flagellum. Unlike most flagellated bacteria, it contains only one major chromosome segment encoding the components of the flagellum with the exception of the motor proteins. In this region, three genes encode flagellinsaccording to the original genome annotation. However, we find that only flaA and flaB encode functional filament subunits. Although these two genesare under the control of different promoters, they are actively transcribed and subsequently translated, producing a considerable number of flagellin proteins. Additionally, both flagellins are able to interact with their chaperon FliS and are subjected to feedback regulation. Furthermore, FlaA and FlaB are glycosylated by a pathwayinvolving a major glycosylating enzyme,PseB, in spite of the lack of the majority of theconsensus glycosylation sites. In conclusion, flagellar assembly in S. oneidensis has novel features despite the conservation of homologous genes across taxa.

Shewanella oneidensis is able to respire on a variety of organic and inorganic substrates, including nitrate and nitrite. Conversion of nitrate to nitrite and nitrite to ammonium is catalysed by periplasmic nitrate and nitrite reductases (NAP and NRF) respectively. Global regulator Crp (cyclic AMP receptor protein) is essential for growth of S. oneidensis on both nitrate and nitrite. In this study, we discovered that crp mutants are not only severely deficient in nitrate or nitrite respiration, but are also hypersensitive to nitrite. This hypersusceptibility phenotype is independent of nitrite respiration. Using random transposon mutagenesis, we obtained 73 Δcrp suppressor strains resistant to nitrite. Transposon insertion sites in 24 suppressor strains were exclusively mapped in the region upstream of the cyd operon encoding a cytochrome bd oxidase, resulting in expression of the operon now driven by a Crp-independent promoter. Further investigation indicated that the promoter in suppressor strains comes from the transposon. Mutational analysis of the cydB gene (encoding the essential subunit II of the bd oxidase) confirmed that the cytochrome bd oxidase confers nitrite resistance to S. oneidensis.

We have previously illustrated the nitrate/nitrite respiratory pathway of Shewanella oneidensis, which is renowned for its remarkable versatility in respiration. Here we investigated the systems regulating the pathway with a reliable approach which enables characterization of mutants impaired in nitrate/nitrite respiration by guaranteeing biomass. The S. oneidensis genome encodes an Escherichia coli NarQ/NarX homolog SO3981 and two E. coli NarP/NarL homologs SO1860 and SO3982. Results of physiological characterization and mutational analyses demonstrated that S. oneidensis possesses a single two-component system (TCS) for regulation of nitrate/nitrite respiration, consisting of the sensor kinase SO3981(NarQ) and the response regulator SO3982(NarP). The TCS directly controls the transcription of nap and nrfA (genes encoding nitrate and nitrite reductases, respectively) but regulates the former less tightly than the latter. Additionally, phosphorylation at residue 57 of SO3982 is essential for its DNA-binding capacity. At the global control level, Crp is found to regulate expression of narQP as well as nap and nrfA. In contrast to NarP-NarQ, Crp is more essential for nap rather than nrfA.

BackgroundThe GENCODE project has collected over 10,000 human long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) genes. However, the vast majority of them remain to be functionally characterized. Computational investigation of potential functions of human lncRNA genes is helpful to guide further experimental studies on lncRNAs.ResultsIn this study, based on expression correlation between lncRNAs and protein-coding genes across 19 human normal tissues, we used the hypergeometric test to functionally annotate a single lncRNA or a set of lncRNAs with significantly enriched functional terms among the protein-coding genes that are significantly co-expressed with the lncRNA(s). The functional terms include all nodes in the Gene Ontology (GO) and 4,380 human biological pathways collected from 12 pathway databases. We successfully mapped 9,625 human lncRNA genes to GO terms and biological pathways, and then developed the first ontology-driven user-friendly web interface named lncRNA2Function, which enables researchers to browse the lncRNAs associated with a specific functional term, the functional terms associated with a specific lncRNA, or to assign functional terms to a set of human lncRNA genes, such as a cluster of co-expressed lncRNAs. The lncRNA2Function is freely available at http://mlg.hit.edu.cn/lncrna2function.ConclusionsThe LncRNA2Function is an important resource for further investigating the functions of a single human lncRNA, or functionally annotating a set of human lncRNAs of interest.

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have emerged as critical regulators of genes at epigenetic, transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels, yet what genes are regulated by a specific lncRNA remains to be characterized. To assess the effects of the lncRNA on gene expression, an increasing number of researchers profiled the genome-wide or individual gene expression level change after knocking down or overexpressing the lncRNA. Herein, we describe a curated database named LncRNA2Target, which stores lncRNA-to-target genes and is publicly accessible at http://www.lncrna2target.org. A gene was considered as a target of a lncRNA if it is differentially expressed after the lncRNA knockdown or overexpression. LncRNA2Target provides a web interface through which its users can search for the targets of a particular lncRNA or for the lncRNAs that target a particular gene. Both search types are performed either by browsing a provided catalog of lncRNA names or by inserting lncRNA/target gene IDs/names in a search box.

Speaker embedding models that utilize neural networks to map utterances to a space where distances reflect similarity between speakers have driven recent progress in the speaker recognition task. However, there is still a significant performance gap between recognizing speakers in the training set and unseen speakers. The latter case corresponds to the fewshot learning task, where a trained model is evaluated on unseen classes. Here, we optimize a speaker embedding model with prototypical network loss (PNL), a state-of-the-art approach for the few-shot image classification task. The resulting embedding model outperforms the state-of-the-art triplet loss based models in both speaker verification and identification tasks, for both seen and unseen speakers.

Shewanella oneidensis exhibits a remarkable versatility in anaerobic respiration, which largely relies on its diverse respiratory pathways. Some of these are expressed in response to the existence of their corresponding electron acceptors (EAs) under aerobic conditions. However, little is known about respiration and the impact of non-oxygen EAs on the physiology of the microorganism when oxygen is present. Here we undertook a study to elucidate the basis for nitrate and nitrite inhibition of growth under aerobic conditions. We discovered that nitrate in the form of NaNO3 exerts its inhibitory effects as a precursor to nitrite at low concentrations and as an osmotic-stress provider (Na+) at high concentrations. In contrast, nitrite is extremely toxic, with 25 mM abolishing growth completely. We subsequently found that oxygen represses utilization of all EAs but nitrate. To order to utilize EAs with less positive redox potential, such as nitrite and fumarate, S. oneidensis must enter the stationary phase, when oxygen respiration becomes unfavorable. In addition, we demonstrated that during aerobic respiration the cytochrome bd oxidase confers S. oneidensis resistance to nitrite, which likely functions via nitric oxide (NO).

High-throughput genomic technologies like lncRNA microarray and RNA-Seq often generate a set of lncRNAs of interest, yet little is known about the transcriptional regulation of the set of lncRNA genes. Here, based on ChIP-Seq peak lists of transcription factors (TFs) from ENCODE and annotated human lncRNAs from GENCODE, we developed a web-based interface titled “TF2lncRNA,” where TF peaks from each ChIP-Seq experiment are crossed with the genomic coordinates of a set of input lncRNAs, to identify which TFs present a statistically significant number of binding sites (peaks) within the regulatory region of the input lncRNA genes. The input can be a set of coexpressed lncRNA genes or any other cluster of lncRNA genes. Users can thus infer which TFs are likely to be common transcription regulators of the set of lncRNAs. In addition, users can retrieve all lncRNAs potentially regulated by a specific TF in a specific cell line of interest or retrieve all TFs that have one or more binding sites in the regulatory region of a given lncRNA in the specific cell line. TF2LncRNA is an efficient and easy-to-use web-based tool.