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The subcellular localization of proteins is very important for characterizing its function in a cell. Accurate prediction of the subcellular locations in computational paradigm has been an active area of interest. Most of the work has been focused on single localization prediction. Only few studies have discussed the multi-target localization, but have not achieved good accuracy so far; in plant sciences, very limited work has been done. Here we report the development of a novel tool Plant-mSubP, which is based on integrated machine learning approaches to efficiently predict the subcellular localizations in plant proteomes. The proposed approach predicts with high accuracy 11 single localizations and three dual locations of plant cell. Several hybrid features based on composition and physicochemical properties of a protein such as amino acid composition, pseudo amino acid composition, auto-correlation descriptors, quasi-sequence-order descriptors and hybrid features are used to represent the protein. The performance of the proposed method has been assessed through a training set as well as an independent test set. Using the hybrid feature of the pseudo amino acid composition, N-Center-C terminal amino acid composition and the dipeptide composition (PseAAC-NCC-DIPEP), an overall accuracy of 81.97 %, 84.75 % and 87.88 % is achieved on the training data set of proteins containing the single-label, single- and dual-label combined, and dual-label proteins, respectively. When tested on the independent data, an accuracy of 64.36 %, 64.84 % and 81.08 % is achieved on the single-label, single- and dual-label, and dual-label proteins, respectively. The prediction models have been implemented on a web server available at http://bioinfo.usu.edu/Plant-mSubP/. The results indicate that the proposed approach is comparable to the existing methods in single localization prediction and outperforms all other existing tools when compared for dual-label proteins. The prediction tool will be a useful resource for better annotation of various plant proteomes.

BackgroundEvery year pathogenic organisms cause billions of dollars' worth damage to crops and livestock. In agriculture, study of plant-microbe interactions is demanding a special attention to develop management strategies for the destructive pathogen induced diseases that cause huge crop losses every year worldwide. Pseudomonas syringae is a major bacterial leaf pathogen that causes diseases in a wide range of plant species. Among its various strains, pathovar tomato strain DC3000 (PstDC3000) is asserted to infect the plant host Arabidopsis thaliana and thus, has been accepted as a model system for experimental characterization of the molecular dynamics of plant-pathogen interactions. Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play a critical role in initiating pathogenesis and maintaining infection. Understanding the PPI network between a host and pathogen is a critical step for studying the molecular basis of pathogenesis. The experimental study of PPIs at a large scale is very scarce and also the high throughput experimental results show high false positive rate. Hence, there is a need for developing efficient computational models to predict the interaction between host and pathogen in a genome scale, and find novel candidate effectors and/or their targets.ResultsIn this study, we used two computational approaches, the interolog and the domain-based to predict the interactions between Arabidopsis and PstDC3000 in genome scale. The interolog method relies on protein sequence similarity to conduct the PPI prediction. A Pseudomonas protein and an Arabidopsis protein are predicted to interact with each other if an experimentally verified interaction exists between their respective homologous proteins in another organism. The domain-based method uses domain interaction information, which is derived from known protein 3D structures, to infer the potential PPIs. If a Pseudomonas and an Arabidopsis protein contain an interacting domain pair, one can expect the two proteins to interact with each other. The interolog-based method predicts ~0.79M PPIs involving around 7700 Arabidopsis and 1068 Pseudomonas proteins in the full genome. The domain-based method predicts 85650 PPIs comprising 11432 Arabidopsis and 887 Pseudomonas proteins. Further, around 11000 PPIs have been identified as interacting from both the methods as a consensus.ConclusionThe present work predicts the protein-protein interaction network between Arabidopsis thaliana and Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 in a genome wide scale with a high confidence. Although the predicted PPIs may contain some false positives, the computational methods provide reasonable amount of interactions which can be further validated by high throughput experiments. This can be a useful resource to the plant community to characterize the host-pathogen interaction in Arabidopsis and Pseudomonas system. Further, these prediction models can be applied to the agriculturally relevant crops.

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Accurate identification of protein-coding regions (exons) in DNA sequences has been a challenging task in bioinformatics. Particularly the coding regions have a 3-base periodicity, which forms the basis of all exon identification methods. Many signal processing tools and techniques have been applied successfully for the identification task but still improvement in this direction is needed. In this paper, we have introduced a new promising model-independent time-frequency filtering technique based on S-transform for accurate identification of the coding regions. The S-transform is a powerful linear time-frequency representation useful for filtering in time-frequency domain. The potential of the proposed technique has been assessed through simulation study and the results obtained have been compared with the existing methods using standard datasets. The comparative study demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms its counterparts in identifying the coding regions.

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Wood-based cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) offer an excellent scaffold for drug-delivery formulation development. However, toxicity and haemocompatibility of the drug carrier is always an important issue. In this study, toxicity-related issues of CNF were addressed. Different doses of CNF were orally administered to Drosophila and different tests like the developmental cycle, trypan blue exclusion assay, larva crawling assay, thermal sensitivity assay, cold sensitivity assay, larval light preference test, climbing behaviour, nitroblue tetrazolium (NBT) reduction assay, adult phenotype, and adult weight were conducted to observe the impact on its development and behaviour. A haemocompatibility assay was done on the blood taken from healthy Wistar rats. In Drosophila, the abnormalities in larval development and behaviour were observed in the behavioural assays. However, the cytotoxic effect could not be confirmed by the gut staining and level of reactive oxygen species. The larvae developed into an adult without any abnormality in the phenotype. The CNF did cause loss of weight in the adult flies and did not cause much toxicity within the body since there was no phenotypic defect. Hemolysis data also suggested that CNF was safe at lower doses, as the data was well within acceptable limits. All these results suggest that cellulose nanofibres have no significant cytotoxic effects on Drosophila. However, the developmental and behavioural abnormalities suggest that CNF may act as a behavioural teratogen.