Shane C Burgess

PMID: 15708115;Abstract:

Placental HIV infections frequently result in infected babies or miscarriage. Aberrant placental cytokine expression during HIV infections may facilitate transplacental viral transmission or pregnancy perturbation. The feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV)-infected cat is a model for HIV infections due to similarities in biology and clinical disease. The purpose of this study was to evaluate placental immunomodulator expression and reproductive outcome using the FIV-infected cat model. Kittens were cesarean delivered from FIV-B-2542-infected and control queens near term; placental and fetal tissues were collected. Real-time RT-PCR was used to measure expression of representative placental Th1 cytokines, interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and interferon-γ (IFN-γ), a Th2 cytokine, IL-10, and chemokine receptor CXCR4. On average, control queens delivered 3.8 kittens/litter; 1 of 31 kittens (3.2%) was non-viable. FIV-infected queens produced 2.7 kittens/litter; 15 of 25 concepti (60%) were non-viable. FIV was detected in 14 of 15 placentas (93%) and 21 of 22 fetuses (95%) using PCR. Placental immunomodulator expression did not differ significantly when placentas from infected cats were compared to those of control cats. However, elevated expression of Th1 cytokines and increased Th1/Th2 ratios (IL-1β/IL-10) occurred in placentas from resorptions. Therefore, increased placental Th1 cytokine expression was associated with pregnancy failure in the FIV-infected cat. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

PMID: 16247735;Abstract:

Here we identify, using nonelectrophoretic proteomics, effects of subminimum inhibitory concentrations (subMIC) of two antibiotic preparations, chlortetracycline (CTC), and chlortetracycline-sulfamethazine (CTC + SMZ), on protein expression in the bovine respiratory pathogen Mannheimia haemolytica. The M. haemolytica genome is currently in draft form, and annotation is incomplete. Relying on the principle of gene sequence conservation across species, we used annotated genomes from closely related species to identify, confirm, and functionally annotate 495 M. haemolytica proteins. To conduct quantitative comparative proteomics, we developed a protein quantitation method based on the cross correlation function of the SEQUEST algorithm. When M. haemolytica was cultivated in the presence of 1/4 MIC of CTC and CTC + SMZ, expression of proteins involved in energy production, nucleotide metabolism, translation, and the bacterial stress response (chaperones) were affected. The most notable subMIC effect was a significant decrease in the expression of leukotoxin A, which is an important M. haemolytica virulence factor. Reduction in leukotoxin expression could be one of the molecular mechanisms responsible for the efficacy of these antibiotics against bovine respiratory disease. © 2005 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

PMID: 21641563;Abstract:

High-density tiling arrays provide closer view of transcription than regular microarrays and can also be used for annotating functional elements in genomes. The identified transcripts usually have a complex overlapping architecture when compared to the existing genome annotation. Therefore, there is a need for customized tiling array data analysis tools. Since most of the initial tiling arrays were conducted in eukaryotes, data analysis methods are well suited for eukaryotic genomes. For using whole-genome tiling arrays to identify previously unknown transcriptional elements like small RNA and antisense RNA in prokaryotes, existing data analysis tools need to be tailored for prokaryotic genome architecture. Furthermore, automation of such custom data analysis workflow is necessary for biologists to apply this powerful platform for knowledge discovery. Here we describe TAAPP, a web-based package that consists of two modules for prokaryotic tiling array data analysis. The transcript generation module works on normalized data to generate transcriptionally active regions (TARs). The feature extraction and annotation module then maps TARs to existing genome annotation. This module further categorizes the transcription profile into potential novel non-coding RNA, antisense RNA, gene expression and operon structures. The implemented workflow is microarray platform independent and is presented as a web-based service. The web interface is freely available for acedemic use at http://lims.lsbi.mafes.msstate.edu/TAAPP-HTML/. © 2011 Beijing Genomics Institute.

PMID: 18021451;PMCID: PMC2204016;Abstract:

Background: The chicken genome was sequenced because of its phylogenetic position as a non-mammalian vertebrate, its use as a biomedical model especially to study embryology and development, its role as a source of human disease organisms and its importance as the major source of animal derived food protein. However, genomic sequence data is, in itself, of limited value; generally it is not equivalent to understanding biological function. The benefit of having a genome sequence is that it provides a basis for functional genomics. However, the sequence data currently available is poorly structurally and functionally annotated and many genes do not have standard nomenclature assigned. Results: We analysed eight chicken tissues and improved the chicken genome structural annotation by providing experimental support for the in vivo expression of 7,809 computationally predicted proteins, including 30 chicken proteins that were only electronically predicted or hypothetical translations in human. To improve functional annotation (based on Gene Ontology), we mapped these identified proteins to their human and mouse orthologs and used this orthology to transfer Gene Ontology (GO) functional annotations to the chicken proteins. The 8,213 orthology-based GO annotations that we produced represent an 8% increase in currently available chicken GO annotations. Orthologous chicken products were also assigned standardized nomenclature based on current chicken nomenclature guidelines. Conclusion: We demonstrate the utility of high-throughput expression proteomics for rapid experimental structural annotation of a newly sequenced eukaryote genome. These experimentally-supported predicted proteins were further annotated by assigning the proteins with standardized nomenclature and functional annotation. This method is widely applicable to a diverse range of species. Moreover, information from one genome can be used to improve the annotation of other genomes and inform gene prediction algorithms. © 2007 Buza et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.