NAPRT Expression Regulation Mechanisms: Novel Functions Predicted by a Bioinformatics Approach.

The nicotinate phosphoribosyltransferase (NAPRT) gene has gained relevance in the research of cancer therapeutic strategies due to its main role as a NAD biosynthetic enzyme. NAD metabolism is an attractive target for the development of anti-cancer therapies, given the high energy requirements of proliferating cancer cells and NAD-dependent signaling. A few studies have shown that NAPRT expression varies in different cancer types, making it imperative to assess NAPRT expression and functionality status prior to the application of therapeutic strategies targeting NAD. In addition, the recent finding of NAPRT extracellular form (eNAPRT) suggested the involvement of NAPRT in inflammation and signaling. However, the mechanisms regulating NAPRT gene expression have never been thoroughly addressed. In this study, we searched for NAPRT gene expression regulatory mechanisms in transcription factors (TFs), RNA binding proteins (RBPs) and microRNA (miRNAs) databases. We identified several potential regulators of NAPRT transcription activation, downregulation and alternative splicing and performed GO and expression analyses. The results of the functional analysis of TFs, RBPs and miRNAs suggest new, unexpected functions for the NAPRT gene in cell differentiation, development and neuronal biology.

MONTRA: An agile architecture for data publishing and discovery.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Data catalogues are a common form of capturing and presenting information about a specific kind of entity (e.g. products, services, professionals, datasets, etc.). However, the construction of a web-based catalogue for a particular scenario normally implies the development of a specific and dedicated solution. In this paper, we present MONTRA, a rapid-application development framework designed to facilitate the integration and discovery of heterogeneous objects, which may be characterized by distinct data structures. METHODS: MONTRA was developed following a plugin-based architecture to allow dynamic composition of services over represented datasets. The core of MONTRA's functionalities resides in a flexible data skeleton used to characterize data entities, and from which a fully-fledged web data catalogue is automatically generated, ensuring access control and data privacy. RESULTS: MONTRA is being successfully used by several European projects to collect and manage biomedical databases. In this paper, we describe three of these applications scenarios. CONCLUSIONS: This work was motivated by the plethora of geographically scattered biomedical repositories, and by the role they can play altogether for the understanding of diseases and of the real-world effectiveness of treatments. Using metadata to expose datasets' characteristics, MONTRA greatly simplifies the task of building data catalogues. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/bioinformatics-ua/montra.

General guidelines for biomedical software development.

Most bioinformatics tools available today were not written by professional software developers, but by people that wanted to solve their own problems, using computational solutions and spending the minimum time and effort possible, since these were just the means to an end. Consequently, a vast number of software applications are currently available, hindering the task of identifying the utility and quality of each. At the same time, this situation has hindered regular adoption of these tools in clinical practice. Typically, they are not sufficiently developed to be used by most clinical researchers and practitioners. To address these issues, it is necessary to re-think how biomedical applications are built and adopt new strategies that ensure quality, efficiency, robustness, correctness and reusability of software components. We also need to engage end-users during the development process to ensure that applications fit their needs. In this review, we present a set of guidelines to support biomedical software development, with an explanation of how they can be implemented and what kind of open-source tools can be used for each specific topic.