Carnitine-acylcarnitine translocase deficiency caused by SLC25A20 gene heterozygous variants in twins: a case report.

The current case report describes the clinical, biochemical and genetic characteristics of carnitine-acylcarnitine translocase deficiency (CACTD) in infant male and female twins that presented with symptoms shortly after elective caesarean delivery. The clinical manifestations were neonatal hypoglycaemia, arrhythmia and sudden death. The age of onset was 1.5 days and the age of the death was 1.5-3.5 days. Dried blood filter paper analysis was used for the detection of acylcarnitine. Peripheral venous blood and skin samples were used for next-generation sequencing. The twins and their parents underwent gene analysis and whole exome sequencing analyses of the solute carrier family 25 member 20 (SLC25A20; also known as carnitine-acylcarnitine translocase) gene. Both infants carried compound heterozygous variants of the SLC25A20 gene: variant M1:c.706_707insT:p.R236L fs*12 and variant M2:c.689C>G:p.P230R. The M1 variant was paternal and had not been previously reported regarding CACTD. The M2 variant was maternal. CACTD has severe clinical manifestations and a poor prognosis, which is manifested as hypoketotic hypoglycaemia, hyperammonaemia, liver function damage and elevated creatine kinase.

MinimapR: A parallel alignment tool for the analysis of large-scale third-generation sequencing data.

The development of third-generation sequencing technology has brought significant changes and influences on genomics. Compared to the second-generation sequencing methods, the third-generation technologies produce around 100 times longer reads to reveal new genomic variations that complete long-term gaps in the human reference genome. However, these reads' excessive length and high error rate severely increase the amount of data and alignment cost. The traditional data analysis platform and serial sequence alignment method can not effectively deal with large-scale long read alignment. There is a critical need for a novel data analysis platform that can deliver fast alignment of large-scale sequences to solve the problem of long read alignment. High-performance computing platforms and efficient, scalable algorithms based on these platforms have significant potential to impact sequence analysis approaches. This paper presented minimapR, a multi-level parallel long-read alignment tool based on minimap2, a popular third-generation read aligner. MinimapR is developed based on the new high-performance distributed framework Ray. Ray fully integrates with the Python environment and can be easily installed with pip. MinimapR can utilize the power of multiple computing nodes, significantly accelerating alignment speeds without sacrificing sensitivity. The minimapR tool was tested on 64 nodes and demonstrated a 50 fold increase in speed with 78 % parallel efficiency. The source code and user manual of minimapR are freely available at https://github.com/Geehome/minimapR.

A Review of Parallel Implementations for the Smith-Waterman Algorithm.

The rapid advances in sequencing technology have led to an explosion of sequence data. Sequence alignment is the central and fundamental problem in many sequence analysis procedure, while local alignment is often the kernel of these algorithms. Usually, Smith-Waterman algorithm is used to find the best subsequence match between given sequences. However, the high time complexity makes the algorithm time-consuming. A lot of approaches have been developed to accelerate and parallelize it, such as vector-level parallelization, thread-level parallelization, process-level parallelization, and heterogeneous acceleration, but the current researches seem unsystematic, which hinders the further research of parallelizing the algorithm. In this paper, we summarize the current research status of parallel local alignments and describe the data layout in these work. Based on the research status, we emphasize large-scale genomic comparisons. By surveying some typical alignment tools' performance, we discuss some possible directions in the future. We hope our work will provide the developers of the alignment tool with technical principle support, and help researchers choose proper alignment tools.

VISPR-online: a web-based interactive tool to visualize CRISPR screening experiments.

BACKGROUND: VISPR is an interactive visualization and analysis framework for CRISPR screening experiments. However, it only supports the output of MAGeCK, and requires installation and manual configuration. Furthermore, VISPR is designed to run on a single computer, and data sharing between collaborators is challenging. RESULTS: To make the tool easily accessible to the community, we present VISPR-online, a web-based general application allowing users to visualize, explore, and share CRISPR screening data online with a few simple steps. VISPR-online provides an exploration of screening results and visualization of read count changes. Apart from MAGeCK, VISPR-online supports two more popular CRISPR screening analysis tools: BAGEL and JACKS. It provides an interactive environment for exploring gene essentiality, viewing guide RNA (gRNA) locations, and allowing users to resume and share screening results. CONCLUSIONS: VISPR-online allows users to visualize, explore and share CRISPR screening data online. It is freely available at http://vispr-online.weililab.org , while the source code is available at https://github.com/lemoncyb/VISPR-online .

CRISP-view: a database of functional genetic screens spanning multiple phenotypes.

High-throughput genetic screening based on CRISPR/Cas9 or RNA-interference (RNAi) enables the exploration of genes associated with the phenotype of interest on a large scale. The rapid accumulation of public available genetic screening data provides a wealth of knowledge about genotype-to-phenotype relationships and a valuable resource for the systematic analysis of gene functions. Here we present CRISP-view, a comprehensive database of CRISPR/Cas9 and RNAi screening datasets that span multiple phenotypes, including in vitro and in vivo cell proliferation and viability, response to cancer immunotherapy, virus response, protein expression, etc. By 22 September 2020, CRISP-view has collected 10 321 human samples and 825 mouse samples from 167 papers. All the datasets have been curated, annotated, and processed by a standard MAGeCK-VISPR analysis pipeline with quality control (QC) metrics. We also developed a user-friendly webserver to visualize, explore, and search these datasets. The webserver is freely available at http://crispview.weililab.org.

OffScan: a universal and fast CRISPR off-target sites detection tool.

BACKGROUND: The Type II clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated proteins (Cas) is a powerful genome editing technology, which is more and more popular in gene function analysis. In CRISPR/Cas, RNA guides Cas nuclease to the target site to perform DNA modification. RESULTS: The performance of CRISPR/Cas depends on well-designed single guide RNA (sgRNA). However, the off-target effect of sgRNA leads to undesired mutations in genome and limits the use of CRISPR/Cas. Here, we present OffScan, a universal and fast CRISPR off-target detection tool. CONCLUSIONS: OffScan is not limited by the number of mismatches and allows custom protospacer-adjacent motif (PAM), which is the target site by Cas protein. Besides, OffScan adopts the FM-index, which efficiently improves query speed and reduce memory consumption.

Integrative analysis of pooled CRISPR genetic screens using MAGeCKFlute.

Genome-wide screening using CRISPR coupled with nuclease Cas9 (CRISPR-Cas9) is a powerful technology for the systematic evaluation of gene function. Statistically principled analysis is needed for the accurate identification of gene hits and associated pathways. Here, we describe how to perform computational analysis of CRISPR screens using the MAGeCKFlute pipeline. MAGeCKFlute combines the MAGeCK and MAGeCK-VISPR algorithms and incorporates additional downstream analysis functionalities. MAGeCKFlute is distinguished from other currently available tools by its comprehensive pipeline, which contains a series of functions for analyzing CRISPR screen data. This protocol explains how to use MAGeCKFlute to perform quality control (QC), normalization, batch effect removal, copy-number bias correction, gene hit identification and downstream functional enrichment analysis for CRISPR screens. We also describe gene identification and data analysis in CRISPR screens involving drug treatment. Completing the entire MAGeCKFlute pipeline requires ~3 h on a desktop computer running Linux or Mac OS with R support.

A CPU/MIC Collaborated Parallel Framework for GROMACS on Tianhe-2 Supercomputer.

Molecular Dynamics (MD) is the simulation of the dynamic behavior of atoms and molecules. As the most popular software for molecular dynamics, GROMACS cannot work on large-scale data because of limit computing resources. In this paper, we propose a CPU and Intel® Xeon Phi Many Integrated Core (MIC) collaborated parallel framework to accelerate GROMACS using the offload mode on a MIC coprocessor, with which the performance of GROMACS is improved significantly, especially with the utility of Tianhe-2 supercomputer. Furthermore, we optimize GROMACS so that it can run on both the CPU and MIC at the same time. In addition, we accelerate multi-node GROMACS so that it can be used in practice. Benchmarking on real data, our accelerated GROMACS performs very well and reduces computation time significantly. Source code: https://github.com/tianhe2/gromacs-mic.

Efficient computation of motif discovery on Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture.

BACKGROUND: Novel sequence motifs detection is becoming increasingly essential in computational biology. However, the high computational cost greatly constrains the efficiency of most motif discovery algorithms. RESULTS: In this paper, we accelerate MEME algorithm targeted on Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture and present a parallel implementation of MEME called MIC-MEME base on hybrid CPU/MIC computing framework. Our method focuses on parallelizing the starting point searching method and improving iteration updating strategy of the algorithm. MIC-MEME has achieved significant speedups of 26.6 for ZOOPS model and 30.2 for OOPS model on average for the overall runtime when benchmarked on the experimental platform with two Xeon Phi 3120 coprocessors. CONCLUSIONS: Furthermore, MIC-MEME has been compared with state-of-arts methods and it shows good scalability with respect to dataset size and the number of MICs. Source code: https://github.com/hkwkevin28/MIC-MEME .

Review of CRISPR/Cas9 sgRNA Design Tools.

The adaptive immunity system in bacteria and archaea, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR-associate (CRISPR/Cas), has been adapted as a powerful gene editing tool and got a broad application in genome research field due to its ease of use and cost-effectiveness. The performance of CRISPR/Cas relies on well-designed single-guide RNA (sgRNA), so a lot of bioinformatic tools have been developed to assist the design of highly active and specific sgRNA. These tools vary in design specifications, parameters, genomes and so on. To help researchers to choose their proper tools, we reviewed various sgRNA design tools, mainly focusing on their on-target efficiency prediction model and off-target detection algorithm.

B-MIC: An Ultrafast Three-Level Parallel Sequence Aligner Using MIC.

Sequence alignment is the central process for sequence analysis, where mapping raw sequencing data to reference genome. The large amount of data generated by NGS is far beyond the process capabilities of existing alignment tools. Consequently, sequence alignment becomes the bottleneck of sequence analysis. Intensive computing power is required to address this challenge. Intel recently announced the MIC coprocessor, which can provide massive computing power. The Tianhe-2 is the world's fastest supercomputer now equipped with three MIC coprocessors each compute node. A key feature of sequence alignment is that different reads are independent. Considering this property, we proposed a MIC-oriented three-level parallelization strategy to speed up BWA, a widely used sequence alignment tool, and developed our ultrafast parallel sequence aligner: B-MIC. B-MIC contains three levels of parallelization: firstly, parallelization of data IO and reads alignment by a three-stage parallel pipeline; secondly, parallelization enabled by MIC coprocessor technology; thirdly, inter-node parallelization implemented by MPI. In this paper, we demonstrate that B-MIC outperforms BWA by a combination of those techniques using Inspur NF5280M server and the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. To the best of our knowledge, B-MIC is the first sequence alignment tool to run on Intel MIC and it can achieve more than fivefold speedup over the original BWA while maintaining the alignment precision.

A Hybrid Parallel Strategy Based on String Graph Theory to Improve De Novo DNA Assembly on the TianHe-2 Supercomputer.

' The de novo assembly of DNA sequences is increasingly important for biological researches in the genomic era. After more than one decade since the Human Genome Project, some challenges still exist and new solutions are being explored to improve de novo assembly of genomes. String graph assembler (SGA), based on the string graph theory, is a new method/tool developed to address the challenges. In this paper, based on an in-depth analysis of SGA we prove that the SGA-based sequence de novo assembly is an NP-complete problem. According to our analysis, SGA outperforms other similar methods/tools in memory consumption, but costs much more time, of which 60-70 % is spent on the index construction. Upon this analysis, we introduce a hybrid parallel optimization algorithm and implement this algorithm in the TianHe-2's parallel framework. Simulations are performed with different datasets. For data of small size the optimized solution is 3.06 times faster than before, and for data of middle size it's 1.60 times. The results demonstrate an evident performance improvement, with the linear scalability for parallel FM-index construction. This results thus contribute significantly to improving the efficiency of de novo assembly of DNA sequences.

Protective Effects of Scutellarin on Human Cardiac Microvascular Endothelial Cells against Hypoxia-Reoxygenation Injury and Its Possible Target-Related Proteins.

Scutellarin (SCU) is one of the main components of traditional Chinese medicine plant Erigeron breviscapus (Vant.) Hand.-Mazz. In this paper, we studied the protective effects of SCU on human cardiac microvascular endothelial cells (HCMECs) against hypoxia-reoxygenation (HR) injury and its possible target-related proteins. Results of MTT assay showed that pretreatment of SCU at doses of 1, 5, and 10 µM for 2 h could significantly inhibit the decrease in cell viability of HCMECs induced by HR injury. Subcellular fractions of cells treated with vehicle control, 1 µM SCU, HR injury, or 1 µM SCU + HR injury were separated by ultracentrifugation. The protein expression profiles of cytoplasm and membrane/nuclei fractions were checked using protein two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE). Proteins differentially expressed between control and SCU-treated group, control and HR group, or HR and SCU + HR group were identified using mass spectrometry (MS/MS). Possible interaction network of these target-related proteins was predicted using bioinformatic analysis. The influence of SCU on the expression levels of these proteins was confirmed using Western blotting assay. The results indicated that proteins such as p27BBP protein (EIF6), heat shock 60 kDa protein 1 (HSPD1), and chaperonin containing TCP1 subunit 6A isoform (CCT6A) might play important roles in the effects of SCU.

A Massively Parallel Computational Method of Reading Index Files for SOAPsnv.

SOAPsnv is the software used for identifying the single nucleotide variation in cancer genes. However, its performance is yet to match the massive amount of data to be processed. Experiments reveal that the main performance bottleneck of SOAPsnv software is the pileup algorithm. The original pileup algorithm's I/O process is time-consuming and inefficient to read input files. Moreover, the scalability of the pileup algorithm is also poor. Therefore, we designed a new algorithm, named BamPileup, aiming to improve the performance of sequential read, and the new pileup algorithm implemented a parallel read mode based on index. Using this method, each thread can directly read the data start from a specific position. The results of experiments on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer show that, when reading data in a multi-threaded parallel I/O way, the processing time of algorithm is reduced to 3.9 s and the application program can achieve a speedup up to 100×. Moreover, the scalability of the new algorithm is also satisfying.

HSPA9 overexpression inhibits apoptin-induced apoptosis in the HepG2 cell line.

Apoptin, a small protein derived from chicken anemia virus, possesses the capacity to specifically kill tumor cells while leaving normal cells intact. Previous studies have indicated that the subcellular localization of apoptin appears to be crucial for this tumor-selective activity. Apoptin resides in the cytoplasm of normal cells; however, in cancer cells it translocates into the nucleus. In the present study, purified prokaryotic native His-apoptin served as a bait for capturing apoptin-associated proteins in both a hepatoma carcinoma cell line (HepG2) and a human fetal liver cell line (L-02). The captured proteins obtained from a pull-down assay were separated by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. Mass spectrometry was employed to detect the effect of HSPA9 overexpression (one of the interacting proteins with apoptin in vitro) and downregulation of HSPA9 on HepG2 cells. The data revealed that HSPA9 overexpression resulted in partial distribution of apoptin in the cytoplasm. Notably, HSPA9 overexpression markedly decreased the apoptosis rate of HepG2 cells from 41.2 to 31.7%, while the downregulation of HSPA9 using small interfering RNA significantly enhanced the apoptosis of HepG2 cells. Our results suggest new insights into the localization mechanism of apoptin which is tightly associated with HSPA9 overexpression and its crucial role in cellular apoptosis both in a tumor cell line (HepG2) and a normal cell line (L-02). These findings shed new light on the elucidation of the underlying mechanism of anticancer action of apoptin.

[Expression of neutrophil adhesion molecule CD11b as an early diagnostic marker for neonatal sepsis].

OBJECTIVE: Neonatal sepsis is a common disease and the sepsis-related mortality rate is still high. Until now, there has no ideal diagnostic marker to early identify neonatal sepsis. Expression of neutrophil adhesion molecule CD(11b) was showed as the earlier reaction to the infection/inflammation, and may be applied as an early diagnostic marker for sepsis. This study was to investigate this antigen for early diagnosis of neonatal sepsis related to bacterial infection. METHODS: According to clinical symptoms, signs and four indices (WBC, PLT, plasma CRP and ratio of I/T), fifty-one neonates with established or suspected sepsis were allocated retrospectively into two groups of sepsis [n = 23, gestational age of (38.3 +/- 2.4) weeks, postnatal age of (12.7 +/- 8.8) days, body weight: (3.1 +/- 0.8) kg] and suspected sepsis [n = 28, gestational age of (38.8 +/- 1.6) weeks, postnatal age of (11.7 +/- 7.3) days, body weight: (3.3 +/- 0.6) kg]. Fifteen healthy neonates were served as controls [gestational age: (38.5 +/- 1.4) weeks, postnatal age: (8.2 +/- 5.5) days, body weight: (3.3 +/- 0.3) kg]. CD(11b) was quantified with the whole blood flow cytometry and direct immunofluorescence technique. RESULTS: The expressions of neutrophil CD(11b) in neonates with sepsis and suspected sepsis were (320 +/- 189) MFI and (456 +/- 213) MFI, respectively, which was lower than that of controls [(1,090 +/- 338) MFI, t = -9.01 and -7.56, respectively; P < 0.001]. The expression of CD(11b) was lower in neonates with sepsis than that with suspected sepsis (t = -2.39, P < 0.05). The expression of CD(11b) in neonates with CRP >or= 30 mg/L was (211 +/- 164) MFI, which was lower than those with CRP < 30 mg/L [(505 +/- 265) MFI, t = 2.64, P < 0.05]. The detection of CD(11b) (