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Defining characteristics and conservation of poorly annotated genes in Caenorhabditis elegans using WormCat 2.0

Higgins, Daniel P
Weisman, Caroline M
Lui, Dominique S
D'Agostino, Frank A
Walker, Amy K
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UMass Chan Affiliations
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Journal Article
Publication Date
2022-05-19
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Abstract

Omics tools provide broad datasets for biological discovery. However, the computational tools for identifying important genes or pathways in RNA-seq, proteomics, or GWAS (Genome-Wide Association Study) data depend on Gene Ontogeny annotations and are biased toward well-described pathways. This limits their utility as poorly annotated genes, which could have novel functions, are often passed over. Recently, we developed an annotation and category enrichment tool for Caenorhabditis elegans genomic data, WormCat, which provides an intuitive visualization output. Unlike Gene Ontogeny-based enrichment tools, which exclude genes with no annotation information, WormCat 2.0 retains these genes as a special UNASSIGNED category. Here, we show that the UNASSIGNED gene category enrichment exhibits tissue-specific expression patterns and can include genes with biological functions identified in published datasets. Poorly annotated genes are often considered to be potentially species-specific and thus, of reduced interest to the biomedical community. Instead, we find that around 3% of the UNASSIGNED genes have human orthologs, including some linked to human diseases. These human orthologs themselves have little annotation information. A recently developed method that incorporates lineage relationships (abSENSE) indicates that the failure of BLAST to detect homology explains the apparent lineage specificity for many UNASSIGNED genes. This suggests that a larger subset could be related to human genes. WormCat provides an annotation strategy that allows the association of UNASSIGNED genes with specific phenotypes and known pathways. Building these associations in C. elegans, with its robust genetic tools, provides a path to further functional study and insight into these understudied genes.

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Higgins DP, Weisman CM, Lui DS, D'Agostino FA, Walker AK. Defining characteristics and conservation of poorly annotated genes in Caenorhabditis elegans using WormCat 2.0. Genetics. 2022 Jul 30;221(4):iyac085. doi: 10.1093/genetics/iyac085. PMID: 35587742; PMCID: PMC9339291.

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DOI
10.1093/genetics/iyac085
PubMed ID
35587742
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Copyright The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Genetics Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Attribution 4.0 International