Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:21:24 BST CiteULike: zwangs Stewart http://www.citeulike.org/user/zwang/author/Stewart CiteULike.org en-gb Copyright © 2004-2008 citeulike.org http://www.citeulike.org/user/zwang/article/2793797 <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (12 May 2008), 0708078105.</i><br /><br />After the completion of the human and other genome projects it emerged that the number of genes in organisms as diverse as fruit flies, nematodes, and humans does not reflect our perception of their relative complexity. Here, we provide reliable evidence that the size of protein interaction networks in different organisms appears to correlate much better with their apparent biological complexity. We develop a stable and powerful, yet simple, statistical procedure to estimate the size of the whole network from subnet data. This approach is then applied to a range of eukaryotic organisms for which extensive protein interaction data have been collected and we estimate the number of interactions in humans to be approx650,000. We find that the human interaction network is one order of magnitude bigger than the Drosophila melanogaster interactome and approx3 times bigger than in Caenorhabditis elegans. 10.1073/pnas.0708078105 Estimating the size of the human interactome Michael Stumpf Thomas Thorne Eric de Silva Ronald Stewart Hyeong An Michael Lappe Carsten Wiuf doi:10.1073/pnas.0708078105 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (12 May 2008), 0708078105. 2008-05-13T07:34:25-00:00 2008 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 0708078105 genome-wide human interaction http://www.citeulike.org/user/zwang/article/2530769 <i>Science, Vol. 319, No. 5869. (14 March 2008), pp. 1533-1536.</i><br /><br />Conjugation allows bacteria to acquire genes for antibiotic resistance, novel virulence attributes, and alternative metabolic pathways. Using a fluorescent protein fusion, SeqA-YFP, we have visualized this process in real time and in single cells of Escherichia coli. We found that the F pilus mediates DNA transfer at considerable cell-to-cell distances. Integration of transferred DNA by recombination occurred in up to 96% of recipients; in the remaining cells, the transferred DNA was fully degraded by the RecBCD helicase/nuclease. The acquired integrated DNA was tracked through successive replication rounds and was found to occasionally split and segregate with different chromosomes, leading to the inheritance of different gene clusters within the cell lineage. The incidence of DNA splitting corresponds to about one crossover per cell generation. 10.1126/science.1153498 Direct Visualization of Horizontal Gene Transfer Ana Babic Ariel Lindner Marin Vulic Eric Stewart Miroslav Radman doi:10.1126/science.1153498 Science, Vol. 319, No. 5869. (14 March 2008), pp. 1533-1536. 2008-03-14T05:48:40-00:00 2008 Science 319 5869 1533 1536 evolution hgt