Origin and evolution of new exons in the rodent zinc finger protein 39 gene

The origin of new structures and functions is an important process in evolution. In the past decades, we have obtained some preliminary knowledge of the origin and evolution of new genes. However, as the basic unit of genes, the origin and evolution of exons remain unclear. Because young exons retain the footprints of origination, they can be good materials for studying origin and evolution of new exons. In this paper, we report two young exons in a zinc finger protein gene of rodents. Since they are unique sequences in mouse and rat genome and no homologous sequences were found in the orthologous genes of human and pig, the young exons might originate after the divergence of primates and rodents through exonization of intronic sequences. Strong positive selection was detected in the new exons between mouse and rat, suggesting that these exons have undergone significant functional divergence after the separation of the two species. On the other hand, population genetics data of mouse demonstrate that the new exons have been subject to functional constraint, indicating an important function of the new exons in mouse. Functional analyses suggest that these new exons encode a nuclear localization signal peptide, which may mediate new ways of nuclear protein transport. To our knowledge, this is the first example of the origin and evolution of young exons.

Excision of Sleeping Beauty transposons: parameters and applications to gene therapy

A major problem in gene therapy is the determination of the rates at which gene transfer has occurred. Our work has focused on applications of the Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposon system as a non-viral vector for gene therapy. Excision of a transposon from a donor molecule and its integration into a cellular chromosome are catalyzed by SB transposase. In this study, we used a plasmid-based excision assay to study the excision step of transposition. We used the excision assay to evaluate the importance of various sequences that border the sites of excision inside and outside the transposon in order to determine the most active sequences for transposition from a donor plasmid. These findings together with our previous results in transposase binding to the terminal repeats suggest that the sequences in the transposon-junction of SB are involved in steps subsequent to DNA binding but before excision, and that they may have a role in transposase-transposon interaction. We found that SB transposons leave characteristically different footprints at excision sites in different cell types, suggesting that alternative repair machineries operate in concert with transposition. Most importantly, we found that the rates of excision correlate with the rates of transposition. We used this finding to assess transposition in livers of mice that were injected with the SB transposon and transposase. The excision assay appears to be a relatively quick and easy method to optimize protocols for delivery of genes in SB transposons to mammalian chromosomes in living animals. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

消除采集脚印的处理方法研究

Seismic technique is in the leading position for discovering oil and gas trap and searching for reserves throughout the course of oil and gas exploration. It needs high quality of seismic processed data, not only required exact spatial position, but also the true information of amplitude and AVO attribute and velocity. Acquisition footprint has an impact on highly precision and best quality of imaging and analysis of AVO attribute and velocity. Acquisition footprint is a new conception of describing seismic noise in 3-D exploration. It is not easy to understand the acquisition footprint. This paper begins with forward modeling seismic data from the simple sound wave model, then processes it and discusses the cause for producing the acquisition footprint. It agreed that the recording geometry is the main cause which leads to the distribution asymmetry of coverage and offset and azimuth in different grid cells. It summarizes the characters and description methods and analysis acquisition footprint’s influence on data geology interpretation and the analysis of seismic attribute and velocity. The data reconstruct based on Fourier transform is the main method at present for non uniform data interpolation and extrapolate, but this method always is an inverse problem with bad condition. Tikhonov regularization strategy which includes a priori information on class of solution in search can reduce the computation difficulty duo to discrete kernel condition disadvantage and scarcity of the number of observations. The method is quiet statistical, which does not require the selection of regularization parameter; and hence it has appropriate inversion coefficient. The result of programming and tentat-ive calculation verifies the acquisition footprint can be removed through prestack data reconstruct. This paper applies migration to the processing method of removing the acquisition footprint. The fundamental principle and algorithms are surveyed, seismic traces are weighted according to the area which occupied by seismic trace in different source-receiver distances. Adopting grid method in stead of accounting the area of Voroni map can reduce difficulty of calculation the weight. The result of processing the model data and actual seismic demonstrate, incorporating a weighting scheme based on the relative area that is associated with each input trace with respect to its neighbors acts to minimize the artifacts caused by irregular acquisition geometry.