TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you're given a paragraph from the research paper and your task is to generate a suitable title for the research paper based on the given paper. Under 100 words is a good title length.
PROBLEM: Low cost, high throughput, easy quantitation, and rich descriptions have made gene expression profiling generated by DNA microarrays an optimal approach for describing host transcriptional responses (HTRs). However, efforts to characterize the landscape of HTRs to diverse pathogens are far from offering a comprehensive view. Here, we developed an HTR Connectivity Map based on systematic assessment of pairwise similarities of HTRs to 50 clinically important human pathogens using 1353 gene-expression profiles generated from >60 human cells/tissues. These 50 pathogens were further partitioned into eight robust "HTR communities" (i.e., groups with more consensus internal HTR similarities). These communities showed enrichment in specific infection attributes and differential gene expression patterns. Using query signatures of HTRs to external pathogens, we demonstrated four distinct modes of HTR associations among different pathogens types/class, and validated the reliability of the HTR community divisions for differentiating and categorizing pathogens from a host-oriented perspective. These findings provide a first-generation HTR Connectivity Map of 50 diverse pathogens, and demonstrate the potential for using annotated HTR community to detect functional associations among infectious pathogens.

SOLUTION: Inferring Infection Patterns Based on a Connectivity Map of Host Transcriptional Responses

PROBLEM: Synonymous codon usage bias (CUB) is a defined as the non-random usage of codons encoding the same amino acid across different genomes. This phenomenon is common to all organisms and the real weight of the many factors involved in its shaping still remains to be fully determined. So far, relatively little attention has been put in the analysis of CUB in bivalve mollusks due to the limited genomic data available. Taking advantage of the massive sequence data generated from next generation sequencing projects, we explored codon preferences in 64 different species pertaining to the six major evolutionary lineages in Bivalvia. We detected remarkable differences across species, which are only partially dependent on phylogeny. While the intensity of CUB is mild in most organisms, a heterogeneous group of species (including Arcida and Mytilida, among the others) display higher bias and a strong preference for AT-ending codons. We show that the relative strength and direction of mutational bias, selection for translational efficiency and for translational accuracy contribute to the establishment of synonymous codon usage in bivalves. Although many aspects underlying bivalve CUB still remain obscure, we provide for the first time an overview of this phenomenon in this large, commercially and environmentally important, class of marine invertebrates. Fields et al., 2014). Details about the data used for the different species are provided in Table S1 . Sequence data were processed as follows: predicted CDS from the fully sequenced genomes of C. gigas (release 9) and P. fucata were retrieved from http://oysterdb.cn and http://marinegenomics.oist.jp/pinctada fucata, respectively. De novo transcriptome assemblies were performed for all the other 62 bivalve species with the CLC Genomics Workbench (v.7.5, CLC Bio, Aarhus, Denmark) using the de novo assembly tool with "automatic word size" and "automatic bubble size" parameters selected, and setting the minimum allowed contig length to 300 bp. In all transcriptomes, ORFs (Open Reading Frames) longer than 100 codons were predicted with TransDecoder (http://transdecoder.sourceforge.net). We selected the predicted CDS of C. gigas, and of one representative species for the Imparidentia (R. decussatus), Protobranchia (S. velum) and Palaeoheterodonta (P. grandis) lineages to identify a subset of evolutionarily conserved protein-coding genes with a 1:1 orthology ratio across Bivalvia. This was achieved by performing reciprocal tBLASTx searches (the e-value threshold was set a 1 × 10 −10 and only hits displaying sequence identity >50% were considered). This procedure resulted in a selection of 2,846 conserved protein-coding genes, whose orthologous sequences were retrieved in the remaining 60 species. Due to the heterogeneous tissue and developmental stage origin, the different sequencing platforms and depth applied, several of these evolutionarily conserved sequences could not be identified or were fragmented in some transcriptomes. In order to ensure a minimum quality criteria, all the selected species had to display at least 25% of the sequences included in the dataset of evolutionarily conserved genes, with an average length >500 nucleotides.

SOLUTION: Distributed under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 Analysis of synonymous codon usage patterns in sixty-four different bivalve species

PROBLEM: Background: Influenza is a zoonotic disease that infects millions of people each year resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and in turn devastating pandemics. Influenza is caused by influenza viruses, including influenza A virus (IAV). There are many subtypes of IAV but only a few seem to be able to adapt to humans and to cause disease. In 2013, an H7N9 IAV subtype emerged in China that does not cause clinical symptoms in its chicken host but leads to severe infections when transmitted into humans. Since 2013, there have been six epidemic waves of H7N9 with 1567 laboratory-confirmed human infections and 615 deaths. Pathogenicity of IAV is complex, but a crucial feature contributing to virulence is the activation of the hemagglutinin (HA) fusion protein by host proteases that triggers membrane fusion and leads to subsequent virus propagation. : 293T, VERO, and MDCK cells were used to conduct Western blot analysis, immunofluorescence assays, and pseudoparticle and live virus infections, and to evaluate H7N9 HA cleavage-activation. Results/Conclusions: We show that human matriptase/ST 14 is able to cleave H7N9 HA. Cleavage of H7N9 HA expressed in cell culture results in fusogenic HA and syncytia formation. In infection studies with viral pseudoparticles carrying matriptase/ ST 14-activated H7N9 HA, we observed a high infectivity of cells. Finally, human matriptase/ST 14 also activated H7N9 live virus which resulted in high infectivity. Our data demonstrate that human matriptase/ST 14 is a likely candidate protease to promote H7N9 infections in humans.

SOLUTION:
Human matriptase/ST 14 proteolytically cleaves H7N9 hemagglutinin and facilitates the activation of influenza A/Shanghai/2/2013 virus in cell culture