Nutrilyzer : a tool for deciphering atomic stoichiometry of differentially expressed paralogous proteins

Abstract

Organisms try to maintain homeostasis by balanced uptake of nutrients from their envi- ronment. From an atomic perspective this means that, for example, carbon:nitrogen:sulfur ratios are kept within given limits. Upon limitation of, for example, sulfur, its acquisition is triggered. For yeast it was shown that transporters and enzymes involved in sulfur up- take are encoded as paralogous genes that express different isoforms. Sulfur deprivation leads to up-regulation of isoforms that are poor in sulfur-containing amino acids, that is, methinone and cysteine. Accordingly, sulfur-rich isoforms are down-regulated. We developed a web-based software, doped Nutrilyzer, that extracts paralogous protein coding sequences from an annotated genome sequence and evaluates their atomic compo- sition. When fed with gene-expression data for nutrient limited and normal conditions, Nutrilyzer provides a list of genes that are significantly differently expressed and simul- taneously contain significantly different amounts of the limited nutrient in their atomic composition. Its intended use is in the field of ecological stoichiometry. Nutrilyzer is available at http://nutrilyzer.hs-mittweida.de. Here we describe the work flow and results with an example from a whole-genome Ara- bidopsis thaliana gene-expression analysis upon oxygen deprivation. 43 paralogs dis- tributed over 37 homology clusters were found to be significantly differently expressed while containing significantly different amounts of oxygen.