Université de Fribourg

Large-scale comparison of toxin and antitoxins in Listeria monocytogenes

Agüero, José Antonio ; Akarsu, Hatice ; Aguilar-Bultet, Lisandra ; Oevermann, Anna ; Falquet, Laurent

In: Toxins, 2020, vol. 12, no. 1, p. 29

Toxin–antitoxin systems (TASs) are widely distributed in prokaryotes and encode pairs of genes involved in many bacterial biological processes and mechanisms, including pathogenesis. The TASs have not been extensively studied in Listeria monocytogenes (Lm), a pathogenic bacterium of the Firmicutes phylum causing infections in animals and humans. Using our recently published TASmania...

Université de Fribourg

DeltaRpkm: an R package for a rapid detection of differential gene presence between related bacterial genomes

Akarsu, Hatice ; Aguilar-Bultet, Lisandra ; Falquet, Laurent

In: BMC Bioinformatics, 2019, vol. 20, no. 1, p. 621

Comparative genomics has seen the development of many software performing the clustering, polymorphism and gene content analysis of genomes at different phylogenetic levels (isolates, species). These tools rely on de novo assembly and/or multiple alignments that can be computationally intensive for large datasets. With a large number of similar genomes in particular, e.g., in surveillance and...

Université de Fribourg

TASmania: A bacterial Toxin-Antitoxin Systems database

Akarsu, Hatice ; Bordes, Patricia ; Mansour, Moise ; Bigot, Donna-Joe ; Genevaux, Pierre ; Falquet, Laurent

In: PLOS Computational Biology, 2019, vol. 15, no. 4, p. e1006946

Bacterial Toxin-Antitoxin systems (TAS) are involved in key biological functions including plasmid maintenance, defense against phages, persistence and virulence. They are found in nearly all phyla and classified into 6 different types based on the mode of inactivation of the toxin, with the type II TAS being the best characterized so far. We have herein developed a new in silico discovery...

Université de Fribourg

A genetically encoded biosensor for visualising hypoxia responses in vivo

Misra, Tvisha ; Baccino-Calace, Martin ; Meyenhofer, Felix ; Rodriguez-Crespo, David ; Akarsu, Hatice ; Armenta-Calderón, Ricardo ; Frei, Thomas A. Gorr, Christian ; Cantera, Rafael ; Egger, Boris ; Luschnig, Stefan

In: Biology Open, 2017, vol. 6, no. 2, p. 296–304

Cells experience different oxygen concentrations depending on location, organismal developmental stage, and physiological or pathological conditions. Responses to reduced oxygen levels (hypoxia) rely on the conserved hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1). Understanding the developmental and tissue-specific responses to changing oxygen levels has been limited by the lack of adequate tools for...