Shimada Makoto

Felsenstein's PHYLIP package of molecular phylogeny tools has been used globally since 1980. The programs are receiving renewed attention because of their character-based user interface, which has the advantage of being scriptable for use with large-scale data studies based on super-computers or massively parallel computing clusters. However, occasionally we found, the PHYLIP Consense program output text file displays two or more divided bootstrap values for the same cluster in its result table, and when this happens the output Newick tree file incorrectly assigns only the last value to that cluster that disturbs correct estimation of a consensus tree. We ascertained the cause of this aberrant behavior in the bootstrapping calculation. Our rewrite of the Consense program source code outputs bootstrap values, without redundancy, in its result table, and a Newick tree file with appropriate, corresponding bootstrap values. Furthermore, we developed an add-on program and shell script, add_bootstrap.pl and fasta2tre_bs.bsh, to generate a Newick tree containing the topology and branch lengths inferred from the original data along with valid bootstrap values, and to actualize the automated inference of a phylogenetic tree containing the originally inferred topology and branch lengths with bootstrap values, from multiple unaligned sequences, respectively. These programs can be downloaded at: https://github.com/ShimadaMK/PHYLIP_enhance/. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) comprise repeats of one to several base pairs. Because of the high mutability due to strand slippage during DNA synthesis, rapid evolutionary change in the number of repeating units directly shapes the range of repeat-number variation according to selection pressure. However, the remaining questions include: Why are STRs causing repeat expansion diseases maintained in the human population; and why are these limited to neurodegenerative diseases? By evaluating the genome-wide selection pressure on STRs using the database we constructed, we identified two different patterns of relationship in repeat-number polymorphisms between DNA and amino-acid sequences, although both patterns are evolutionary consequences of avoiding the formation of harmful long STRs. First, a mixture of degenerate codons is represented in poly-proline (poly-P) repeats. Second, long poly-glutamine (poly-Q) repeats are favored at the protein level; however, at the DNA level, STRs encoding long poly-Qs are frequently divided by synonymous SNPs. Furthermore, significant enrichments of apoptosis and neurodevelopment were biological processes found specifically in genes encoding poly-Qs with repeat polymorphism. This suggests the existence of a specific molecular function for polymorphic and/or long poly-Q stretches. Given that the poly-Qs causing expansion diseases were longer than other poly-Qs, even in healthy subjects, our results indicate that the evolutionary benefits of long and/or polymorphic poly-Q stretches outweigh the risks of long CAG repeats predisposing to pathological hyper-expansions. Molecular pathways in neurodevelopment requiring long and polymorphic poly-Q stretches may provide a clue to understanding why poly-Q expansion diseases are limited to neurodegenerative diseases.