title: Bioinformatic identification of homing endonucleases and their target sites.
abstract: Homing endonuclease genes (HEGs) are a large, phylogenetically diverse superfamily of enzymes with high specificity for especially long target sites. The public genomic sequence databases contain thousands of HEGs. This is a large and diverse arsenal of potential genome editing tools. To make use of this natural resource, one needs to identify candidate HEGs. Due to their special relationship with a host gene, it is also possible to predict their cognate target sequences. Here I describe the HomeBase algorithm that was developed to this end. A detailed description of the computational pipeline is provided with emphasis on technical and methodological caveats of the approach.
authors: Institute of Evolution and Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
authors: Eyal
authors: E
authors: Privman
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D004720:Endonucleases / Q000378:metabolism*; D018390:Gene Targeting / Q000379:methods; D064878:Web Browser
chemical_list: D004720:Endonucleases