title: PyMut: A Web Tool for Overlapping Gene Loss-of-Function Mutation Design.
abstract: Loss-of-function study is an effective approach to research gene functions. However, currently most of such studies have ignored an important problem (in this paper, we call it "off-target" problem), that is, if the target gene is an overlapping gene (A gene whose expressible nucleotides overlaps with that of another one), loss-of-function mutation by deleting the complete open reading frame (ORF) may also cause the gene it overlaps lose function, resulting a phenotype which may be rather different from that of single gene deletion. Therefore, when doing such studies, the loss-of-function mutations should be carefully designed to guarantee only the function of the target gene will be abolished. In this paper, we present PyMut, an easy-to-use web tool for biologists to design such mutations. To the best of our knowledge, PyMut is the first tool that aims to solve the "off-target" problem regarding the overlapping genes. Our web server is freely available at http://www.bioinfo.tsinghua.edu.cn/∼liuke/PyMut/index.html.
authors.forename: Ke
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Sha
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hou
authors.forename: Junbiao
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dai
authors.forename: Zhirong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Sun
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005800:Genes, Fungal / Q000235:genetics; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D000073658:Loss of Function Mutation / Q000235:genetics*; D012984:Software; D058615:Synthetic Biology / Q000379:methods*; D015003:Yeasts / Q000187:drug effects