Sentences with phrase «key mutations if»

Not exact matches

If researchers can trace the bacterium's evolutionary history, they might be able to identify the key mutations that trigger virulence or adaptation to different habitats, for example.

Even if researchers can pinpoint and transfer those key mutations (a daunting task), DNA is only half the battle.

To understand the selection mechanism behind mutations, network - based studies were used to estimate the importance of a mutated protein compared to non-mutated ones in signalling and protein — protein interaction networks.10, 11,12,13 Proteins mutated in cancer were found having a high number of interacting partners (i.e., a high degree of connectivity), which indicates high local importance.10 Mutated proteins are also often found in the centre of the network, in key global positions, as quantified by the number of shortest paths passing through them if all proteins are connected with each other (i.e., they have high betweenness centrality; hereafter called betweenness).11, 12 Mutated proteins also have high clustering coefficients, which means their neighbours are also neighbours of each other.10, 13 Moreover, neighbourhood analysis of mutated proteins have been previously successfully used to predict novel cancer - related genes.14, 15 However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has concentrated particularly on the topological importance of first neighbours of mutated proteins in cancer, and their usefulness as drug targets themselves.