I am trying to identity all the amino acids in each protein in the human genome in which the residues are split between two adjacent exons.
To illustrate the problem, suppose I have the following peptide PNKCSGMRFP
Suppose that the residues PNKCS were encoded by exon 2 but the codons encoding "G" amino acid (which is encoded by the GGA codon) was split either as G|GA (the G on the left side of "|" is encoded by exon 2 and the "GA" on the right side of "|" is encoded by exon 3) or as GG|A.
Thank you
Lee
2 answers
you could use UCSC knownGene and awk to get the position of the exons. I put a awk script here: https://github.com/lindenb/awk-sandbox/blob/master/src/bio/ucsc/biostar172743.awk
$ curl -s "http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/database/knownGene.txt.gz" | gunzip -c | awk -f biostar172743.awk | head
#NAME CHROM POS-0 STRAND EXON CODON-0 CDNA-0 PROT-0
uc010nxq.1 chr1 12226 + Exon_1 2 38 12
uc021oeh.1 chr1 324685 + Exon_2 1 172 57
uc021oeh.1 chr1 325123 + Exon_3 2 578 192
uc001abv.1 chr1 865715 + Exon_3 2 254 84
uc001abv.1 chr1 866468 + Exon_4 2 305 101
uc001abw.1 chr1 865715 + Exon_3 2 254 84
uc001abw.1 chr1 866468 + Exon_4 2 305 101
uc001abw.1 chr1 871275 + Exon_5 1 430 143
uc001abw.1 chr1 874508 + Exon_6 1 520 173
note: I haven't much checked the output of this awk script. Please check a few points
You'll need to pick your source for transcripts, exons, etc because they will differ somewhat between sources. I usually advocate for Ensembl or Gencode as being the most comprehensive, although some of the exons and transcripts may be non-canonical and how biologically meaningful some minor or alternative exons/transcripts are is up for debate. But I'd say those would be the best sources for those definitions.
A BED or GTF file with exon definitions is easy to get (GENCODEs files are here). You can use those to get start and stop coordinates of exons. From there it would be easy to determine all of the exons whose length isn't a multiple of three as a rough first pass anyway. You could probably do a more refined approach with a mapping of codon locations to genomic coordinates as well.
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