Family physicians rely on symptom severity, and to some extent on length of time that symptoms are present and family history to determine whether patients should be tested to determine the presence of allergic disease.
The extent of length variation varied from two three residues to over two-fold.
We have found that the extent of length variation is not uniform across all classes.
However, the extent of length heterogeneity is significantly lower in the 5'-end, reflecting a better preservation of the 5' sequence.
These specialist roles that we observe and trends in the extent of length variation could influence decision making in modeling of new superfamily members.
Firstly, it has enabled a qualitative assessment of the extent of length variation in domain superfamilies and aided description of domains tolerant to length variation from a structural perspective.
Further, a quantitative description of the extent of length variation in each of the multi-membered protein domain superfamilies, to analyze the nature and typical lengths of indels in the four major structural classes, showed that length variation is universal and occurs in all classes [13].
The extent of length heterogeneity and nucleotide variation observed in our EBV miRNA deep sequencing study was similar to that observed in miRNAs from Rhesus lymphocryptovirus (rLCV) [24] and Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) [25], as well as in human and mouse miRNAs [17], [26], [27].
We have considered 353 multi-member superfamily alignments (with at least 3 distantly related members) from PASS2 [40] (where the sequence identity between any two members in a superfamily is not more than 40%) and determined the extent of length variation in each domain superfamily.
The newly added members were found to have different domain lengths which changed the extent of length variation of that superfamily.
Though the increase is marginal, this can have an effect on classification of superfamilies based on their extent of length variation.
