A novel corpus of molecular to higher-order events that facilitates the understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a severe and progressive chronic fibrosing interstitial lung disease with causes that have remained unclear to date. Development of effective treatments will require elucidation of the detailed pathogenetic mechanisms of IPF at both the molecular and cellular levels. With a biomedical corpus that includes IPF-related entities and events, text-mining systems can efficiently extract such mechanism-related information from huge amounts of literature on the disease. A novel corpus consisting of 150 abstracts with 9297 entities intended for training a text-mining system was constructed to clarify IPF-related pathogenetic mechanisms. For this corpus, entity information was annotated, as were relation and event information. To construct IPF-related networks, we also conducted entity normalization with IDs assigned to entities. Thereby, we extracted the same entities, which are expressed differently. Moreover, IPF-related events have been defined in this corpus, in contrast to existing corpora. This corpus will be useful to extract IPF-related information from scientific texts. Because many entities and events are related to lung diseases, this freely available corpus can also be used to extract information related to other lung diseases such as lung cancer and interstitial pneumonia caused by COVID-19.

Characterization of LdrA (long direct repeat A) protein of Escherichia coli.

Reminiscent of apoptotic genes in higher systems, almost all bacteria contain 'suicide' genes, which encode toxins. Toxins inhibit cell growth and may cause cell death. These are coexpressed with their cognate antitoxins from a toxin-antitoxin (TA) operon in normally growing cells. The cellular targets of toxins are diverse. The study of the TA system is important as in addition to their involvement in the normal bacterial physiology, TA systems may also play a role in bacterial pathogenicity. The long direct repeat (Ldr) family of proteins belongs to one such TA system. Here we report characterization of LdrA, the prototypical protein of the Ldr family, and show that it is highly toxic for cell growth. The data suggests that LdrA may exert toxicity by inhibiting ATP synthesis, possibly due to its localization in the cell membrane. This inhibition of energy production leads to the inhibition of biosynthetic reactions in the cell such as DNA replication, transcription and translation, and eventually cell growth.