Vinicio Danilo Armijos Jaramillo

Universidad de Las Américas | UDLA · Department of Biotechnology

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a widely acknowledged phenomenon in prokaryotes for generating genetic diversity. However, the impact of this process in eukaryotes, particularly interdomain HGT, is a topic of debate. Although there have been observed biases in interdomain HGT detection, little exploration has been conducted on the effects of imba...

The introduction of plant pathogens can quickly reshape disease dynamics in island agro-ecologies, representing a continuous challenge for local crop management strategies. Xanthomonas pathogens causing tomato bacterial spot were probably introduced in Taiwan several decades ago, creating a unique opportunity to study the genetic makeup and adaptiv...

Trehalose 6-phosphate (Tre6P), the intermediate of trehalose biosynthesis, is an essential signalling metabolite linking plant growth and development to carbon metabolism. While recent work has focused predominantly on the enzymes that produce Tre6P, little is known about the proteins that catalyse its degradation, the trehalose 6-phosphate phospha...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is an emerging virus that, since March 2020, has been responsible for a global and ongoing pandemic. Its rapid spread over the past nearly 3 years has caused novel variants to arise. To monitor the circulation and emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants, surveillance systems based on nucleotide...

Studies of the evolution of anti-predatory phenotypes such as aposematic signals have proven informative to demonstrate the role of selection on phenotypic divergence. Oophaga pumilio show high variance in both elements of their aposematic signals; visual cues consisting of color patterns, as well as their alkaloid chemical defenses where an indivi...

Extensive plastic production has become a serious environmental and health problem due to the lack of efficient treatment of plastic waste. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is one of the most used polymers and is accumulating in landfills or elsewhere in nature at alarming rates. In recent years, enzymatic degradation of PET by Ideonella sakaiensis...

The Kunitz‐Soybean Trypsin Inhibitor (Kunitz‐STI) family is a large family of proteins with most of its members being protease inhibitors. The versatility of the inhibitory profile and the structural plasticity of these proteins, make this family a promising scaffold for designing new multifunctional proteins. Historically, Kunitz‐STI inhibitors ha...

Background Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are the result of the integration of retroviruses into host DNA following germline infection. Endogenous retroviruses are made up of three main genes: gag , pol , and env , each of which encodes viral proteins that can be conserved or not. ERVs have been observed in a wide range of vertebrate genomes and th...

Red blood cells infected with Plasmodium falciparum secrete extracellular vesicles in order to facilitate the survival and infection of human cells. Various researchers have studied the composition of these extracellular vesicles and identified the proteins contained inside. In this work, we used that information to detect potential P. falciparum m...

Molecular mimicry is one of the evolutionary strategies that parasites use to manipulate the host metabolism and perform an effective infection. This phenomenon has been observed in several animal and plant pathosystems. Despite the relevance of this mechanism in pathogenesis, little is known about it in fungus–plant interactions. For that reason,...

Leishmaniasis and trypanosomiasis are largely neglected diseases prevailing in tropical and subtropical conditions. These are an arthropod-borne zoonosis that affects humans and some animals and is caused by infection with protozoan of the genera Leishmania and Trypanosoma, respectively. These parasites present high genomic plasticity and are able...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) plays an important role for evolutionary innovations within prokaryotic communities and is a crucial event for their survival. Several computational approaches have arisen to identify HGT events in recipient genomes. However, this has been proven to be a complex task due to the generation of a great number of false po...

Streptomyces clavuligerus is a bacterium that produces a lot of secondary metabolites. The production of antibiotics has been extensively studied in this specie; nevertheless, other aspects, such as evolution or ecology, have received less attention. Thus, we studied the impact of horizontal gene transfer in the S. clavuligerus genome. To perform t...

The emergence of SARS‐CoV‐2 has resulted in nearly 1,280,000 infections and 73,000 deaths globally so far. This novel virus acquired the ability to infect human cells using the SARS‐CoV cell receptor hACE2. Because of this it is essential to improve our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics surrounding the SARS‐CoV‐2 hACE2 interaction. One way...

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in more than 200,000 infections and nearly 9,000 deaths globally so far. This novel virus is thought to have originated from an animal reservoir, and acquired the ability to infect human cells using the SARS-CoV cell receptor hACE2. In the wake of a global pandemic it is essential to improve our understandin...

Streptomyces clavuligerus is a bacterium that produces a lot of secondary metabolites. The production of antibiotics has been extensively studied in this species; nevertheless, other aspects, such as evolution or ecology, have received less attention. Thus, we studied the impact of horizontal gene transfer in the S. clavuligerus genome. To perform...

Plant pathogenic organisms secrete proteins called effectors that recognize, infect and promote disease within host cells. . Bacteria, like Pseudomona syringae, use effectors with DnaJ function to disrupt plant defenses. DnaJ proteins (also called Hsp40) are a group of co-chaperone molecules, which assist in the folding of proteins. Despite the des...

The prediction of cell-lines sensitivity to a given set of compounds is a very important factor in the optimization of in-vitro assays. To date, the most common prediction strategies are based upon machine learning or other quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) based approaches. In the present research, we propose and discuss a strai...

Consensus scoring has become a commonly used strategy within structure-based virtual screening (VS) workflows with improved performance compared to those based in a single scoring function. However, no research has been devoted to analyze the worth of docking scoring functions components in consensus scoring. We implemented and tested a method that...

Retroviral infections, such as HIV are, until now, diseases with no cure. Determining the target proteins of new antiretroviral compounds is a huge goal for medicine and pharmaceutical chemistry. ChEMBL manages Big Data features with complex dataset, which is hard to organize. This makes information difficult to analyze due to a big number of chara...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) plays an important role in the evolution of many organisms, especially in prokaryotes where commonly occurs. Microbial communities can improve survival due to the evolutionary innovations induced by HGT events. Thus, several computational approaches have arisen to identify such events in recipient genomes. However, th...

Background: Malaria or Paludism is a tropical disease caused by parasites of the Plasmodium genre and transmitted to humans through the bite of infected mosquitos of the Anopheles genre. This pathology is considered one of the first causes of death in tropical countries and, despite several existing therapies, they have a high toxicity. Computatio...

Consensus scoring has become a commonly used strategy within structure-based virtual screening (VS) workflows with improved performance compared to those based in a single scoring function. However, no research has been devoted to analyze the worth of docking scoring functions components in consensus scoring. We implemented and tested a method that...

Streptomyces clavuligerus is a Gram‐positive bacterium that is a high producer of secondary metabolites with industrial applications. The production of antibiotics such as clavulanic acid or cephamycin has been extensively studied in this species; nevertheless, other aspects, such as evolution or ecology, have received less attention. Furthermore,...

Expansins are a superfamily of proteins mainly present in plants that are also found in bacteria, fungi and amoebozoa. Expansin proteins bind the plant cells wall and relax the cellulose microfibrils without any enzymatic action. The evolution of this kind of proteins exposes a complex pattern of horizontal gene transferences that makes difficult t...

Streptomyces scabies is a common soil bacterium that causes scab symptoms in potatoes. Strong evidence indicates horizontal gene transfer (HGT) among bacteria has influenced the evolution of this plant pathogen and other Streptomyces spp. To extend the study of the HGT to the Streptomyces genus, we explored the effects of the inter-domain HGT in th...

Plant pathogens have the capacity to manipulate the host immune system through the secretion of effectors. We identified 27 putative effector proteins encoded in the genome of the maize anthracnose pathogen Colletotrichum graminicola that are likely to target the host’s nucleus as they simultaneously contain sequence signatures for secretion and nu...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the stable transmission of genetic material between organisms by means other than vertical inheritance. HGT has an important role in the evolution of prokaryotes but is relatively rare in eukaryotes. HGT has been shown to contribute to virulence in eukaryotic pathogens. We studied the importance of HGT in plant pat...

The Colletotrichum plant-like subtilisins (CPLSs) are a family of proteins found only in species of the phytopathogenic fungus Colletotrichum. CPLSs have high similarity to plant subtilisins and our previous work has shown that they were acquired by an ancient horizontal gene transfer event from plants. The rapid growth of sequence data in public d...

The genus Colletotrichum contains a large number of phytopathogenic fungi that produce enormous economic losses around the world. The effect of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has not been studied yet in these organisms. Inter-Kingdom HGT into fungal genomes has been reported in the past but knowledge about the HGT between plants and fungi is partic...

Figures S1–S8. (DOCX)