Complete Backtranslation of Oligopeptides for Metabolic Pathways Exploration of Complex Environments using Functional Microarrays

When studying complex environments where the composing microorganisms are unknown, exploratory tools able to tackle with the biological diversity have to be proposed. DNA microarrays can be a good answer if we are in a position to propose all the probes that could target a specific enzyme. In addition, in the context of new metabolic pathways discovery, it appears that a full backtranslation of oligopeptides is also a promising approach. In both contexts it is preferable to have all the complete nucleic sequences corresponding to an enzyme of interest. In this paper, we revisit existing bioinformatics applications, which bring partial reverse translation solutions, and we propose an algorithm based on input oligopeptide degeneracy able to efficiently compute a complete backtranslation of oligopeptides. This algorithm is precious for the discovery of new organisms and we show its performance on simulated and real biological datasets.