Biomedical subjects

Francis Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Francis Tang.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Wildfire: distributed, Grid-enabled workflow construction and execution.

BACKGROUND: We observe two trends in bioinformatics: (i) analyses are increasing in complexity, often requiring several applications to be run as a workflow; and (ii) multiple CPU clusters and Grids are available to more scientists. The traditional solution to the problem of running workflows across multiple CPUs required programming, often in a scripting language such as perl. Programming places such solutions beyond the reach of many bioinformatics consumers. RESULTS: We present Wildfire, a graphical user interface for constructing and running workflows. Wildfire borrows user interface features from Jemboss and adds a drag-and-drop interface allowing the user to compose EMBOSS (and other) programs into workflows. For execution, Wildfire uses GEL, the underlying workflow execution engine, which can exploit available parallelism on multiple CPU machines including Beowulf-class clusters and Grids. CONCLUSION: Wildfire simplifies the tasks of constructing and executing bioinformatics workflows.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

WebAllergen: a web server for predicting allergenic proteins.

UNLABELLED: WebAllergen is a web server that predicts the potential allergenicity of proteins. The query protein will be compared against a set of prebuilt allergenic motifs that have been obtained from 664 known allergen proteins. The query will also be compared with known allergens that do not have detectable allergenic motifs. Moreover, users are allowed to upload their own allergens as alternative training sequences on which a new set of allergenic motifs will be built. The query sequences can also be compared with these motifs. AVAILABILITY: http://weballergen.bii.a-star.edu.sg/

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

CMDWave: conserved motifs detection using wavelets.

CMDWave (Conserved Motif Detection using WAVElets) is a web server that predicts conserved motifs in protein sequences. A set of query protein sequences are first aligned using ClustalW to obtain equal sized sequences. CMDWave then converts the sequences into a numerical representation using electron-ion interaction potential (EIIP). This is followed by a wavelet decomposition and reconstruction. A new similarity metric along with thresholding is then used to identify conserved motifs across all the query sequences. Users need not specify the number of motifs to be identified. For larger groups of sequences, results can be emailed to the users.

Amino Acid Motifs↗

PubMed2004

Exhaustive whole-genome tandem repeats search.

MOTIVATION: Approximate tandem repeats (ATR) occur frequently in the genomes of organisms, and are a source of polymorphisms observed in individuals, and thus are of interest to those studying genetic disorders. Though extensive work has been done in order to identify ATRs, there are inherent limitations with the current approaches in terms of the number of pattern sizes that can be searched or the size of the input length. RESULTS: This paper describes (1) a new algorithm which exhaustively finds all variable-length ATRs in a genomic sequence and (2) a precise description of, and an algorithm to significantly reduce, redundancy in the output. Our ATR definition is parameterized by a mismatch ratio p which allows for more mismatches in longer tandem repeats (and fewer in shorter). Furthermore, our algorithm is embarrassingly parallel and thus can attain near-linear speed-up on Beowulf clusters. We present results of our algorithm applied to sequences of widely differing lengths (from genes to chromosomes). AVAILABILITY: Source and binaries are available on request.

Algorithms↗