Biomedical subjects

Gabriel Valiente

Publications and source records attributed to Gabriel Valiente.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

On the ancestral compatibility of two phylogenetic trees with nested taxa.

Compatibility of phylogenetic trees is the most important concept underlying widely-used methods for assessing the agreement of different phylogenetic trees with overlapping taxa and combining them into common supertrees to reveal the tree of life. The notion of ancestral compatibility of phylogenetic trees with nested taxa was recently introduced. In this paper we analyze in detail the meaning of this compatibility from the points of view of the local structure of the trees, of the existence of embeddings into a common supertree, and of the joint properties of their cluster representations. Our analysis leads to a very simple polynomial-time algorithm for testing this compatibility, which we have implemented and is freely available for download from the BioPerl collection of Perl modules for computational biology.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

An edit script for taxonomic classifications.

BACKGROUND: The NCBI taxonomy provides one of the most powerful ways to navigate sequence data bases but currently users are forced to formulate queries according to a single taxonomic classification. Given that there is not universal agreement on the classification of organisms, providing a single classification places constraints on the questions biologists can ask. However, maintaining multiple classifications is burdensome in the face of a constantly growing NCBI classification. RESULTS: In this paper, we present a solution to the problem of generating modifications of the NCBI taxonomy, based on the computation of an edit script that summarises the differences between two classification trees. Our algorithms find the shortest possible edit script based on the identification of all shared subtrees, and only take time quasi linear in the size of the trees because classification trees have unique node labels. CONCLUSION: These algorithms have been recently implemented, and the software is freely available for download from http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/forest/.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

Qualitatively predicting acetylation and methylation areas in DNA sequences.

Eukaryotic genomes are packaged by the wrapping of DNA around histone octamers to form nucleosomes. Nucleosome occupancy, acetylation, and methylation, which have a major impact on all nuclear processes involving DNA, have been recently mapped across the yeast genome using chromatin immunoprecipitation and DNA microarrays. However, this experimental protocol is laborious and expensive. Moreover, experimental methods often produce noisy results. In this paper, we introduce a computational approach to the qualitative prediction of nucleosome occupancy, acetylation, and methylation areas in DNA sequences. Our method uses support vector machines to discriminate between DNA areas with high and low relative occupancy, acetylation, or methylation, and rank k-gram features based on their support for these DNA modifications. Experimental results on the yeast genome reveal genetic area preferences of nucleosome occupancy, acetylation, and methylation that are consistent with previous studies. Supplementary files are available from http://www.jaist.ac.jp/~tran/nucleosome/.

Acetylation↗

PubMed2005

Reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships from metabolic pathways based on the enzyme hierarchy and the gene ontology.

There has been much interest in the structural comparison and alignment of metabolic pathways. Several techniques have been conceived to assess the similarity of metabolic pathways of different organisms. In this paper, we show that the combination of a new heuristic algorithm for the comparison of metabolic pathways together with any of three enzyme similarity measures (hierarchical, information content, and gene ontology) can be used to derive a metabolic pathway similarity measure that is suitable for reconstructing phylogenetic relationships from metabolic pathways. Experimental results on the Glycolysis pathway of 73 organisms representing the three domains of life show that our method outperforms previous techniques.

Enzymes↗