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At least 1,135 records · Page 63Linked to original sources

A data-mining approach to spacer oligonucleotide typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

MOTIVATION: The Direct Repeat (DR) locus of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a suitable model to study (i) molecular epidemiology and (ii) the evolutionary genetics of tuberculosis. This is achieved by a DNA analysis technique (genotyping), called sp acer oligo nucleotide typing (spoligotyping ). In this paper, we investigated data analysis methods to discover intelligible knowledge rules from spoligotyping, that has not yet been applied on such representation. This processing was achieved by applying the C4.5 induction algorithm and knowledge rules were produced. Finally, a Prototype Selection (PS) procedure was applied to eliminate noisy data. This both simplified decision rules, as well as the number of spacers to be tested to solve classification tasks. In the second part of this paper, the contribution of 25 new additional spacers and the knowledge rules inferred were studied from a machine learning point of view. From a statistical point of view, the correlations between spacers were analyzed and suggested that both negative and positive ones may be related to potential structural constraints within the DR locus that may shape its evolution directly or indirectly. RESULTS: By generating knowledge rules induced from decision trees, it was shown that not only the expert knowledge may be modeled but also improved and simplified to solve automatic classification tasks on unknown patterns. A practical consequence of this study may be a simplification of the spoligotyping technique, resulting in a reduction of the experimental constraints and an increase in the number of samples processed.

Algorithms↗

Mining viral protease data to extract cleavage knowledge.

MOTIVATION: The motivation is to identify, through machine learning techniques, specific patterns in HIV and HCV viral polyprotein amino acid residues where viral protease cleaves the polyprotein as it leaves the ribosome. An understanding of viral protease specificity may help the development of future anti-viral drugs involving protease inhibitors by identifying specific features of protease activity for further experimental investigation. While viral sequence information is growing at a fast rate, there is still comparatively little understanding of how viral polyproteins are cut into their functional unit lengths. The aim of the work reported here is to investigate whether it is possible to generalise from known cleavage sites to unknown cleavage sites for two specific viruses-HIV and HCV. An understanding of proteolytic activity for specific viruses will contribute to our understanding of viral protease function in general, thereby leading to a greater understanding of protease families and their substrate characteristics. RESULTS: Our results show that artificial neural networks and symbolic learning techniques (See5) capture some fundamental and new substrate attributes, but neural networks outperform their symbolic counterpart.

Algorithms↗

Prediction of contact maps by GIOHMMs and recurrent neural networks using lateral propagation from all four cardinal corners.

MOTIVATION: Accurate prediction of protein contact maps is an important step in computational structural proteomics. Because contact maps provide a translation and rotation invariant topological representation of a protein, they can be used as a fundamental intermediary step in protein structure prediction. RESULTS: We develop a new set of flexible machine learning architectures for the prediction of contact maps, as well as other information processing and pattern recognition tasks. The architectures can be viewed as recurrent neural network implemantations of a class of Bayesian networks we call generalized input-output HMMs (GIOHMMs). For the specific case of contact maps, contextual information is propagated laterally through four hidden planes, one for each cardinal corner. We show that these architectures can be trained from examples and yield contact map predictors that outperform previously reported methods. While several extensions and improvements are in progress, the current version can accurately predict 60.5% of contacts at a distance cutoff of 8 A and 45% of distant contacts at 10 A, for proteins of length up to 300.

Algorithms↗

Biological information: making it accessible and integrated (and trying to make sense of it).

The availability of the genome sequences of human and mouse, human sequence variation data and other large genetic data sets will lead to a revolution in understanding of the human machine and the treatment of its diseases. The success of the international genome sequencing consortiums shows what can be achieved by well coordinated large scale public domain projects and the benefits of data access to all. It is already clear that the availability of this sequence is having a huge impact on research worldwide. Complete genome sequences provide a framework to pull all biological data together such that each piece has the potential to say something about biology as a whole. Biology is too complex for any organisation to have a monopoly of ideas or data, so the collection, analysis and access to this data can be contributed to by research institutes around the world. However, although it is possible for all this data to be accessible to all through the internet, the more organisations provide data or analysis separately, the harder it becomes for anyone to collect and integrate the results. To address these problems of intergration of data, open standards for biological data exchange, such as the 'Distributed Annotation System' (DAS) are being developed and bioinformatics (Dowell et al., 2001) as a whole is now being strongly driven by the open source software (OSS) model for collaborative software development (Hubbard and Birney, 1999). The leading provider of human genome annotation, the Ensembl project (http://www.ensembl.org), is entirely an OSS project and has been widely adopted by academic and commerical organisations alike (Hubbard et al., 2002). Accurate automatic annotation of features such as genes in vertebrate genomes currently relies on supporting evidence in the form of homologies to mRNAs, ESTs or protein. However, it appears that sufficient high quality experimentally curated annotation now exists to be used as a substrate for machine learning algorithms to create effective models of biological signal sequences (Down and Hubbard, 2002). Is there hope for ab initio prediction methods after all?

Chromosome Mapping↗

Knowledge-enhanced protein subcellular localization prediction from 3D fluorescence microscope images.

MOTIVATION: Pinpointing the subcellular location of proteins is essential for studying protein function and related diseases. Advances in spatial proteomics have shown that automatic recognition of protein subcellular localization from images could highly facilitate protein translocation analysis and biomarker discovery, but existing machine-learning works have been mostly limited to processing 2D images. By contrast, 3D images have higher spatial resolution and allow researchers to observe cellular structures in their natural context, but currently, there are only a few studies of 3D image processing for protein distribution analysis due to the lack of data and complexity of modeling. RESULTS: We developed a knowledge-enhanced protein subcellular localization model, KE3DLoc, which could recognize distribution patterns in 3D fluorescence microscope images using deep learning methods. The model designs an image feature extraction module that incorporates information from 3D and 2D projected cells and implements asymmetric loss and confidence weights to address data imbalance and weak cell annotation issues. Besides, considering that the biological knowledge in the Gene Ontology (GO) database can provide valuable support for protein location understanding, the KE3DLoc model incorporates a novel knowledge enhancement module that optimizes the protein representation by related knowledge graphs derived from the GO. Since the image module and the knowledge module calculate features from different levels, KE3DLoc designs protein ID aggregation to enhance the consistency of protein features across different cells. Experimental results on three public datasets have demonstrated that the KE3DLoc significantly outperforms existing methods and provides valuable insights for spatial proteomics research. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: All datasets and codes used in this study are available at GitHub: https://github.com/PRBioimages/KE3DLoc.

Microscopy, Fluorescence↗

dbscATAC: a resource of single-cell super-enhancers/enhancers and gene markers derived from scATAC-seq data.

MOTIVATION: scATAC-seq enables high-resolution mapping of cis-regulatory elements. It has been widely applied to uncover cell-type-specific regulatory networks and complement scRNA-seq analysis in numerous studies. However, a large number of datasets generated by scATAC-seq remain underutilized due to limited exploration of super-enhancers/typical enhancers and gene markers. A comprehensive resource enabling cell-type-specific annotation of cis-regulatory elements and their dynamic enhancer-gene linkages remains an urgent unmet need for scATAC-seq. RESULTS: We present dbscATAC, a specialized single-cell database for annotating super-enhancers, gene markers, and enhancer-gene interactions derived from scATAC-seq data. Using improved machine learning algorithms, we identified 213 835 super-enhancers across 520 tissue/cell types from three species, as well as 347 484 gene markers, 13 470 526 enhancers, and 10 402 346 enhancer-gene interactions derived from 1 668 076 single cells spanning 1028 tissue/cell types in 13 species. An easy-to-use online platform with multiple analytic modules and hierarchical query options was developed for searching, browsing and visualizing single-cell super-enhancers, enhancers, and gene markers. dbscATAC provides a comprehensive resource to facilitate the exploration of enhancer landscapes, gene regulation, and cell-type-specific characteristics in single-cell epigenomics. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The database with all the super-enhancer/enhancer annotation data is available at http://singlecelldb.com/dbscATAC/index.php. And the source code of dbscATAC for prediction of SEs, enhancers, and gene markers are available at https://github.com/EvansGao/dbscATAC. The source code, tissue/cell type description, and data summary can be downloaded at DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.28706414.scATAC-seq, Database, Super-enhancers/enhancers, Gene markers.

Enhancer Elements, Genetic↗

AncestryGeni: a novel genetic ancestry classification pipeline for small and noisy sequence data.

MOTIVATION: Efforts to address health disparities are often limited by the lack of robust computational tools for inferring genetic ancestry by calculating an individual's genetic similarity to continental groups. We have already shown that a preferred alternative to self-described race is using ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) that can be classified into ancestral components and used to estimate their similarity to those of known populations to identify continental groups. However, real-world genomic data can present challenges, including limited availability of germline DNA, a small number of AIMs for each sample, and the use of different variant calling software, limiting the application of existing solutions. RESULTS: Here, we describe a novel supervised machine-learning tool AncestryGeni, which infers genetic ancestry for samples with even a hundred markers and is applicable to any genomic data, including whole exome sequencing (WES) and RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) data. Applying AncestryGeni to a real-world genomic dataset obtained from the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) CoMMpass study, we show that it is more accurate than the commonly used FastNGSadmix when using nonstandard genomic material. We also demonstrate that when using AncestryGeni, the tumor-derived sequence obtained from WES and RNA-Seq can be a robust data source to accurately estimate an individual's genetic similarity to a continental group. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: AncestryGeni pipeline is available at https://github.com/eelhaik/AncestryGeni/tree/main.

Humans↗

HallmarkGraph: a cancer hallmark informed graph neural network for classifying hierarchical tumor subtypes.

MOTIVATION: Accurate tumor subtype diagnosis is crucial for precision oncology, yet current methodologies face significant challenges. These include balancing model accuracy with interpretability and the high costs of generating multi-omics data in clinical settings. Moreover, there is a lack of validated models capable of classifying hierarchical tumor subtypes across a comprehensive pan-cancer cohort. RESULTS: We present a graph neural network, HallmarkGraph, the first biologically informed model developed to classify hierarchical tumor subtypes in human cancer. Inspired by cancer hallmarks, the model's architecture integrates transcriptome profiles and gene regulatory interactions to perform multi-label classification. We evaluate the model on a comprehensive pan-cancer cohort comprising 11 476 samples from 26 primary cancers with 405 subtypes up to eight levels. The model demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving 5-fold cross-validation accuracy between 85% and 99% for tumor subtypes labeled with increasing details of genomic information. It also shows good generalizability on a validation dataset of 887 samples, assessed using three metrics that consider tumor subtypes at individual, combined, and sample levels. Benchmarking and ablation experiments show that hallmark-based embeddings slightly influence model performance, while the integrated multilayer perceptron plays a significant role in determining classifier accuracy. Additionally, we use the SHAP method to link cancer hallmarks with genes, identifying key features that influence model decisions. Our findings present a biologically informed machine learning framework capable of tracking tumor transcriptomic trajectories and distinguishing inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity in pan-cancer. This approach holds promise for enhancing cancer diagnostics. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: HallmarkGraph is accessible at https://github.com/laixn/HallmarkGraph.

Humans↗

Tomtom-lite: accelerating Tomtom enables large-scale and real-time motif similarity scoring.

SUMMARY: Pairwise sequence similarity is a core operation in genomic analysis, yet most attention has been given to sequences made up of discrete characters. With the growing prevalence of machine learning, calculating similarities for sequences of continuous representations, e.g. frequency-based position-weight matrices (PWMs) and attribution-based contribution-weight matrices, is taking on newfound importance. Tomtom has previously been proposed as an algorithm for identifying pairs of PWMs whose similarity is statistically significant, but the implementation remains inefficient for both real-time and large-scale analysis. Accordingly, we have re-implemented Tomtom as a numba-accelerated Python function that is natively multi-threaded, avoids cache misses, more efficiently caches intermediate values, and uses approximations at compute bottlenecks. Here, we provide a detailed description of the original Tomtom method and present results demonstrating that our re-implementation can achieve over a 1000-fold speedup compared with the original tool on reasonable tasks. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Our implementation of Tomtom is freely available as a Python package at https://github.com/jmschrei/memesuite-lite, which can be downloaded via pip install memelite or at https://zenodo.org/records/17008952.

Software↗

HXMS: a standardized file format for HX-MS data.

MOTIVATION: Hydrogen/deuterium exchange-mass spectrometry (HX-MS) is a rapidly expanding technique used to investigate protein conformational ensembles. The growing popularity and utility of HX-MS has driven the development of diverse instrumentation and software, resulting in inconsistent, non-standardized data analysis and representation. Most HX-MS data formats also employ only mean deuteration representations of the data rather than full isotopic mass spectra, which reduces the information content of the data and limits downstream quantitative analysis. RESULTS: Inspired by reliable protein structure and genomics data formats, we present HXMS, a unified, lightweight, scalable, and human-readable file format for HX-MS data. The HXMS format preserves the isotopic mass envelopes for all peptides, captures the full experimental time-course including fully deuterated control samples, and contains all other key information. It supports multimodal distributions, post-translational modifications (PTMs), and experimental replicates. To promote compatibility with existing HX-MS workflows, we also developed PFLink, a Python package that converts exported data files from commonly used HX-MS software to the HXMS format. PFLink and the HXMS format will enable quantitative, higher-resolution data processing, improved data sharing and storage among HX-MS practitioners, future machine learning applications, and further developments in HX-MS analysis. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: PFLink is publicly available to install locally on HuggingFace, alongside documentation, or use online at HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/spaces/glasgow-lab/PFlink). The supplementary information includes sample input files, sample HXMS files, and a generic unfilled PFlink custom CSV file that users may populate with key experimental conditions and results, which can then be read and converted into the HXMS format.

Software↗

PMGen: from peptide-MHC structure prediction to peptide generation.

MOTIVATION: Accurate structural modeling of peptide-major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) complexes is essential for structure-driven immunotherapy design, yet current prediction tools suffer from narrow class coverage, restricted peptide lengths, insufficient accuracy, and a lack of built-in structure-aware peptide sampling. Consequently, most mimotope and altered peptide ligand designs rely solely on sequence substitution, leaving spatial and biophysical insights from pMHC structures largely unexploited. RESULTS: We introduce peptide-MHC generator (PMGen), an integrated framework for structure prediction and structure-guided design of variable-length peptides across MHC Class I and II. PMGen enforces anchor constraints within AlphaFold2 through two complementary strategies, initial guess and template engineering, achieving state-of-the-art structural fidelity without model fine-tuning. On a comprehensive benchmark, PMGen outperforms all existing methods, yielding median peptide-core Cα RMSDs of 0.62 Å for MHC-I and 0.33 Å for MHC-II. We show that PMGen can recover incorrectly predicted anchor positions and that AlphaFold pLDDT scores enable sequence-independent binding-core identification. Applied to a published neoantigen/wild-type pair, PMGen accurately captures mutation-induced conformational changes. Beyond structure prediction, we show that ProteinMPNN sampling on PMGen-predicted backbones yields higher affinity peptides while preserving the parental 3D conformation. Using PMGen to generate 63 817 high-confidence pMHC structures as training data, we further improve ProteinMPNN's peptide sequence recovery from 0.14 to 0.64 on a test set of 85 unseen MHC-I alleles, highlighting the value of accurate predicted structures for downstream machine learning tasks. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: PMGen is freely available at https://github.com/soedinglab/PMGen, with an interactive Colab notebook at https://colab.research.google.com/github/soedinglab/PMGen/blob/master/colab.ipynb.

Peptides↗

GRNContext: an interactive web platform for contextualized gene regulatory networks visualization across human cancers.

SUMMARY: While current Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) databases provide comprehensive reference maps of potential interactions between transcription factors and target genes, they do not specify which regulatory interactions are active within specific biological contexts. This limitation is particularly critical in cancer, where transcriptional programs are inherently tissue-specific. To address this gap, we developed GRNContext, an interactive web platform designed for the visualization, exploration, and comparative analysis of gene regulatory networks contextualized across 33 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Our approach uses the TFLink human reference GRN as a starting point and integrates TCGA transcriptomic profiles to infer cancer-specific regulatory activity. Regulatory relevance was assessed using complementary machine learning and statistical methods, which were unified into a consensus score to prioritize and filter the most relevant candidate regulators for each target gene. By providing both curated context-specific GRNs and a user-friendly platform, GRNContext constitutes a comprehensive and accessible resource that supports mechanistic investigations, hypothesis generation, and translational research focused on transcriptional regulation in cancer. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: GRNContext is supported by all major browsers and freely available on the web at https://apps.cienciavida.org/grncontext. It is implemented as a client-server web application featuring a FastAPI backend and a React frontend utilizing Cytoscape.js for interactive network visualization, all containerized via Docker for cross-platform compatibility.

Humans↗

Towards a computational model for -1 eukaryotic frameshifting sites.

MOTIVATION: Unconventional decoding events are now well acknowledged, but not yet well formalized. In this study, we present a bioinformatics analysis of eukaryotic -1 frameshifting, in order to model this event. RESULTS: A consensus model has already been established for -1 frameshifting sites. Our purpose here is to provide new constraints which make the model more precise. We show how a machine learning approach can be used to refine the current model. We identify new properties that may be involved in frameshifting. Each of the properties found was experimentally validated. Initially, we identify features of the overall model that are to be simultaneously satisfied. We then focus on the following two components: the spacer and the slippery sequence. As a main result, we point out that the identity of the primary structure of the so-called spacer is of great importance. AVAILABILITY: Sequences of the oligonucleotides in the functional tests are available at http://www.igmors.u-psud.fr/rousset/bioinformatics/.

Algorithms↗

A statistical problem for inference to regulatory structure from associations of gene expression measurements with microarrays.

MOTIVATION: One approach to inferring genetic regulatory structure from microarray measurements of mRNA transcript hybridization is to estimate the associations of gene expression levels measured in repeated samples. The associations may be estimated by correlation coefficients or by conditional frequencies (for discretized measurements) or by some other statistic. Although these procedures have been successfully applied to other areas, their validity when applied to microarray measurements has yet to be tested. RESULTS: This paper describes an elementary statistical difficulty for all such procedures, no matter whether based on Bayesian updating, conditional independence testing, or other machine learning procedures such as simulated annealing or neural net pruning. The difficulty obtains if a number of cells from a common population are aggregated in a measurement of expression levels. Although there are special cases where the conditional associations are preserved under aggregation, in general inference of genetic regulatory structure based on conditional association is unwarranted

Algorithms↗

Extracting synonymous gene and protein terms from biological literature.

MOTIVATION: Genes and proteins are often associated with multiple names. More names are added as new functional or structural information is discovered. Because authors can use any one of the known names for a gene or protein, information retrieval and extraction would benefit from identifying the gene and protein terms that are synonyms of the same substance. RESULTS: We have explored four complementary approaches for extracting gene and protein synonyms from text, namely the unsupervised, partially supervised, and supervised machine-learning techniques, as well as the manual knowledge-based approach. We report results of a large scale evaluation of these alternatives over an archive of biological journal articles. Our evaluation shows that our extraction techniques could be a valuable supplement to resources such as SWISSPROT, as our systems were able to capture gene and protein synonyms not listed in the SWISSPROT database.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

Gene networks inference using dynamic Bayesian networks.

This article deals with the identification of gene regulatory networks from experimental data using a statistical machine learning approach. A stochastic model of gene interactions capable of handling missing variables is proposed. It can be described as a dynamic Bayesian network particularly well suited to tackle the stochastic nature of gene regulation and gene expression measurement. Parameters of the model are learned through a penalized likelihood maximization implemented through an extended version of EM algorithm. Our approach is tested against experimental data relative to the S.O.S. DNA Repair network of the Escherichia coli bacterium. It appears to be able to extract the main regulations between the genes involved in this network. An added missing variable is found to model the main protein of the network. Good prediction abilities on unlearned data are observed. These first results are very promising: they show the power of the learning algorithm and the ability of the model to capture gene interactions.

Algorithms↗

Controlling false-negative errors in microarray differential expression analysis: a PRIM approach.

MOTIVATION: Theoretical considerations suggest that current microarray screening algorithms may fail to detect many true differences in gene expression (Type II analytic errors). We assessed 'false negative' error rates in differential expression analyses by conventional linear statistical models (e.g. t-test), microarray-adapted variants (e.g. SAM, Cyber-T), and a novel strategy based on hold-out cross-validation. The latter approach employs the machine-learning algorithm Patient Rule Induction Method (PRIM) to infer minimum thresholds for reliable change in gene expression from Boolean conjunctions of fold-induction and raw fluorescence measurements. RESULTS: Monte Carlo analyses based on four empirical data sets show that conventional statistical models and their microarray-adapted variants overlook more than 50% of genes showing significant up-regulation. Conjoint PRIM prediction rules recover approximately twice as many differentially expressed transcripts while maintaining strong control over false-positive (Type I) errors. As a result, experimental replication rates increase and total analytic error rates decline. RT-PCR studies confirm that gene inductions detected by PRIM but overlooked by other methods represent true changes in mRNA levels. PRIM-based conjoint inference rules thus represent an improved strategy for high-sensitivity screening of DNA microarrays. AVAILABILITY: Freestanding JAVA application at http://microarray.crump.ucla.edu/focus

Algorithms↗

Protein beta-turn prediction using nearest-neighbor method.

MOTIVATION: With the emerging success of protein secondary structure prediction through the applications of various statistical and machine learning techniques, similar techniques have been applied to protein beta-turn prediction. In this study, we perform protein beta-turn prediction using a k-nearest neighbor method, which is combined with a filter that uses predicted protein secondary structure information. Traditional beta-turn prediction from k-nearest neighbor method is modified to account for the unbalanced ratio of the natural occurrence of beta-turns and non-beta-turns. RESULTS: Our prediction scheme is tested on a set of 426 non-homologous protein sequences. The prediction scheme consists of two stages: k-nearest neighbor method stage and filtering stage. Variations of the k-nearest neighbor method were used to take property of beta-turns into consideration. Our filtering method uses beta-turn/non-beta-turn estimates from the k-nearest neighbor method stage and predicted protein secondary structure information from PSI-PRED in order to get new beta-turn/non-beta-turn estimate. Our result is compared with the previously best known beta-turn prediction method on the dataset of 426 non-homologous protein sequences and is shown to give slightly superior performance at significantly lower computational complexity. AVAILABILITY: Contact the author for information on the source code of the programs used.

Algorithms↗