This paper proposes a method for identifying protein names in biomedical texts with an emphasis on detecting protein name boundaries. We use a probabilistic model which exploits several surface clues characterizing protein names and incorporates word classes for generalization. In contrast to previously proposed methods, our approach does not rely on natural language processing tools such as part-of-speech taggers and syntactic parsers, so as to reduce processing overhead and the potential number of probabilistic parameters to be estimated. A notion of certainty is also proposed to improve precision for identification. We implemented a protein name identification system based on our proposed method, and evaluated the system on real-world biomedical texts in conjunction with the previous work. The results showed that overall our system performs comparably to the state-of-the-art protein name identification system and that higher performance is achieved for compound names. In addition, it is demonstrated that our system can further improve precision by restricting the system output to those names with high certainties.
The promise of plentiful data on common human genetic variations has given hope that we will be able to uncover genetic factors behind common diseases that have proven difficult to locate by prior methods. Much recent interest in this problem has focused on using haplotypes (contiguous regions of correlated genetic variations), instead of the isolated variations, in order to reduce the size of the statistical analysis problem. In order to most effectively use such variation data, we will need a better understanding of haplotype structure, including both the general principles underlying haplotype structure in the human population and the specific structures found in particular genetic regions or sub-populations. This paper presents a probabilistic model for analyzing haplotype structure in a population using conserved motifs found in statistically significant sub-populations. It describes the model and computational methods for deriving the predicted motif set and haplotype structure for a population. It further presents results on simulated data, in order to validate the method, and on two real datasets from the literature, in order to illustrate its practical application.
Regulatory sequence elements provide important clues to understanding and predicting gene expression. Although the binding sites for hundreds of transcription factors are known, there has been no systematic attempt to incorporate this information in the annotation of the human genome. Cross species sequence comparisons are critical to a meaningful annotation of regulatory elements since they generally reside in conserved non-coding regions. To take advantage of the recently completed drafts of the mouse and human genomes for annotating transcription factor binding sites, we developed SMASH, a computational pipeline that identifies thousands of orthologous human/ mouse proteins, maps them to genomic sequences, extracts and compares upstream regions and annotates putative regulatory elements in conserved, non-coding, upstream regions. Our current dataset consists of approximately 2,500 human/mouse gene pairs. Transcription start sites were estimated by mapping quasi-full length cDNA sequences. SMASH uses a novel probabilistic method to identify putative conserved binding sites that takes into account the competition between transcription factors for binding DNA. SMASH presents the results via a genome browser web interface which displays the predicted regulatory information together with the current annotations for the human genome. Our results are validated by comparison to previously published experimental data. SMASH results compare favorably to other existing computational approaches.
Codon optimization enhances the efficiency of DNA expression vectors used in DNA vaccination and gene therapy by increasing protein expression. Additionally, certain nucleotide motifs have experimentally been shown to be immuno-stimulatory while certain others immuno-suppressive. In this paper, we present algorithms to locate a given set of immuno-modulatory motifs in the DNA expression vectors corresponding to a given amino acid sequence and maximize or minimize the number and the context of the immuno-modulatory motifs in the DNA expression vectors. The main contribution is to use multiple pattern matching algorithms to synthesize a DNA sequence for a given amino acid sequence and a graph theoretic approach for finding the longest weighted path in a directed graph that will maximize or minimize certain motifs. This is achieved using O(n(2)) time, where n is the length of the amino acid sequence. Based on this, we develop a software tool.
Protein sequence analysis is an important tool to decode the logic of life. One of the most important similarity measures in this area is the edit distance between amino acids of two sequences. We believe this criterion should be reconsidered because protein features are probably associated more with small peptide fragments than with individual amino acids. In this paper, we design small patterns that are associated with highly conversed regions among a set of protein sequences. These patterns are used analogous to the index terms in information retrieval. Therefore, we do not consider gaps within patterns. This new similarity measure has been applied to phylogenetic tree construction, protein clustering and protein secondary structure prediction and has produced promising results.
DNA microarray technology provides a broad snapshot of the state of the cell by measuring the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. Visualization techniques can enable the exploration and detection of patterns and relationships in a complex dataset by presenting the data in a graphical format in which the key characteristics become more apparent. The purpose of this study is to present an interactive visualization technique conveying the temporal patterns of gene expression data in a form intuitive for nonspecialized end-users. The first Fourier harmonic projection (FFHP) was introduced to translate the multidimensional time series data into a two dimensional scatter plot. The spatial relationship of the points reflect the structure of the original dataset and relationships among clusters become two dimensional. The proposed method was tested using two published, array-derived gene expression datasets. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
The relationship between protein mutations and conformational change can potentially decipher the language relating sequence to structure. Elsewhere, we presented the protein mutant resource (PMR), an online tool that systematically identified related mutants in the protein databank (PDB), inferred mutant Gene Ontology classifications using data-mining, and allowed intuitive exploration of relationships between mutant structures. Here, we perform a comprehensive statistical analysis of PMR mutants. Although the PMR contains spectacular conformational changes, generally there is a counter-intuitive inverse relationship between conformational change and the number of mutations. That is, PDB mutations contrast naturally evolved mutations. We compare the frequencies of mutations in the PMR/PDB datasets against the PAM250 natural mutation frequencies to confirm this. We make available morph movies from PMR structure pairs, allowing visual analysis of conformational change and the ability to distinguish visually between conformational change due to motions (e.g., ligand binding) and mutations. The PMR is at http://pmr.sdsc.edu.
The sequencing of the genomes of a variety of species and the growing databases containing expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and complementary DNAs (cDNAs) facilitate the design of highly specific oligomers for use as genomic markers, PCR primers, or DNA oligo microarrays. The first step in evaluating the specificity of short oligomers of about twenty units in length is to determine the frequencies at which the oligomers occur. However, for oligomers longer than about fifty units this is not efficient, as they usually have a frequency of only 1. A more suitable procedure is to consider the mismatch tolerance of an oligomer, that is, the minimum number of mismatches that allows a given oligomer to match a sub-sequence other than the target sequence anywhere in the genome or the EST database. However, calculating the exact value of mismatch tolerance is computationally costly and impractical. Therefore, we studied the problem of checking whether an oligomer meets the constraint that its mismatch tolerance is no less than a given threshold. Here, we present an efficient dynamic programming algorithm solution that utilizes suffix and height arrays. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this algorithm by efficiently computing a dense list of oligo-markers applicable to the human genome. Experimental results show that the algorithm runs faster than well-known Abrahamson 's algorithm by orders of magnitude and is able to enumerate 63%/spl sim/79% of qualified oligomers.
Recognition of a protein's fold provides valuable information about its function. While many sequence-based homology prediction methods exist, an important challenge remains: two highly dissimilar sequences can have similar folds-- how can we detect this rapidly, in the context of structural genomics? High-throughput NMR experiments, coupled with novel algorithms for data analysis, can address this challenge. We report an automated procedure for detecting 3D structural homologies from sparse, unassigned protein NMR data. Our method identifies the 3D structural models in a protein structural database whose geometries best fit the unassigned experimental NMR data. It does not use sequence information and is thus not limited by sequence homology. The method can also be used to confirm or refute structural predictions made by other techniques such as protein threading or sequence homology. The algorithm runs in O(pnk(3)) time, where p is the number of proteins in the database, n is the number of residues in the target protein, and k is the resolution of a rotation search. The method requires only uniform (15)N-labelling of the protein and processes unassigned H(N)-(15)N residual dipolar couplings, which can be acquired in a couple of hours. Our experiments on NMR data from 5 different proteins demonstrate that the method identifies closely related protein folds, despite low-sequence homology between the target protein and the computed model.
The complexity of the global organization and internal structures of motifs in higher eukaryotic organisms raises significant challenges for motif detection techniques. To achieve successful de novo motif detection it is necessary to model the complex dependencies within and among motifs and incorporate biological prior knowledge. In this paper, we present LOGOS, an integrated LOcal and GlObal motif Sequence model for biopolymer sequences, which provides a principled framework for developing, modularizing, extending and computing expressive motif models for complex biopolymer sequence analysis. LOGOS consists of two interacting submodels: HMDM, a local alignment model capturing biological prior knowledge and positional dependence within the motif local structure; and HMM, a global motif distribution model modeling frequencies and dependencies of motif occurrences. Model parameters can be fit using training motifs within an empirical Bayesian framework. A variational EM algorithm is developed for de novo motif detection. LOGOS improves over existing models that ignore biological priors and dependencies in motif structures and motif occurrences, and demonstrates superior performance on both semi-realistic test data and cis-regulatory sequences from yeast and Drosophila sequences with regard to sensitivity, specificity, flexibility and extensibility.
We present a new method for conducting protein structure similarity searches, which improves on the accuracy, robustness, and efficiency of some existing techniques. Our method is grounded in the theory of differential geometry on 3D space curve matching. We generate shape signatures for proteins that are invariant, localized, robust, compact, and biologically meaningful. To improve matching accuracy, we smooth the noisy raw atomic coordinate data with spline fitting. To improve matching efficiency, we adopt a hierarchical coarse-to-fine strategy. We use an efficient hashing-based technique to screen out unlikely candidates and perform detailed pairwise alignments only for a small number of candidates that survive the screening process. Contrary to other hashing based techniques, our technique employs domain specific information (not just geometric information) in constructing the hash key, and hence, is more tuned to the domain of biology. Furthermore, the invariancy, localization, and compactness of the shape signatures allow us to utilize a well-known local sequence alignment algorithm for aligning two protein structures. One measure of the efficacy of the proposed technique is that we were able to discover new, meaningful motifs that were not reported by other structure alignment methods.
Study of protein interaction networks is crucial to post-genomic systems biology. Aided by high-throughput screening technologies, biologists are rapidly accumulating protein-protein interaction data. Using a random yeast two-hybrid (R2H) process, we have performed large-scale yeast two-hybrid searches with approximately fifty thousand random human brain cDNA bait fragments against a human brain cDNA prey fragment library. From these searches, we have identified 13,656 unique protein-protein interaction pairs involving 4,473 distinct known human loci. In this paper, we have performed our initial characterization of the protein interaction network in human brain tissue. We have classified and characterized all identified interactions based on Gene Ontology (GO) annotation of interacting loci. We have also described the "scale-free" topological structure of the network.
The cWINNOWER algorithm detects fuzzy motifs in DNA sequences rich in protein-binding signals. A signal is defined as any short nucleotide pattern having up to d mutations differing from a motif of length l. The algorithm finds such motifs if a clique consisting of a sufficiently large number of mutated copies of the motif (i.e., the signals) is present in the DNA sequence. The cWINNOWER algorithm substantially improves the sensitivity of the winnower method of Pevzner and Sze by imposing a consensus constraint, enabling it to detect much weaker signals. We studied the minimum detectable clique size qc as a function of sequence length N for random sequences. We found that qc increases linearly with N for a fast version of the algorithm based on counting three-member sub-cliques. Imposing consensus constraints reduces qc by a factor of three in this case, which makes the algorithm dramatically more sensitive. Our most sensitive algorithm, which counts four-member sub-cliques, needs a minimum of only 13 signals to detect motifs in a sequence of length N = 12,000 for (l, d) = (15, 4).
NMR resonance peak assignment is one of the key steps in solving an NMR protein structure. The assignment process links resonance peaks to individual residues of the target protein sequence, providing the prerequisite for establishing intra- and inter-residue spatial relationships between atoms. The assignment process is tedious and time-consuming, which could take many weeks. Though there exist a number of computer programs to assist the assignment process, many NMR labs are still doing the assignments manually to ensure quality. This paper presents (1) a new scoring system for mapping spin systems to residues, (2) an automated adjacency information extraction procedure from NMR spectra, and (3) a very fast assignment algorithm based on our previous proposed greedy filtering method and a maximum matching algorithm to automate the assignment process. The computational tests on 70 instances of (pseudo) experimental NMR data of 14 proteins demonstrate that the new score scheme has much better discerning power with the aid of adjacency information between spin systems simulated across various NMR spectra. Typically, with automated extraction of adjacency information, our method achieves nearly complete assignments for most of the proteins. The experiment shows very promising perspective that the fast automated assignment algorithm together with the new score scheme and automated adjacency extraction may be ready for practical use.
This paper presents a novel algorithm for identification and functional characterization of "key" genome features responsible for a particular biochemical process of interest. The central idea is that individual genome features are identified as "key" features if the discrimination accuracy between two classes of genomes with respect to a given biochemical process is sufficiently affected by the inclusion or exclusion of these features. In this paper, genome features are defined by high-resolution gene functions. The discrimination procedure utilizes the Support Vector Machine classification technique. The application to the oxygenic photosynthetic process resulted in 126 highly confident candidate genome features. While many of these features are well-known components in the oxygenic photosynthetic process, others are completely unknown, even including some hypothetical proteins. It is obvious that our algorithm is capable of discovering features related to a targeted biochemical process.
We have constructed a computer model of the cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) response to antigen and the maintenance of immunological memory. Because immune responses often begin with small numbers of cells and there is great variation among individual immune systems, we have chosen to implement a stochastic model that captures the life cycle of T cells more faithfully than deterministic models. Past models of the immune response have been differential equation based, which do not capture stochastic effects, or agent-based, which are computationally expensive. We use a stochastic stage-structured approach that has many of the advantages of agent-based modeling but is much more efficient. Our model can provide insights into the effect infections have on the CTL repertoire and the response to subsequent infections.
In this paper we present a new multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithm called AntiClustAl. The method makes use of the commonly used idea of aligning homologous sequences belonging to classes generated by some clustering algorithm, and then continue the alignment process in a bottom-up way along a suitable tree structure. The final result is then read at the root of the tree. Multiple sequence alignment in each cluster makes use of the progressive alignment with the 1-median (center) of the cluster. The 1-median of set S of sequences is the element of S which minimizes the average distance from any other sequence in S. Its exact computation requires quadratic time. The basic idea of our proposed algorithm is to make use of a simple and natural algorithmic technique based on randomised tournaments which has been successfully applied to large size search problems in general metric spaces. In particular a clustering algorithm called antipole tree and an approximate linear 1-median computation are used. Our algorithm compared with Clustal W, a widely used tool to MSA, shows a better running time results with fully comparable alignment quality. A successful biological application showing high amino acid conservation during evolution of Xenopus laevis SOD2 is also cited.
We present a systematic treatment of alignment distance and local similarity algorithms on trees and forests. We build upon the tree alignment algorithm for ordered trees given by Jiang et. al (1995) and extend it to calculate local forest alignments, which is essential for finding local similar regions in RNA secondary structures. The time complexity of our algorithm is O(/F/sub 1///spl middot//F/sub 2//)/spl middot/deg(F/sub 1/)/spl middot/deg(F/sub 2/)/spl middot/(deg(F/sub 1/)+deg(F/sub 2/)) where /Fi/ is the number of nodes in forest Fi and deg(Fi) is the degree of Fi. We provide carefully engineered dynamic programming implementations using dense, two-dimensional tables which considerably reduces the space requirement. We suggest a new representation of RNA secondary structures as forests that allow reasonable scoring of edit operations on RNA secondary structures. The comparison of RNA secondary structures is facilitated by a new visualization technique for RNA secondary structure alignments. Finally, we show how potential regulatory motifs can be discovered solely by their structural preservation, and independent of their sequence conservation and position.
The problem addressed by this paper is accurate and automatic gene annotation following precise identification/annotation of exon and intron boundaries of biologically verified nucleotide sequences using the alignment of human genomic DNA to curated mRNA transcripts. We provide a detailed description of a new cDNA/DNA homology gene annotation algorithm that combines the results of BLASTN searches and spliced alignments. Compared to other programs currently in use, annotation quality is significantly increased through the unambiguous junction of genomic DNA sequences. We also address gene annotation with both noncanonic splice sites and short exons. The approach has been tested on the genie learning subset as well as full-scale human RefSeq, and has demonstrated performance as high as 97%.
This is a review of a new and essentially simple method of inferring phylogenetic relationships from complete genome data without using sequence alignment. The method is based on counting the appearance frequency of oligopeptides of a fixed length (up to K=6) in the collection of protein sequences of a species. It is a method without fine adjustment and choice of genes. Applied to prokaryotic genomes it has led to results comparable with the bacteriologists' systematics as reflected in the latest 2002 outline of the Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology. The method has also been used to compare chloroplast genomes and to the phylogeny of Coronaviruses including human SARS-CoV. A key point in our approach is subtraction of a random background from the original counts by using a Markov model of order K-2 in order to highlight the shaping role of natural selection. The implications of the subtraction procedure is specially analyzed and further development of the new approach is indicated.
