143,343 research outputs found
Microbial community pattern detection in human body habitats via ensemble clustering framework
The human habitat is a host where microbial species evolve, function, and
continue to evolve. Elucidating how microbial communities respond to human
habitats is a fundamental and critical task, as establishing baselines of human
microbiome is essential in understanding its role in human disease and health.
However, current studies usually overlook a complex and interconnected
landscape of human microbiome and limit the ability in particular body habitats
with learning models of specific criterion. Therefore, these methods could not
capture the real-world underlying microbial patterns effectively. To obtain a
comprehensive view, we propose a novel ensemble clustering framework to mine
the structure of microbial community pattern on large-scale metagenomic data.
Particularly, we first build a microbial similarity network via integrating
1920 metagenomic samples from three body habitats of healthy adults. Then a
novel symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) based ensemble model is
proposed and applied onto the network to detect clustering pattern. Extensive
experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our model on
deriving microbial community with respect to body habitat and host gender. From
clustering results, we observed that body habitat exhibits a strong bound but
non-unique microbial structural patterns. Meanwhile, human microbiome reveals
different degree of structural variations over body habitat and host gender. In
summary, our ensemble clustering framework could efficiently explore integrated
clustering results to accurately identify microbial communities, and provide a
comprehensive view for a set of microbial communities. Such trends depict an
integrated biography of microbial communities, which offer a new insight
towards uncovering pathogenic model of human microbiome.Comment: BMC Systems Biology 201
Analyzing large-scale DNA Sequences on Multi-core Architectures
Rapid analysis of DNA sequences is important in preventing the evolution of
different viruses and bacteria during an early phase, early diagnosis of
genetic predispositions to certain diseases (cancer, cardiovascular diseases),
and in DNA forensics. However, real-world DNA sequences may comprise several
Gigabytes and the process of DNA analysis demands adequate computational
resources to be completed within a reasonable time. In this paper we present a
scalable approach for parallel DNA analysis that is based on Finite Automata,
and which is suitable for analyzing very large DNA segments. We evaluate our
approach for real-world DNA segments of mouse (2.7GB), cat (2.4GB), dog
(2.4GB), chicken (1GB), human (3.2GB) and turkey (0.2GB). Experimental results
on a dual-socket shared-memory system with 24 physical cores show speed-ups of
up to 17.6x. Our approach is up to 3x faster than a pattern-based parallel
approach that uses the RE2 library.Comment: The 18th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and
Engineering (CSE 2015), Porto, Portugal, 20 - 23 October 201
Distributed classifier based on genetically engineered bacterial cell cultures
We describe a conceptual design of a distributed classifier formed by a
population of genetically engineered microbial cells. The central idea is to
create a complex classifier from a population of weak or simple classifiers. We
create a master population of cells with randomized synthetic biosensor
circuits that have a broad range of sensitivities towards chemical signals of
interest that form the input vectors subject to classification. The randomized
sensitivities are achieved by constructing a library of synthetic gene circuits
with randomized control sequences (e.g. ribosome-binding sites) in the front
element. The training procedure consists in re-shaping of the master population
in such a way that it collectively responds to the "positive" patterns of input
signals by producing above-threshold output (e.g. fluorescent signal), and
below-threshold output in case of the "negative" patterns. The population
re-shaping is achieved by presenting sequential examples and pruning the
population using either graded selection/counterselection or by
fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). We demonstrate the feasibility of
experimental implementation of such system computationally using a realistic
model of the synthetic sensing gene circuits.Comment: 31 pages, 9 figure
Optimal learning rules for discrete synapses
There is evidence that biological synapses have a limited number of discrete weight states. Memory storage with such synapses behaves quite differently from synapses with unbounded, continuous weights, as old memories are automatically overwritten by new memories. Consequently, there has been substantial discussion about how this affects learning and storage capacity. In this paper, we calculate the storage capacity of discrete, bounded synapses in terms of Shannon information. We use this to optimize the learning rules and investigate how the maximum information capacity depends on the number of synapses, the number of synaptic states, and the coding sparseness. Below a certain critical number of synapses per neuron (comparable to numbers found in biology), we find that storage is similar to unbounded, continuous synapses. Hence, discrete synapses do not necessarily have lower storage capacity
Automating Fault Tolerance in High-Performance Computational Biological Jobs Using Multi-Agent Approaches
Background: Large-scale biological jobs on high-performance computing systems
require manual intervention if one or more computing cores on which they
execute fail. This places not only a cost on the maintenance of the job, but
also a cost on the time taken for reinstating the job and the risk of losing
data and execution accomplished by the job before it failed. Approaches which
can proactively detect computing core failures and take action to relocate the
computing core's job onto reliable cores can make a significant step towards
automating fault tolerance.
Method: This paper describes an experimental investigation into the use of
multi-agent approaches for fault tolerance. Two approaches are studied, the
first at the job level and the second at the core level. The approaches are
investigated for single core failure scenarios that can occur in the execution
of parallel reduction algorithms on computer clusters. A third approach is
proposed that incorporates multi-agent technology both at the job and core
level. Experiments are pursued in the context of genome searching, a popular
computational biology application.
Result: The key conclusion is that the approaches proposed are feasible for
automating fault tolerance in high-performance computing systems with minimal
human intervention. In a typical experiment in which the fault tolerance is
studied, centralised and decentralised checkpointing approaches on an average
add 90% to the actual time for executing the job. On the other hand, in the
same experiment the multi-agent approaches add only 10% to the overall
execution time.Comment: Computers in Biology and Medicin
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