On the role of metaheuristic optimization in bioinformatics

Metaheuristic algorithms are employed to solve complex and large-scale optimization problems in many different fields, from transportation and smart cities to finance. This paper discusses how metaheuristic algorithms are being applied to solve different optimization problems in the area of bioinformatics. While the text provides references to many optimization problems in the area, it focuses on those that have attracted more interest from the optimization community. Among the problems analyzed, the paper discusses in more detail the molecular docking problem, the protein structure prediction, phylogenetic inference, and different string problems. In addition, references to other relevant optimization problems are also given, including those related to medical imaging or gene selection for classification. From the previous analysis, the paper generates insights on research opportunities for the Operations Research and Computer Science communities in the field of bioinformatics

Design of RNAs: comparing programs for inverse RNA folding.

International audienceComputational programs for predicting RNA sequences with desired folding properties have been extensively developed and expanded in the past several years. Given a secondary structure, these programs aim to predict sequences that fold into a target minimum free energy secondary structure, while considering various constraints. This procedure is called inverse RNA folding. Inverse RNA folding has been traditionally used to design optimized RNAs with favorable properties, an application that is expected to grow considerably in the future in light of advances in the expanding new fields of synthetic biology and RNA nanostructures. Moreover, it was recently demonstrated that inverse RNA folding can successfully be used as a valuable preprocessing step in computational detection of novel noncoding RNAs. This review describes the most popular freeware programs that have been developed for such purposes, starting from RNAinverse that was devised when formulating the inverse RNA folding problem. The most recently published ones that consider RNA secondary structure as input are antaRNA, RNAiFold and incaRNAfbinv, each having different features that could be beneficial to specific biological problems in practice. The various programs also use distinct approaches, ranging from ant colony optimization to constraint programming, in addition to adaptive walk, simulated annealing and Boltzmann sampling. This review compares between the various programs and provides a simple description of the various possibilities that would benefit practitioners in selecting the most suitable program. It is geared for specific tasks requiring RNA design based on input secondary structure, with an outlook toward the future of RNA design programs

Soft Computing Techiniques for the Protein Folding Problem on High Performance Computing Architectures

The protein-folding problem has been extensively studied during the last fifty years. The understanding of the dynamics of global shape of a protein and the influence on its biological function can help us to discover new and more effective drugs to deal with diseases of pharmacological relevance. Different computational approaches have been developed by different researchers in order to foresee the threedimensional arrangement of atoms of proteins from their sequences. However, the computational complexity of this problem makes mandatory the search for new models, novel algorithmic strategies and hardware platforms that provide solutions in a reasonable time frame. We present in this revision work the past and last tendencies regarding protein folding simulations from both perspectives; hardware and software. Of particular interest to us are both the use of inexact solutions to this computationally hard problem as well as which hardware platforms have been used for running this kind of Soft Computing techniques.This work is jointly supported by the FundaciónSéneca (Agencia Regional de Ciencia y Tecnología, Región de Murcia) under grants 15290/PI/2010 and 18946/JLI/13, by the Spanish MEC and European Commission FEDER under grant with reference TEC2012-37945-C02-02 and TIN2012-31345, by the Nils Coordinated Mobility under grant 012-ABEL-CM-2014A, in part financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). We also thank NVIDIA for hardware donation within UCAM GPU educational and research centers.Ingeniería, Industria y Construcció

Computational Design and Experimental Validation of Functional Ribonucleic Acid Nanostructures

In living cells, two major classes of ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules can be found. The first class called the messenger RNA (mRNA) contains the genetic information that allows the ribosome to read and translate it into proteins. The second class called non-coding RNA (ncRNA), do not code for proteins and are involved with key cellular processes, such as gene expression regulation, splicing, differentiation, and development. NcRNAs fold into an ensemble of thermodynamically stable secondary structures, which will eventually lead the molecule to fold into a specific 3D structure. It is widely known that ncRNAs carry their functions via their 3D structures as well as their molecular composition. The secondary structure of ncRNAs is composed of different types of structural elements (motifs) such as stacking base pairs, internal loops, hairpin loops and pseudoknots. Pseudoknots are specifically difficult to model, are abundant in nature and known to stabilize the functional form of the molecule. Due to the diverse range of functions of ncRNAs, their computational design and analysis have numerous applications in nano-technology, therapeutics, synthetic biology, and materials engineering. The RNA design problem is to find novel RNA sequences that are predicted to fold into target structure(s) while satisfying specific qualitative characteristics and constraints. RNA design can be modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem (COP) and is known to be computationally challenging or more precisely NP-hard. Numerous algorithms to solve the RNA design problem have been developed over the past two decades, however mostly ignore pseudoknots and therefore limit application to only a slice of real-world modeling and design problems. Moreover, the few existing pseudoknot designer methods which were developed only recently, do not provide any evidence about the applicability of their proposed design methodology in biological contexts. The two objectives of this thesis are set to address these two shortcomings. First, we are interested in developing an efficient computational method for the design of RNA secondary structures including pseudoknots that show significantly improved in-silico quality characteristics than the state of the art. Second, we are interested in showing the real-world worthiness of the proposed method by validating it experimentally. More precisely, our aim is to design instances of certain types of RNA enzymes (i.e. ribozymes) and demonstrate that they are functionally active. This would likely only happen if their predicted folding matched their actual folding in the in-vitro experiments. In this thesis, we present four contributions. First, we propose a novel adaptive defect weighted sampling algorithm to efficiently solve the RNA secondary structure design problem where pseudoknots are included. We compare the performance of our design algorithm with the state of the art and show that our method generates molecules that are thermodynamically more stable and less defective than those generated by state of the art methods. Moreover, we show when the effect of fitness evaluation is decoupled from the search and optimization process, our optimization method converges faster than the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA II) and the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm do. Second, we use our algorithmic development to implement an RNA design pipeline called Enzymer and make it available as an open source package useful for wet lab practitioners and RNA bioinformaticians. Enzymer uses multiple sequence alignment (MSA) data to generate initial design templates for further optimization. Our design pipeline can then be used to re-engineer naturally occurring RNA enzymes such as ribozymes and riboswitches. Our first and second contributions are published in the RNA section of the Journal of Frontiers in Genetics. Third, we use Enzymer to reengineer three different species of pseudoknotted ribozymes: a hammerhead ribozyme from the mouse gut metagenome, a hammerhead ribozyme from Yarrowia lipolytica and a glmS ribozyme from Thermoanaerobacter tengcogensis. We designed a total of 18 ribozyme sequences and showed the 16 of them were active in-vitro. Our experimental results have been submitted to the RNA journal and strongly suggest that Enzymer is a reliable tool to design pseudoknotted ncRNAs with desired secondary structure. Finally, we propose a novel architecture for a new ribozyme-based gene regulatory network where a hammerhead ribozyme modulates expression of a reporter gene when an external stimulus IPTG is present. Our in-vivo results show expected results in 7 out of 12 cases

Vertical decomposition with Genetic Algorithm for Multiple Sequence Alignment

Many Bioinformatics studies begin with a multiple sequence alignment as the foundation for their research. This is because multiple sequence alignment can be a useful technique for studying molecular evolution and analyzing sequence structure relationships.In this paper, we have proposed a Vertical Decomposition with Genetic Algorithm (VDGA) for Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA). In VDGA, we divide the sequences vertically into two or more subsequences, and then solve them individually using a guide tree approach. Finally, we combine all the subsequences to generate a new multiple sequence alignment. This technique is applied on the solutions of the initial generation and of each child generation within VDGA. We have used two mechanisms to generate an initial population in this research: the first mechanism is to generate guide trees with randomly selected sequences and the second is shuffling the sequences inside such trees. Two different genetic operators have been implemented with VDGA. To test the performance of our algorithm, we have compared it with existing well-known methods, namely PRRP, CLUSTALX, DIALIGN, HMMT, SB_PIMA, ML_PIMA, MULTALIGN, and PILEUP8, and also other methods, based on Genetic Algorithms (GA), such as SAGA, MSA-GA and RBT-GA, by solving a number of benchmark datasets from BAliBase 2.0.The experimental results showed that the VDGA with three vertical divisions was the most successful variant for most of the test cases in comparison to other divisions considered with VDGA. The experimental results also confirmed that VDGA outperformed the other methods considered in this research

Cooperative Metaheuristics for Exploring Proteomic Data

Most combinatorial optimization problems cannotbe solved exactly. A class of methods, calledmetaheuristics, has proved its efficiency togive good approximated solutions in areasonable time. Cooperative metaheuristics area sub-set of metaheuristics, which implies aparallel exploration of the search space byseveral entities with information exchangebetween them. The importance of informationexchange in the optimization process is relatedto the building block hypothesis ofevolutionary algorithms, which is based onthese two questions: what is the pertinentinformation of a given potential solution andhow this information can be shared? Aclassification of cooperative metaheuristicsmethods depending on the nature of cooperationinvolved is presented and the specificproperties of each class, as well as a way tocombine them, is discussed. Severalimprovements in the field of metaheuristics arealso given. In particular, a method to regulatethe use of classical genetic operators and todefine new more pertinent ones is proposed,taking advantage of a building block structuredrepresentation of the explored space. Ahierarchical approach resting on multiplelevels of cooperative metaheuristics is finallypresented, leading to the definition of acomplete concerted cooperation strategy. Someapplications of these concepts to difficultproteomics problems, including automaticprotein identification, biological motifinference and multiple sequence alignment arepresented. For each application, an innovativemethod based on the cooperation concept isgiven and compared with classical approaches.In the protein identification problem, a firstlevel of cooperation using swarm intelligenceis applied to the comparison of massspectrometric data with biological sequencedatabase, followed by a genetic programmingmethod to discover an optimal scoring function.The multiple sequence alignment problem isdecomposed in three steps involving severalevolutionary processes to infer different kindof biological motifs and a concertedcooperation strategy to build the sequencealignment according to their motif conten

Evolutionary Computation and QSAR Research

[Abstract] The successful high throughput screening of molecule libraries for a specific biological property is one of the main improvements in drug discovery. The virtual molecular filtering and screening relies greatly on quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis, a mathematical model that correlates the activity of a molecule with molecular descriptors. QSAR models have the potential to reduce the costly failure of drug candidates in advanced (clinical) stages by filtering combinatorial libraries, eliminating candidates with a predicted toxic effect and poor pharmacokinetic profiles, and reducing the number of experiments. To obtain a predictive and reliable QSAR model, scientists use methods from various fields such as molecular modeling, pattern recognition, machine learning or artificial intelligence. QSAR modeling relies on three main steps: molecular structure codification into molecular descriptors, selection of relevant variables in the context of the analyzed activity, and search of the optimal mathematical model that correlates the molecular descriptors with a specific activity. Since a variety of techniques from statistics and artificial intelligence can aid variable selection and model building steps, this review focuses on the evolutionary computation methods supporting these tasks. Thus, this review explains the basic of the genetic algorithms and genetic programming as evolutionary computation approaches, the selection methods for high-dimensional data in QSAR, the methods to build QSAR models, the current evolutionary feature selection methods and applications in QSAR and the future trend on the joint or multi-task feature selection methods.Instituto de Salud Carlos III, PIO52048Instituto de Salud Carlos III, RD07/0067/0005Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo; TSI-020110-2009-53)Galicia. Consellería de Economía e Industria; 10SIN105004P