6,739 research outputs found
The Hierarchic treatment of marine ecological information from spatial networks of benthic platforms
Measuring biodiversity simultaneously in different locations, at different temporal scales, and over wide spatial scales is of strategic importance for the improvement of our understanding of the functioning of marine ecosystems and for the conservation of their biodiversity. Monitoring networks of cabled observatories, along with other docked autonomous systems (e.g., Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], Autonomous Underwater Vehicles [AUVs], and crawlers), are being conceived and established at a spatial scale capable of tracking energy fluxes across benthic and pelagic compartments, as well as across geographic ecotones. At the same time, optoacoustic imaging is sustaining an unprecedented expansion in marine ecological monitoring, enabling the acquisition of new biological and environmental data at an appropriate spatiotemporal scale. At this stage, one of the main problems for an effective application of these technologies is the processing, storage, and treatment of the acquired complex ecological information. Here, we provide a conceptual overview on the technological developments in the multiparametric generation, storage, and automated hierarchic treatment of biological and environmental information required to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of a marine ecosystem. In doing so, we present a pipeline of ecological data acquisition and processing in different steps and prone to automation. We also give an example of population biomass, community richness and biodiversity data computation (as indicators for ecosystem functionality) with an Internet Operated Vehicle (a mobile crawler). Finally, we discuss the software requirements for that automated data processing at the level of cyber-infrastructures with sensor calibration and control, data banking, and ingestion into large data portals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Cancer gene prioritization by integrative analysis of mRNA expression and DNA copy number data: a comparative review
A variety of genome-wide profiling techniques are available to probe
complementary aspects of genome structure and function. Integrative analysis of
heterogeneous data sources can reveal higher-level interactions that cannot be
detected based on individual observations. A standard integration task in
cancer studies is to identify altered genomic regions that induce changes in
the expression of the associated genes based on joint analysis of genome-wide
gene expression and copy number profiling measurements. In this review, we
provide a comparison among various modeling procedures for integrating
genome-wide profiling data of gene copy number and transcriptional alterations
and highlight common approaches to genomic data integration. A transparent
benchmarking procedure is introduced to quantitatively compare the cancer gene
prioritization performance of the alternative methods. The benchmarking
algorithms and data sets are available at http://intcomp.r-forge.r-project.orgComment: PDF file including supplementary material. 9 pages. Preprin
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