3 research outputs found
Eliciting the Functional Taxonomy from protein annotations and taxa
The advances of omics technologies have triggered the production of an enormous volume of data coming from thousands of species. Meanwhile, joint international efforts like the Gene Ontology (GO) consortium have worked to provide functional information for a vast amount of proteins. With these data available, we have developed FunTaxIS, a tool that is the first attempt to infer functional taxonomy (i.e. how functions are distributed over taxa) combining functional and taxonomic information. FunTaxIS is able to define a taxon specific functional space by exploiting annotation frequencies in order to establish if a function can or cannot be used to annotate a certain species. The tool generates constraints between GO terms and taxa and then propagates these relations over the taxonomic tree and the GO graph. Since these constraints nearly cover the whole taxonomy, it is possible to obtain the mapping of a function over the taxonomy. FunTaxIS can be used to make functional comparative analyses among taxa, to detect improper associations between taxa and functions, and to discover how functional knowledge is either distributed or missing. A benchmark test set based on six different model species has been devised to get useful insights on the generated taxonomic rules
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Collective analysis of multiple high-throughput gene expression datasets
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonModern technologies have resulted in the production of numerous high-throughput biological datasets. However, the pace of development of capable computational methods does not cope with the pace of generation of new high-throughput datasets. Amongst the most popular biological high-throughput datasets are gene expression datasets (e.g. microarray datasets). This work targets this aspect by proposing a suite of computational methods which can analyse multiple gene expression datasets collectively. The focal method in this suite is the unification of clustering results from multiple datasets using external specifications (UNCLES). This method applies clustering to multiple heterogeneous datasets which measure the expression of the same set of genes separately and then combines the resulting partitions in accordance to one of two types of external specifications; type A identifies the subsets of genes that are consistently co-expressed in all of the given datasets while type B identifies the subsets of genes that are consistently co-expressed in a subset of datasets while being poorly co-expressed in another subset of datasets. This contributes to the types of questions which can addressed by computational methods because existing clustering, consensus clustering, and biclustering methods are inapplicable to address the aforementioned objectives. Moreover, in order to assist in setting some of the parameters required by UNCLES, the M-N scatter plots technique is proposed. These methods, and less mature versions of them, have been validated and applied to numerous real datasets from the biological contexts of budding yeast, bacteria, human red blood cells, and malaria. While collaborating with biologists, these applications have led to various biological insights. In yeast, the role of the poorly-understood gene CMR1 in the yeast cell-cycle has been further elucidated. Also, a novel subset of poorly understood yeast genes has been discovered with an expression profile consistently negatively correlated with the well-known ribosome biogenesis genes. Bacterial data analysis has identified two clusters of negatively correlated genes. Analysis of data from human red blood cells has produced some hypotheses regarding the regulation of the pathways producing such cells. On the other hand, malarial data analysis is still at a preliminary stage. Taken together, this thesis provides an original integrative suite of computational methods which scrutinise multiple gene expression datasets collectively to address previously unresolved questions, and provides the results and findings of many applications of these methods to real biological datasets from multiple contexts.National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the Brunel College of Engineering, Design and Physical Science