27,898 research outputs found
A Linked Data Approach to Sharing Workflows and Workflow Results
A bioinformatics analysis pipeline is often highly elaborate, due to the inherent complexity of biological systems and the variety and size of datasets. A digital equivalent of the ‘Materials and Methods’ section in wet laboratory publications would be highly beneficial to bioinformatics, for evaluating evidence and examining data across related experiments, while introducing the potential to find associated resources and integrate them as data and services. We present initial steps towards preserving bioinformatics ‘materials and methods’ by exploiting the workflow paradigm for capturing the design of a data analysis pipeline, and RDF to link the workflow, its component services, run-time provenance, and a personalized biological interpretation of the results. An example shows the reproduction of the unique graph of an analysis procedure, its results, provenance, and personal interpretation of a text mining experiment. It links data from Taverna, myExperiment.org, BioCatalogue.org, and ConceptWiki.org. The approach is relatively ‘light-weight’ and unobtrusive to bioinformatics users
Evolutionary constraints on the complexity of genetic regulatory networks allow predictions of the total number of genetic interactions
Genetic regulatory networks (GRNs) have been widely studied, yet there is a
lack of understanding with regards to the final size and properties of these
networks, mainly due to no network currently being complete. In this study, we
analyzed the distribution of GRN structural properties across a large set of
distinct prokaryotic organisms and found a set of constrained characteristics
such as network density and number of regulators. Our results allowed us to
estimate the number of interactions that complete networks would have, a
valuable insight that could aid in the daunting task of network curation,
prediction, and validation. Using state-of-the-art statistical approaches, we
also provided new evidence to settle a previously stated controversy that
raised the possibility of complete biological networks being random and
therefore attributing the observed scale-free properties to an artifact
emerging from the sampling process during network discovery. Furthermore, we
identified a set of properties that enabled us to assess the consistency of the
connectivity distribution for various GRNs against different alternative
statistical distributions. Our results favor the hypothesis that highly
connected nodes (hubs) are not a consequence of network incompleteness.
Finally, an interaction coverage computed for the GRNs as a proxy for
completeness revealed that high-throughput based reconstructions of GRNs could
yield biased networks with a low average clustering coefficient, showing that
classical targeted discovery of interactions is still needed.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, 12 pages supplementary informatio
Node Classification in Uncertain Graphs
In many real applications that use and analyze networked data, the links in
the network graph may be erroneous, or derived from probabilistic techniques.
In such cases, the node classification problem can be challenging, since the
unreliability of the links may affect the final results of the classification
process. If the information about link reliability is not used explicitly, the
classification accuracy in the underlying network may be affected adversely. In
this paper, we focus on situations that require the analysis of the uncertainty
that is present in the graph structure. We study the novel problem of node
classification in uncertain graphs, by treating uncertainty as a first-class
citizen. We propose two techniques based on a Bayes model and automatic
parameter selection, and show that the incorporation of uncertainty in the
classification process as a first-class citizen is beneficial. We
experimentally evaluate the proposed approach using different real data sets,
and study the behavior of the algorithms under different conditions. The
results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach
Biological control networks suggest the use of biomimetic sets for combinatorial therapies
Cells are regulated by networks of controllers having many targets, and
targets affected by many controllers, but these "many-to-many" combinatorial
control systems are poorly understood. Here we analyze distinct cellular
networks (transcription factors, microRNAs, and protein kinases) and a
drug-target network. Certain network properties seem universal across systems
and species, suggesting the existence of common control strategies in biology.
The number of controllers is ~8% of targets and the density of links is 2.5%
\pm 1.2%. Links per node are predominantly exponentially distributed, implying
conservation of the average, which we explain using a mathematical model of
robustness in control networks. These findings suggest that optimal
pharmacological strategies may benefit from a similar, many-to-many
combinatorial structure, and molecular tools are available to test this
approach.Comment: 33 page
Chemoinformatics Research at the University of Sheffield: A History and Citation Analysis
This paper reviews the work of the Chemoinformatics Research Group in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, focusing particularly on the work carried out in the period 1985-2002. Four major research areas are discussed, these involving the development of methods for: substructure searching in databases of three-dimensional structures, including both rigid and flexible molecules; the representation and searching of the Markush structures that occur in chemical patents; similarity searching in databases of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures; and compound selection and the design of combinatorial libraries. An analysis of citations to 321 publications from the Group shows that it attracted a total of 3725 residual citations during the period 1980-2002. These citations appeared in 411 different journals, and involved 910 different citing organizations from 54 different countries, thus demonstrating the widespread impact of the Group's work
Integrating and Ranking Uncertain Scientific Data
Mediator-based data integration systems resolve exploratory queries by joining data elements across sources. In the presence of uncertainties, such multiple expansions can quickly lead to spurious connections and incorrect results. The BioRank project investigates formalisms for modeling uncertainty during scientific data integration and for ranking uncertain query results. Our motivating application is protein function prediction. In this paper we show that: (i) explicit modeling of uncertainties as probabilities increases our ability to predict less-known or previously unknown functions (though it does not improve predicting the well-known). This suggests that probabilistic uncertainty models offer utility for scientific knowledge discovery; (ii) small perturbations in the input probabilities tend to produce only minor changes in the quality of our result rankings. This suggests that our methods are robust against slight variations in the way uncertainties are transformed into probabilities; and (iii) several techniques allow us to evaluate our probabilistic rankings efficiently. This suggests that probabilistic query evaluation is not as hard for real-world problems as theory indicates
- …