3,786 research outputs found
The complexity landscape of viral genomes
Background Viruses are among the shortest yet highly abundant species that harbor minimal instructions to infect cells, adapt, multiply, and exist. However, with the current substantial availability of viral genome sequences, the scientific repertory lacks a complexity landscape that automatically enlights viral genomes' organization, relation, and fundamental characteristics. Results This work provides a comprehensive landscape of the viral genome's complexity (or quantity of information), identifying the most redundant and complex groups regarding their genome sequence while providing their distribution and characteristics at a large and local scale. Moreover, we identify and quantify inverted repeats abundance in viral genomes. For this purpose, we measure the sequence complexity of each available viral genome using data compression, demonstrating that adequate data compressors can efficiently quantify the complexity of viral genome sequences, including subsequences better represented by algorithmic sources (e.g., inverted repeats). Using a state-of-the-art genomic compressor on an extensive viral genomes database, we show that double-stranded DNA viruses are, on average, the most redundant viruses while single-stranded DNA viruses are the least. Contrarily, double-stranded RNA viruses show a lower redundancy relative to single-stranded RNA. Furthermore, we extend the ability of data compressors to quantify local complexity (or information content) in viral genomes using complexity profiles, unprecedently providing a direct complexity analysis of human herpesviruses. We also conceive a features-based classification methodology that can accurately distinguish viral genomes at different taxonomic levels without direct comparisons between sequences. This methodology combines data compression with simple measures such as GC-content percentage and sequence length, followed by machine learning classifiers. Conclusions This article presents methodologies and findings that are highly relevant for understanding the patterns of similarity and singularity between viral groups, opening new frontiers for studying viral genomes' organization while depicting the complexity trends and classification components of these genomes at different taxonomic levels. The whole study is supported by an extensive website (https://asilab.github.io/canvas/) for comprehending the viral genome characterization using dynamic and interactive approaches.Peer reviewe
Reconstrução e classificação de sequências de ADN desconhecidas
The continuous advances in DNA sequencing technologies and techniques
in metagenomics require reliable reconstruction and accurate classification
methodologies for the diversity increase of the natural repository while contributing
to the organisms' description and organization. However, after
sequencing and de-novo assembly, one of the highest complex challenges
comes from the DNA sequences that do not match or resemble any biological
sequence from the literature. Three main reasons contribute to this
exception: the organism sequence presents high divergence according to the
known organisms from the literature, an irregularity has been created in the
reconstruction process, or a new organism has been sequenced. The inability
to efficiently classify these unknown sequences increases the sample
constitution's uncertainty and becomes a wasted opportunity to discover
new species since they are often discarded.
In this context, the main objective of this thesis is the development and
validation of a tool that provides an efficient computational solution to
solve these three challenges based on an ensemble of experts, namely
compression-based predictors, the distribution of sequence content, and
normalized sequence lengths. The method uses both DNA and amino acid
sequences and provides efficient classification beyond standard referential
comparisons. Unusually, it classifies DNA sequences without resorting directly
to the reference genomes but rather to features that the species biological
sequences share. Specifically, it only makes use of features extracted
individually from each genome without using sequence comparisons.
RFSC was then created as a machine learning classification pipeline that
relies on an ensemble of experts to provide efficient classification in metagenomic
contexts. This pipeline was tested in synthetic and real data, both
achieving precise and accurate results that, at the time of the development
of this thesis, have not been reported in the state-of-the-art. Specifically, it
has achieved an accuracy of approximately 97% in the domain/type classification.Os contínuos avanços em tecnologias de sequenciação de ADN e técnicas
em meta genómica requerem metodologias de reconstrução confiáveis e de
classificação precisas para o aumento da diversidade do repositório natural,
contribuindo, entretanto, para a descrição e organização dos organismos.
No entanto, após a sequenciação e a montagem de-novo, um dos desafios
mais complexos advém das sequências de ADN que não correspondem ou se
assemelham a qualquer sequencia biológica da literatura. São três as principais
razões que contribuem para essa exceção: uma irregularidade emergiu
no processo de reconstrução, a sequência do organismo é altamente dissimilar
dos organismos da literatura, ou um novo e diferente organismo foi
reconstruído. A incapacidade de classificar com eficiência essas sequências
desconhecidas aumenta a incerteza da constituição da amostra e desperdiça
a oportunidade de descobrir novas espécies, uma vez que muitas vezes são
descartadas.
Neste contexto, o principal objetivo desta tese é fornecer uma solução computacional
eficiente para resolver este desafio com base em um conjunto
de especialistas, nomeadamente preditores baseados em compressão, a distribuição de conteúdo de sequência e comprimentos de sequência normalizados.
O método usa sequências de ADN e de aminoácidos e fornece classificação eficiente além das comparações referenciais padrão. Excecionalmente,
ele classifica as sequências de ADN sem recorrer diretamente a genomas
de referência, mas sim às características que as sequências biológicas da
espécie compartilham. Especificamente, ele usa apenas recursos extraídos
individualmente de cada genoma sem usar comparações de sequência. Além
disso, o pipeline é totalmente automático e permite a reconstrução sem referência de genomas a partir de reads FASTQ com a garantia adicional de
armazenamento seguro de informações sensíveis.
O RFSC é então um pipeline de classificação de aprendizagem automática
que se baseia em um conjunto de especialistas para fornecer classificação
eficiente em contextos meta genómicos. Este pipeline foi aplicado em dados
sintéticos e reais, alcançando em ambos resultados precisos e exatos que,
no momento do desenvolvimento desta dissertação, não foram relatados na
literatura. Especificamente, esta ferramenta desenvolvida, alcançou uma
precisão de aproximadamente 97% na classificação de domínio/tipo.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic
In the search for the low-complexity sequences in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes: how to derive a coherent picture from global and local entropy measures
We investigate on a possible way to connect the presence of Low-Complexity
Sequences (LCS) in DNA genomes and the nonstationary properties of base
correlations. Under the hypothesis that these variations signal a change in the
DNA function, we use a new technique, called Non-Stationarity Entropic Index
(NSEI) method, and we prove that this technique is an efficient way to detect
functional changes with respect to a random baseline. The remarkable aspect is
that NSEI does not imply any training data or fitting parameter, the only
arbitrarity being the choice of a marker in the sequence. We make this choice
on the basis of biological information about LCS distributions in genomes. We
show that there exists a correlation between changing the amount in LCS and the
ratio of long- to short-range correlation
Literature on applied machine learning in metagenomic classification: A scoping review
Applied machine learning in bioinformatics is growing as computer science slowly invades all research spheres. With the arrival of modern next-generation DNA sequencing algorithms, metagenomics is becoming an increasingly interesting research field as it finds countless practical applications exploiting the vast amounts of generated data. This study aims to scope the scientific literature in the field of metagenomic classification in the time interval 2008–2019 and provide an evolutionary timeline of data processing and machine learning in this field. This study follows the scoping review methodology and PRISMA guidelines to identify and process the available literature. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is deployed to ensure efficient and exhaustive search of the literary corpus of three large digital libraries: IEEE, PubMed, and Springer. The search is based on keywords and properties looked up using the digital libraries’ search engines. The scoping review results reveal an increasing number of research papers related to metagenomic classification over the past decade. The research is mainly focused on metagenomic classifiers, identifying scope specific metrics for model evaluation, data set sanitization, and dimensionality reduction. Out of all of these subproblems, data preprocessing is the least researched with considerable potential for improvement
Entropy in Image Analysis III
Image analysis can be applied to rich and assorted scenarios; therefore, the aim of this recent research field is not only to mimic the human vision system. Image analysis is the main methods that computers are using today, and there is body of knowledge that they will be able to manage in a totally unsupervised manner in future, thanks to their artificial intelligence. The articles published in the book clearly show such a future
A Predictive Model for Secondary RNA Structure Using Graph Theory and a Neural Network
Background: Determining the secondary structure of RNA from the primary structure is a challenging computational problem. A number of algorithms have been developed to predict the secondary structure from the primary structure. It is agreed that there is still room for improvement in each of these approaches. In this work we build a predictive model for secondary RNA structure using a graph-theoretic tree representation of secondary RNA structure. We model the bonding of two RNA secondary structures to form a larger secondary structure with a graph operation we call merge. We consider all combinatorial possibilities using all possible tree inputs, both those that are RNA-like in structure and those that are not. The resulting data from each tree merge operation is represented by a vector. We use these vectors as input values for a neural network and train the network to recognize a tree as RNA-like or not, based on the merge data vector. The network estimates the probability of a tree being RNA-like.Results: The network correctly assigned a high probability of RNA-likeness to trees previously identified as RNA-like and a low probability of RNA-likeness to those classified as not RNA-like. We then used the neural network to predict the RNA-likeness of the unclassified trees.Conclusions: There are a number of secondary RNA structure prediction algorithms available online. These programs are based on finding the secondary structure with the lowest total free energy. In this work, we create a predictive tool for secondary RNA structures using graph-theoretic values as input for a neural network. The use of a graph operation to theoretically describe the bonding of secondary RNA is novel and is an entirely different approach to the prediction of secondary RNA structures. Our method correctly predicted trees to be RNA-like or not RNA-like for all known cases. In addition, our results convey a measure of likelihood that a tree is RNA-like or not RNA-like. Given that the majority of secondary RNA folding algorithms return more than one possible outcome, our method provides a means of determining the best or most likely structures among all of the possible outcomes
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