Toward community standards and software for whole-cell modeling

Whole-cell (WC) modeling is a promising tool for biological research, bioengineering, and medicine. However, substantial work remains to create accurate, comprehensive models of complex cells. Methods: We organized the 2015 Whole-Cell Modeling Summer School to teach WC modeling and evaluate the need for new WC modeling standards and software by recoding a recently published WC model in SBML. Results: Our analysis revealed several challenges to representing WC models using the current standards. Conclusion: We, therefore, propose several new WC modeling standards, software, and databases. Significance:We anticipate that these new standards and software will enable more comprehensive models

Leveraging pre-trained language models for mining microbiome-disease relationships

Abstract Background The growing recognition of the microbiome’s impact on human health and well-being has prompted extensive research into discovering the links between microbiome dysbiosis and disease (healthy) states. However, this valuable information is scattered in unstructured form within biomedical literature. The structured extraction and qualification of microbe-disease interactions are important. In parallel, recent advancements in deep-learning-based natural language processing algorithms have revolutionized language-related tasks such as ours. This study aims to leverage state-of-the-art deep-learning language models to extract microbe-disease relationships from biomedical literature. Results In this study, we first evaluate multiple pre-trained large language models within a zero-shot or few-shot learning context. In this setting, the models performed poorly out of the box, emphasizing the need for domain-specific fine-tuning of these language models. Subsequently, we fine-tune multiple language models (specifically, GPT-3, BioGPT, BioMedLM, BERT, BioMegatron, PubMedBERT, BioClinicalBERT, and BioLinkBERT) using labeled training data and evaluate their performance. Our experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of these fine-tuned models ( specifically GPT-3, BioMedLM, and BioLinkBERT), achieving an average F1 score, precision, and recall of over $$>0.8$$ > 0.8 compared to the previous best of  0.74. Conclusion Overall, this study establishes that pre-trained language models excel as transfer learners when fine-tuned with domain and problem-specific data, enabling them to achieve state-of-the-art results even with limited training data for extracting microbiome-disease interactions from scientific publications

Abstracting the dynamics of biological pathways using information theory: a case study of apoptosis pathway

free access to online article: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/33/13/1980/2996220/Abstracting-the-dynamics-of-biological-pathways?guestAccessKey=7083a393-ea30-4113-b5f9-816fb9b56287International audienceMotivation: Quantitative models are increasingly used in systems biology. Usually, these quantitative models involve many molecular species and their associated reactions. When simulating a tissue with thousands of cells, using these large models becomes computationally and time limiting. Results: In this paper, we propose to construct abstractions using information theory notions. Entropy is used to discretize the state space and mutual information is used to select a subset of all original variables and their mutual dependencies. We apply our method to an hybrid model of TRAIL-induced apoptosis in HeLa cell. Our abstraction, represented as a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN), reduces the number of variables from 92 to 10, and accelerates numerical simulation by an order of magnitude, yet preserving essential features of cell death time distributions

A Reciprocal Embedding Framework For Modelling Mutual Preferences

Understanding the mutual preferences between potential dating partners is core to the success of modern web-scale personalized recommendation systems that power online dating platforms. In contrast to classical user-item recommendation systems which model the unidirectional preferences of users to items, understanding the bidirectional preferences between people in a reciprocal recommendation system is more complex and challenging given the dynamic nature of interactions. In this paper, we describe a reciprocal recommendation system we built for one of the leading online dating applications in Japan. We also discuss the lessons learnt from designing, developing and deploying the reciprocal recommendation system in production

Innate immune memory and homeostasis may be conferred through crosstalk between the TLR3 and TLR7 pathways

10.1126/scisignal.aac9340SCIENCE SIGNALING9436ra70

Asking the right questions for mutagenicity prediction from BioMedical text

Abstract Assessing the mutagenicity of chemicals is an essential task in the drug development process. Usually, databases and other structured sources for AMES mutagenicity exist, which have been carefully and laboriously curated from scientific publications. As knowledge accumulates over time, updating these databases is always an overhead and impractical. In this paper, we first propose the problem of predicting the mutagenicity of chemicals from textual information in scientific publications. More simply, given a chemical and evidence in the natural language form from publications where the mutagenicity of the chemical is described, the goal of the model/algorithm is to predict if it is potentially mutagenic or not. For this, we first construct a golden standard data set and then propose MutaPredBERT, a prediction model fine-tuned on B i o L i n k B E R T based on a question-answering formulation of the problem. We leverage transfer learning and use the help of large transformer-based models to achieve a Macro F1 score of >0.88 even with relatively small data for fine-tuning. Our work establishes the utility of large language models for the construction of structured sources of knowledge bases directly from scientific publications