Evolutionary Distributed Control of a Biologically Inspired Modular Robot

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Gene masking - a technique to improve accuracy for cancer classification with high dimensionality in microarray data

Background: High dimensional feature space generally degrades classification in several applications. In this paper, we propose a strategy called gene masking, in which non-contributing dimensions are heuristically removed from the data to improve classification accuracy. Methods: Gene masking is implemented via a binary encoded genetic algorithm that can be integrated seamlessly with classifiers during the training phase of classification to perform feature selection. It can also be used to discriminate between features that contribute most to the classification, thereby, allowing researchers to isolate features that may have special significance. Results: This technique was applied on publicly available datasets whereby it substantially reduced the number of features used for classification while maintaining high accuracies. Conclusion: The proposed technique can be extremely useful in feature selection as it heuristically removes non-contributing features to improve the performance of classifiers

SucStruct: Prediction of succinylated lysine residues by using structural properties of amino acids

Post-Translational Modification (PTM) is a biological reaction which contributes to diversify the proteome. Despite many modifications with important roles in cellular activity, lysine succinylation has recently emerged as an important PTM mark. It alters the chemical structure of lysines, leading to remarkable changes in the structure and function of proteins. In contrast to the huge amount of proteins being sequenced in the post-genome era, the experimental detection of succinylated residues remains expensive, inefficient and time-consuming. Therefore, the development of computational tools for accurately predicting succinylated lysines is an urgent necessity. To date, several approaches have been proposed but their sensitivity has been reportedly poor. In this paper, we propose an approach that utilizes structural features of amino acids to improve lysine succinylation prediction. Succinylated and non-succinylated lysines were first retrieved from 670 proteins and characteristics such as accessible surface area, backbone torsion angles and local structure conformations were incorporated. We used the k-nearest neighbors cleaning treatment for dealing with class imbalance and designed a pruned decision tree for classification. Our predictor, referred to as SucStruct (Succinylation using Structural features), proved to significantly improve performance when compared to previous predictors, with sensitivity, accuracy and Mathew's correlation coefficient equal to 0.7334-0.7946, 0.744

Improving succinylation prediction accuracy by incorporating the secondary structure via helix, strand and coil, and evolutionary information from profile bigrams

<div><p>Post-translational modification refers to the biological mechanism involved in the enzymatic modification of proteins after being translated in the ribosome. This mechanism comprises a wide range of structural modifications, which bring dramatic variations to the biological function of proteins. One of the recently discovered modifications is succinylation. Although succinylation can be detected through mass spectrometry, its current experimental detection turns out to be a timely process unable to meet the exponential growth of sequenced proteins. Therefore, the implementation of fast and accurate computational methods has emerged as a feasible solution. This paper proposes a novel classification approach, which effectively incorporates the secondary structure and evolutionary information of proteins through profile bigrams for succinylation prediction. The proposed predictor, abbreviated as SSEvol-Suc, made use of the above features for training an AdaBoost classifier and consequently predicting succinylated lysine residues. When SSEvol-Suc was compared with four benchmark predictors, it outperformed them in metrics such as sensitivity (0.909), accuracy (0.875) and Matthews correlation coefficient (0.75).</p></div

Improving succinylation prediction accuracy by incorporating the secondary structure via helix, strand and coil, and evolutionary information from profile bigrams - Fig 2

<p>Receiver operating characteristic of SSEvol-Suc for (A) 6-, (B) 8- and (C) 10-fold cross-validations.</p

Comparison of SSEvol-Suc and state-of-the-art predictors.

<p>Comparison of SSEvol-Suc and state-of-the-art predictors.</p

Schematic representation of a lysine residue and its surrounding amino acids.

<p>(A) lysine with 15 residues on both sides, (B) lysine with missing residues to the right and left.</p