The impact of quantitative optimization of hybridization conditions on gene expression analysis.

BACKGROUND: With the growing availability of entire genome sequences, an increasing number of scientists can exploit oligonucleotide microarrays for genome-scale expression studies. While probe-design is a major research area, relatively little work has been reported on the optimization of microarray protocols. RESULTS: As shown in this study, suboptimal conditions can have considerable impact on biologically relevant observations. For example, deviation from the optimal temperature by one degree Celsius lead to a loss of up to 44% of differentially expressed genes identified. While genes from thousands of Gene Ontology categories were affected, transcription factors and other low-copy-number regulators were disproportionately lost. Calibrated protocols are thus required in order to take full advantage of the large dynamic range of microarrays.For an objective optimization of protocols we introduce an approach that maximizes the amount of information obtained per experiment. A comparison of two typical samples is sufficient for this calibration. We can ensure, however, that optimization results are independent of the samples and the specific measures used for calibration. Both simulations and spike-in experiments confirmed an unbiased determination of generally optimal experimental conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Well calibrated hybridization conditions are thus easily achieved and necessary for the efficient detection of differential expression. They are essential for the sensitive pro filing of low-copy-number molecules. This is particularly critical for studies of transcription factor expression, or the inference and study of regulatory networks.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

PLA/WOOD BIOCOMPOSITES: IMPROVING COMPOSITE STRENGTH BY CHEMICAL TREATMENT OF THE FIBERS

A resol type phenolic resin was prepared for the impregnation of wood particles used for the reinforcement of PLA. A preliminary study showed that the resin penetrates wood with rates depending on the concentration of the solution and on temperature. Treatment with a solution of 1 wt% resin resulted in a considerable increase of composite strength and decrease of water absorption. Composite strength improved as a result of increased inherent strength of the wood, but interfacial adhesion might be modified as well. When wood was treated with resin solutions of larger concentrations, the strength of the composites decreased, first slightly, then drastically to a very small value. A larger amount of resin results in a thick coating on wood with inferior mechanical properties. At large resin contents the mechanism of deformation changes; the thick coating breaks very easily leading to the catastrophic failure of the composites at very small loads

Biocomposite from polylactic acid and lignocellulosic fibers: structure-property correlations

ABSTRACT PLA biocomposites were prepared using three corncob fractions and a wood fiber as reference. The composites were characterized by tensile testing, scanning electron (SEM) and polarization optical (POM) microscopy. Micromechanical deformation processes were followed by acoustic emission measurements. The different strength of the components was proved by direct measurements. Two consecutive micromechanical deformation processes were detected in composites containing the heavy fraction of corncob, which were assigned to the fracture of soft and hard particles, respectively. The fracture of soft particles does not result in the failure of the composites that is initi-ated either by the fracture of hard particles or by matrix cracking. Very large particles debond easily from the matrix resulting in catastrophic failure at very low stresses. At sufficiently large shear stresses large particles break easily during compounding, thus reinforcement depending on interfacial adhesion was practically the same in all composites irrespectively of initial fiber characteristics

Fiber association and network formation in PLA/lignocellulosic fiber composites.

PLA composites were prepared in an internal mixer with a lignocellulosic fiber having relatively large aspect ratio. Fiber content changed between 0 and 60 vol% and the homogenized material was compression molded to 1 mm thick plates. The composites showed anomalous behavior above certain fiber content. Their modulus and especially their strength decreased drastically and modeling also proved the loss of reinforcement at large fiber contents. Micromechanical testing showed that the mechanism of deformation and failure changes at a critical fiber content. Microscopic analysis indi-cated the formation of a network purely from geometrical reasons. The inherent strength of the network is very small because of the weak forces acting among the fibers. This weak inherent strength makes the structure of the composites very sensitive to pro-cessing conditions, and decreases strength, reproducibility as well as reliability

Predictive monitoring of shake flask cultures with online estimated growth models

Simplicity renders shake flasks ideal for strain selection and substrate optimization in biotechnology. Uncertainty during initial experiments may, however, cause adverse growth conditions and mislead conclusions. Using growth models for online predictions of future biomass (BM) and the arrival of critical events like low dissolved oxygen (DO) levels or when to harvest is hence important to optimize protocols. Established knowledge that unfavorable metabolites of growing microorganisms interfere with the substrate suggests that growth dynamics and, as a consequence, the growth model parameters may vary in the course of an experiment. Predictive monitoring of shake flask cultures will therefore benefit from estimating growth model parameters in an online and adaptive manner. This paper evaluates a newly developed particle filter (PF) which is specifically tailored to the requirements of biotechnological shake flask experiments. By combining stationary accuracy with fast adaptation to change the proposed PF estimates time-varying growth model parameters from iteratively measured BM and DO sensor signals in an optimal manner. Such proposition of inferring time varying parameters of Gompertz and Logistic growth models is to our best knowledge novel and here for the first time assessed for predictive monitoring of Escherichia coli (E. coli) shake flask experiments. Assessments that mimic real-time predictions of BM and DO levels under previously untested growth conditions demonstrate the efficacy of the approach. After allowing for an initialization phase where the PF learns appropriate model parameters, we obtain accurate predictions of future BM and DO levels and important temporal characteristics like when to harvest. Statically parameterized growth models that represent the dynamics of a specific setting will in general provide poor characterizations of the dynamics when we change strain or substrate. The proposed approach is thus an important innovation for scientists working on strain characterization and substrate optimization as providing accurate forecasts will improve reproducibility and efficiency in early-stage bioprocess development

Biological assessment of robust noise models in microarray data analysis

Motivation: Although several recently proposed analysis packages for microarray data can cope with heavy-tailed noise, many applications rely on Gaussian assumptions. Gaussian noise models foster computational efficiency. This comes, however, at the expense of increased sensitivity to outlying observations. Assessing potential insufficiencies of Gaussian noise in microarray data analysis is thus important and of general interest

Model-based probe set optimization for high-performance microarrays

A major challenge in microarray design is the selection of highly specific oligonucleotide probes for all targeted genes of interest, while maintaining thermodynamic uniformity at the hybridization temperature. We introduce a novel microarray design framework (Thermodynamic Model-based Oligo Design Optimizer, TherMODO) that for the first time incorporates a number of advanced modelling features: (i) A model of position-dependent labelling effects that is quantitatively derived from experiment. (ii) Multi-state thermodynamic hybridization models of probe binding behaviour, including potential cross-hybridization reactions. (iii) A fast calibrated sequence-similarity-based heuristic for cross-hybridization prediction supporting large-scale designs. (iv) A novel compound score formulation for the integrated assessment of multiple probe design objectives. In contrast to a greedy search for probes meeting parameter thresholds, this approach permits an optimization at the probe set level and facilitates the selection of highly specific probe candidates while maintaining probe set uniformity. (v) Lastly, a flexible target grouping structure allows easy adaptation of the pipeline to a variety of microarray application scenarios. The algorithm and features are discussed and demonstrated on actual design runs. Source code is available on request

A brain-computer interface with vibrotactile biofeedback for haptic information

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>It has been suggested that Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) may one day be suitable for controlling a neuroprosthesis. For closed-loop operation of BCI, a tactile feedback channel that is compatible with neuroprosthetic applications is desired. Operation of an EEG-based BCI using only <it>vibrotactile feedback</it>, a commonly used method to convey haptic senses of contact and pressure, is demonstrated with a high level of accuracy.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A Mu-rhythm based BCI using a motor imagery paradigm was used to control the position of a virtual cursor. The cursor position was shown visually as well as transmitted haptically by modulating the intensity of a vibrotactile stimulus to the upper limb. A total of six subjects operated the BCI in a two-stage targeting task, receiving only vibrotactile biofeedback of performance. The location of the vibration was also systematically varied between the left and right arms to investigate location-dependent effects on performance.</p> <p>Results and Conclusion</p> <p>Subjects are able to control the BCI using only vibrotactile feedback with an average accuracy of 56% and as high as 72%. These accuracies are significantly higher than the 15% predicted by random chance if the subject had no voluntary control of their Mu-rhythm. The results of this study demonstrate that vibrotactile feedback is an effective biofeedback modality to operate a BCI using motor imagery. In addition, the study shows that placement of the vibrotactile stimulation on the biceps ipsilateral or contralateral to the motor imagery introduces a significant bias in the BCI accuracy. This bias is consistent with a drop in performance generated by stimulation of the contralateral limb. Users demonstrated the capability to overcome this bias with training.</p

An analysis of single amino acid repeats as use case for application specific background models

Background Sequence analysis aims to identify biologically relevant signals against a backdrop of functionally meaningless variation. Increasingly, it is recognized that the quality of the background model directly affects the performance of analyses. State-of-the-art approaches rely on classical sequence models that are adapted to the studied dataset. Although performing well in the analysis of globular protein domains, these models break down in regions of stronger compositional bias or low complexity. While these regions are typically filtered, there is increasing anecdotal evidence of functional roles. This motivates an exploration of more complex sequence models and application-specific approaches for the investigation of biased regions. Results Traditional Markov-chains and application-specific regression models are compared using the example of predicting runs of single amino acids, a particularly simple class of biased regions. Cross-fold validation experiments reveal that the alternative regression models capture the multi-variate trends well, despite their low dimensionality and in contrast even to higher-order Markov-predictors. We show how the significance of unusual observations can be computed for such empirical models. The power of a dedicated model in the detection of biologically interesting signals is then demonstrated in an analysis identifying the unexpected enrichment of contiguous leucine-repeats in signal-peptides. Considering different reference sets, we show how the question examined actually defines what constitutes the 'background'. Results can thus be highly sensitive to the choice of appropriate model training sets. Conversely, the choice of reference data determines the questions that can be investigated in an analysis. Conclusions Using a specific case of studying biased regions as an example, we have demonstrated that the construction of application-specific background models is both necessary and feasible in a challenging sequence analysis situation