16 research outputs found
ProLanGO: Protein Function Prediction Using Neural~Machine Translation Based on a Recurrent Neural Network
With the development of next generation sequencing techniques, it is fast and
cheap to determine protein sequences but relatively slow and expensive to
extract useful information from protein sequences because of limitations of
traditional biological experimental techniques. Protein function prediction has
been a long standing challenge to fill the gap between the huge amount of
protein sequences and the known function. In this paper, we propose a novel
method to convert the protein function problem into a language translation
problem by the new proposed protein sequence language "ProLan" to the protein
function language "GOLan", and build a neural machine translation model based
on recurrent neural networks to translate "ProLan" language to "GOLan"
language. We blindly tested our method by attending the latest third Critical
Assessment of Function Annotation (CAFA 3) in 2016, and also evaluate the
performance of our methods on selected proteins whose function was released
after CAFA competition. The good performance on the training and testing
datasets demonstrates that our new proposed method is a promising direction for
protein function prediction. In summary, we first time propose a method which
converts the protein function prediction problem to a language translation
problem and applies a neural machine translation model for protein function
prediction.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure
Public Perception of Invasive Plant Species: Assessing the impact of workshop activities to promote young students’ awareness
Invasive species are one of the main threats to biodiversity worldwide. Even though they are
identified and recognized as such by the Portuguese law, the majority of the population is not yet
aware of this problem. Aiming to increase awareness about biological invasions among young
students, a workshop on Invasive Plant Species was organized at the Botanical Museum of the
University of Coimbra. A total of 170 teenager students from five schools participated in the
workshop. Three activities were prepared, focusing on: (1) identification of invasive plants, (2)
competition between native and invasive plants and (3) control of invasive plants. One year later,
questionnaires were sent to the participants, aiming to appraise workshop effectiveness, and this
questionnaire revealed that these students know more about invasive plant species than a
comparable group of students that did not participate in the workshop. The results clearly
showed that practical informal education activities may be effective in raising public awareness.
Questionnaires were essential to evaluate the knowledge acquired and retained by the students
during the workshop.This workshop was supported
by FCT-MCTES (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) and
European fund FEDER, project INVADER II—Invasion processes, control and restoration
of coastal ecosystems invaded by Acacia longifolia—PPCDT/AMB/61387/
2004