OBCS: The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. To promote logically consistent representation and classification of statistical entities, we have developed the Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS). OBCS extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO Foundry ontology supported by some 20 communities. Currently, OBCS contains 686 terms, including 381 classes imported from OBI and 147 classes specific to OBCS. The goal of this paper is to present OBCS for community critique and to describe a number of use cases designed to illustrate its potential applications. The OBCS project and source code are available at http://obcs.googlecode.com

Toll-like receptor signaling in vertebrates: Testing the integration of protein, complex, and pathway data in the Protein Ontology framework

The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides terms for and supports annotation of species-specific protein complexes in an ontology framework that relates them both to their components and to species-independent families of complexes. Comprehensive curation of experimentally known forms and annotations thereof is expected to expose discrepancies, differences, and gaps in our knowledge. We have annotated the early events of innate immune signaling mediated by Toll-Like Receptor 3 and 4 complexes in human, mouse, and chicken. The resulting ontology and annotation data set has allowed us to identify species-specific gaps in experimental data and possible functional differences between species, and to employ inferred structural and functional relationships to suggest plausible resolutions of these discrepancies and gaps

An improved ontological representation of dendritic cells as a paradigm for all cell types

The Cell Ontology (CL) is designed to provide a standardized representation of cell types for data annotation. Currently, the CL employs multiple is_a relations, defining cell types in terms of histological, functional, and lineage properties, and the majority of definitions are written with sufficient generality to hold across multiple species. This approach limits the CL’s utility for cross-species data integration. To address this problem, we developed a method for the ontological representation of cells and applied this method to develop a dendritic cell ontology (DC-CL). DC-CL subtypes are delineated on the basis of surface protein expression, systematically including both species-general and species-specific types and optimizing DC-CL for the analysis of flow cytometry data. This approach brings benefits in the form of increased accuracy, support for reasoning, and interoperability with other ontology resources. 104. Barry Smith, “Toward a Realistic Science of Environments”, Ecological Psychology, 2009, 21 (2), April-June, 121-130. Abstract: The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson embraces a radically externalistic view of mind and action. We have, for Gibson, not a Cartesian mind or soul, with its interior theater of contents and the consequent problem of explaining how this mind or soul and its psychological environment can succeed in grasping physical objects external to itself. Rather, we have a perceiving, acting organism, whose perceptions and actions are always already tuned to the parts and moments, the things and surfaces, of its external environment. We describe how on this basis Gibson sought to develop a realist science of environments which will be ‘consistent with physics, mechanics, optics, acoustics, and chemistry’

Semiparametric mixed-effects models for unsupervised classification of Italian schools

The main purpose of the paper is to improve research on school effectiveness by applying a new strategy for uncovering subpopulations of schools that differ in terms of distributionof student outcomes. We propose a semiparametric mixed effects model with an expectation–maximization algorithm to estimate its parameters and we apply it to the Italian Institute for theEducational Evaluation of Instruction and Training data of 2013–2014 as a tool for the identification of latent subpopulations of schools. The semiparametric assumption provides the random effects of the mixed effects model to be distributed according to a discrete distribution with an(a priori) unknown number of support points. This modelling induces an automatic clustering of schools (the higher level of hierarchy), where schools within the same cluster share the same random effects. The latent subpopulations of schools identified may then be exploited through the use of multinomial models that include school level features. The novelties introduced by this paper are twofold: first, the semiparametric expectation–maximization algorithm is an innovative method that could be used in many classification problems; second, its application to education data represents a new approach to study school effectiveness

The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS) for standardized and reproducible statistical analysis

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. However, most reports of scientific results in the published literature make it difficult for the reader to reproduce the statistical analyses performed in achieving those results because they provide inadequate documentation of the statistical tests and algorithms applied. The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS) is put forward here as a step towards solving this problem. Terms in OBCS, including ‘data collection’, ‘data transformation in statistics’, ‘data visualization’, ‘statistical data analysis’, and ‘drawing a conclusion based on data’, cover the major types of statistical processes used in basic biological research and clinical outcome studies. OBCS is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry ontology supported by over 20 research communities. We discuss two examples illustrating how the ontology is being applied. In the first (biological) use case, we describe how OBCS was applied to represent the high throughput microarray data analysis of immunological transcriptional profiles in human subjects vaccinated with an influenza vaccine. In the second (clinical outcomes) use case, we applied OBCS to represent the processing of electronic health care data to determine the associations between hospital staffing levels and patient mortality. Our case studies were designed to show how OBCS can be used for the consistent representation of statistical analysis pipelines under two different research paradigms. By representing statistics-related terms and their relations in a rigorous fashion, OBCS facilitates standard data analysis and integration, and supports reproducible biological and clinical research

OHMI: The Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions

Host-microbiome interactions (HMIs) are critical for the modulation of biological processes and are associated with several diseases, and extensive HMI studies have generated large amounts of data. We propose that the logical representation of the knowledge derived from these data and the standardized representation of experimental variables and processes can foster integration of data and reproducibility of experiments and thereby further HMI knowledge discovery. A community-based Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions (OHMI) was developed following the OBO Foundry principles. OHMI leverages established ontologies to create logically structured representations of microbiomes, microbial taxonomy, host species, host anatomical entities, and HMIs under different conditions and associated study protocols and types of data analysis and experimental results

Phylogeny of Toll-Like Receptor Signaling: Adapting the Innate Response

The Toll-like receptors represent a largely evolutionarily conserved pathogen recognition machinery responsible for recognition of bacterial, fungal, protozoan, and viral pathogen associated microbial patterns and initiation of inflammatory response. Structurally the Toll-like receptors are comprised of an extracellular leucine rich repeat domain and a cytoplasmic Toll/Interleukin 1 receptor domain. Recognition takes place in the extracellular domain where as the cytoplasmic domain triggers a complex signal network required to sustain appropriate immune response. Signal transduction is regulated by the recruitment of different intracellular adaptors. The Toll-like receptors can be grouped depending on the usage of the adaptor, MyD88, into MyD88-dependent and MyD88 independent subsets. Herein, we present a unique phylogenetic analysis of domain regions of these receptors and their cognate signaling adaptor molecules. Although previously unclear from the phylogeny of full length receptors, these analyses indicate a separate evolutionary origin for the MyD88-dependent and MyD88-independent signaling pathway and provide evidence of a common ancestor for the vertebrate and invertebrate orthologs of the adaptor molecule MyD88. Together these observations suggest a very ancient origin of the MyD88-dependent pathway Additionally we show that early duplications gave rise to several adaptor molecule families. In some cases there is also strong pattern of parallel duplication between adaptor molecules and their corresponding TLR. Our results further support the hypothesis that phylogeny of specific domains involved in signaling pathway can shed light on key processes that link innate to adaptive immune response

VIGET: A web portal for study of vaccine-induced host responses based on Reactome pathways and ImmPort data

Host responses to vaccines are complex but important to investigate. To facilitate the study, we have developed a tool called Vaccine Induced Gene Expression Analysis Tool (VIGET), with the aim to provide an interactive online tool for users to efficiently and robustly analyze the host immune response gene expression data collected in the ImmPort/GEO databases. VIGET allows users to select vaccines, choose ImmPort studies, set up analysis models by choosing confounding variables and two groups of samples having different vaccination times, and then perform differential expression analysis to select genes for pathway enrichment analysis and functional interaction network construction using the Reactome’s web services. VIGET provides features for users to compare results from two analyses, facilitating comparative response analysis across different demographic groups. VIGET uses the Vaccine Ontology (VO) to classify various types of vaccines such as live or inactivated flu vaccines, yellow fever vaccines, etc. To showcase the utilities of VIGET, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of immune responses to yellow fever vaccines and found an intriguing complex activity response pattern of pathways in the immune system annotated in Reactome, demonstrating that VIGET is a valuable web portal that supports effective vaccine response studies using Reactome pathways and ImmPort data

An improved ontological representation of dendritic cells as a paradigm for all cell types

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent increases in the volume and diversity of life science data and information and an increasing emphasis on data sharing and interoperability have resulted in the creation of a large number of biological ontologies, including the Cell Ontology (CL), designed to provide a standardized representation of cell types for data annotation. Ontologies have been shown to have significant benefits for computational analyses of large data sets and for automated reasoning applications, leading to organized attempts to improve the structure and formal rigor of ontologies to better support computation. Currently, the CL employs multiple <it>is_a </it>relations, defining cell types in terms of histological, functional, and lineage properties, and the majority of definitions are written with sufficient generality to hold across multiple species. This approach limits the CL's utility for computation and for cross-species data integration.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To enhance the CL's utility for computational analyses, we developed a method for the ontological representation of cells and applied this method to develop a dendritic cell ontology (DC-CL). DC-CL subtypes are delineated on the basis of surface protein expression, systematically including both species-general and species-specific types and optimizing DC-CL for the analysis of flow cytometry data. We avoid multiple uses of <it>is_a </it>by linking DC-CL terms to terms in other ontologies via additional, formally defined relations such as <it>has_function</it>.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This approach brings benefits in the form of increased accuracy, support for reasoning, and interoperability with other ontology resources. Accordingly, we propose our method as a general strategy for the ontological representation of cells. DC-CL is available from <url>http://www.obofoundry.org</url>.</p

Psychological Health Status of Psychiatric Patients Living in Treatment Communities before and during the COVID-19 Lockdown: A Brief Report

Many studies investigated the psychological impact of lockdown measures on the general population, while few studies focused on the psychiatric population. This study aimed to investigate the role of therapeutic communities in the management and containment of symptoms of patients with psychosis living in psychiatric residential facilities. Data were collected at two different points: November 2019 (Coronavirus disease 19 had not yet spread) and April 2020 (during the lockdown in Italy). Twenty-two study participants were recruited from three residential accredited psychiatric facilities. During lockdown, the patients showed a small increase in symptomatology in terms of emotional isolation. In addition, it was been observed significant differences in certain functional areas of the behavior, measured as lower inclination towards violent behaviors during lockdown, and higher scores in substance abuse and medical impairment. The lockdown condition could represent a form of containment; daily routines, along with adequate social support, are important aspects of the stability and the level of behavioral functioning of psychiatric patients. Social support and continuity of care offered by psychiatric communities can be an effective safeguard against the psychological impact of the COVID-19 epidemic