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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 55 records · Page 3

MS1Connect: a mass spectrometry run similarity measure

Abstract Motivation Interpretation of newly acquired mass spectrometry data can be improved by identifying, from an online repository, previous mass spectrometry runs that resemble the new data. However, this retrieval task requires computing the similarity between an arbitrary pair of mass spectrometry runs. This is particularly challenging for runs acquired using different experimental protocols. Results We propose a method, MS1Connect, that calculates the similarity between a pair of runs by examining only the intact peptide (MS1) scans, and we show evidence that the MS1Connect score is accurate. Specifically, we show that MS1Connect outperforms several baseline methods on the task of predicting the species from which a given proteomics sample originated. In addition, we show that MS1Connect scores are highly correlated with similarities computed from fragment (MS2) scans, even though these data are not used by MS1Connect. Availability and implementation The MS1Connect software is available at https://github.com/bmx8177/MS1Connect. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Blinking statistics and molecular counting in direct stochastic reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM)

Abstract Motivation Many recent advancements in single-molecule localization microscopy exploit the stochastic photoswitching of fluorophores to reveal complex cellular structures beyond the classical diffraction limit. However, this same stochasticity makes counting the number of molecules to high precision extremely challenging, preventing key insight into the cellular structures and processes under observation. Results Modelling the photoswitching behaviour of a fluorophore as an unobserved continuous time Markov process transitioning between a single fluorescent and multiple dark states, and fully mitigating for missed blinks and false positives, we present a method for computing the exact probability distribution for the number of observed localizations from a single photoswitching fluorophore. This is then extended to provide the probability distribution for the number of localizations in a direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy experiment involving an arbitrary number of molecules. We demonstrate that when training data are available to estimate photoswitching rates, the unknown number of molecules can be accurately recovered from the posterior mode of the number of molecules given the number of localizations. Finally, we demonstrate the method on experimental data by quantifying the number of adapter protein linker for activation of T cells on the cell surface of the T-cell immunological synapse. Availability and implementation Software and data available at https://github.com/lp1611/mol_count_dstorm. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Patel, Lekha↗

RASTtk: A modular and extensible implementation of the RAST algorithm for building custom annotation pipelines and annotating batches of genomes

The RAST (Rapid Annotation using Subsystem Technology) annotation engine was built in 2008 to annotate bacterial and archaeal genomes. It works by offering a standard software pipeline for identifying genomic features (i.e., protein-encoding genes and RNA) and annotating their functions. Recently, in order to make RAST a more useful research tool and to keep pace with advancements in bioinformatics, it has become desirable to build a version of RAST that is both customizable and extensible. In this paper, we describe the RAST tool kit (RASTtk), a modular version of RAST that enables researchers to build custom annotation pipelines. RASTtk offers a choice of software for identifying and annotating genomic features as well as the ability to add custom features to an annotation job. RASTtk also accommodates the batch submission of genomes and the ability to customize annotation protocols for batch submissions. This is the first major software restructuring of RAST since its inception.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Inference of cell type-specific gene regulatory networks on cell lineages from single cell omic datasets

Abstract Cell type-specific gene expression patterns are outputs of transcriptional gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that connect transcription factors and signaling proteins to target genes. Single-cell technologies such as single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) and single cell Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (scATAC-seq), can examine cell-type specific gene regulation at unprecedented detail. However, current approaches to infer cell type-specific GRNs are limited in their ability to integrate scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq measurements and to model network dynamics on a cell lineage. To address this challenge, we have developed single-cell Multi-Task Network Inference (scMTNI), a multi-task learning framework to infer the GRN for each cell type on a lineage from scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq data. Using simulated and real datasets, we show that scMTNI is a broadly applicable framework for linear and branching lineages that accurately infers GRN dynamics and identifies key regulators of fate transitions for diverse processes such as cellular reprogramming and differentiation.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Computational Strategies for Scalable Genomics Analysis

The revolution in next-generation DNA sequencing technologies is leading to explosive data growth in genomics, posing a significant challenge to the computing infrastructure and software algorithms for genomics analysis. Various big data technologies have been explored to scale up/out current bioinformatics solutions to mine the big genomics data. In this review, we survey some of these exciting developments in the applications of parallel distributed computing and special hardware to genomics. We comment on the pros and cons of each strategy in the context of ease of development, robustness, scalability, and efficiency. Although this review is written for an audience from the genomics and bioinformatics fields, it may also be informative for the audience of computer science with interests in genomics applications.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

iMicrobe: Tools and data-driven discovery platform for the microbiome sciences

Background: Scientists have amassed a wealth of microbiome datasets, making it possible to study microbes in biotic and abiotic systems on a population or planetary scale; however, this potential has not been fully realized given that the tools, datasets, and computation are available in diverse repositories and locations. To address this challenge, we developed iMicrobe.us, a community-driven microbiome data marketplace and tool exchange for users to integrate their own data and tools with those from the broader community. Findings: The iMicrobe platform brings together analysis tools and microbiome datasets by leveraging National Science Foundation–supported cyberinfrastructure and computing resources from CyVerse, Agave, and XSEDE. The primary purpose of iMicrobe is to provide users with a freely available, web-based platform to (1) maintain and share project data, metadata, and analysis products, (2) search for related public datasets, and (3) use and publish bioinformatics tools that run on highly scalable computing resources. Analysis tools are implemented in containers that encapsulate complex software dependencies and run on freely available XSEDE resources via the Agave API, which can retrieve datasets from the CyVerse Data Store or any web-accessible location (e.g., FTP, HTTP). Conclusions: iMicrobe promotes data integration, sharing, and community-driven tool development by making open source data and tools accessible to the research community in a web-based platform.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

SeqTU: A web server for identification of bacterial transcription units

A transcription unit (TU) consists of K ≥ 1 consecutive genes on the same strand of a bacterial genome that are transcribed into a single mRNA molecule under certain conditions. Their identification is an essential step in elucidation of transcriptional regulatory networks. We have recently developed a machine-learning method to accurately identify TUs from RNA-seq data, based on two features of the assembled RNA reads: the continuity and stability of RNA-seq coverage across a genomic region. While good performance was achieved by the method on Escherichia coli and Clostridium thermocellum , substantial work is needed to make the program generally applicable to all bacteria, knowing that the program requires organism specific information. A web server, named SeqTU , was developed to automatically identify TUs with given RNA-seq data of any bacterium using a machine-learning approach. The server consists of a number of utility tools, in addition to TU identification, such as data preparation, data quality check and RNA-read mapping. SeqTU provides a user-friendly interface and automated prediction of TUs from given RNA-seq data. Furthermore, the predicted TUs are displayed intuitively using HTML format along with a graphic visualization of the prediction.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Distributed Many-to-Many Protein Sequence Alignment using Sparse Matrices

Identifying similar protein sequences is a core step in many computational biology pipelines such as detection of homologous protein sequences, generation of similarity protein graphs for downstream analysis, functional annotation, and gene location. Performance and scalability of protein similarity search have proven to be a bottleneck in many bioinformatics pipelines due to increase in cheap and abundant sequencing data. This work presents a new distributed-memory software PASTIS. PASTIS relies on sparse matrix computations for efficient identification of possibly similar proteins. We use distributed sparse matrices for scalability and show that the sparse matrix infrastructure is a great fit for protein similarity search when coupled with a fully-distributed dictionary of sequences that allow remote sequence requests to be fulfilled. Our algorithm incorporates the unique bias in amino acid sequence substitution in search without altering basic sparse matrix model, and in turn, achieves ideal scaling up to millions of protein sequences.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

wastewater_virus

This repo contains software used to clean and assemble high-throughput sequencing data containing viruses. The input is raw illumina sequencing reads and the output is a database of high-quality viral genomes. The specific application is to wastewater viral concentrates but it is not restricted to that sample type. The software is composed of Nextflow workflows and a set of custom Python and bash scripts that call publicly available bioinformatics tools to accomplish obvious tasks in data analysis in a high performance computing environment. For detailed information, please see the repo's README file.

Kantor, Rose [Lawrence Livermore National Laborato↗

Identification of candidate diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for human prostate cancer: RPL22L1 and RPS21

Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most common malignancies in men worldwide. This study was designed to investigate the potential of Ribosomal Protein L22-like1 (RPL22L1) and Ribosomal Protein S21 (RPS21) as diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for PCa. First, RPL22L1 and RPS21 were screened as the key molecular of PCa by bioinformatics analysis. Subsequently, the prostate tissue samples were stained for antibodies against RPL22L1 and RPS21. The unbiased signal quantification was performed by ImageJ software, and the results showed that the expression of RPL22L1 and RPS21 exhibited significant differences between the PCa tissues and the normal prostate tissues. Receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) curves were prepared, and then the area under the curve (AUC) values of RPL22L1 and RPS21 were calculated as 0.798 and 0.768, and the likelihood ratio (LR) values of RPL22L1 and RPS21 were calculated as 2.86 and 2.53. These data implied that the over-expression of RPL22L1 and RPS21 is associated with the presence of PCa. The further analysis suggested that the expression of RPL22L1 and RPS21 were significantly higher in high Gleason grade than they were in low Gleason grade. In addition, in vitro studies were undertaken to evaluate the roles of RPL22L1 and RPS21 in PCa. The results revealed that these genes promote PCa cell proliferation, migration and invasion, and inhibit PCa cell apoptosis. Taken together, these data showed that RPL22L1 and RPS21 exhibited higher expression in human prostate cancer tissue, and involved in PCa cell proliferation and invasion. This research provided a novel insight into diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for PCa.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗

k-merSNP discovery: Software for alignment-and reference-free scalable SNP discovery, phylogenetics, and annotation for hundreds of microbial genomes

With the flood of whole genome finished and draft microbial sequences, we need faster, more scalable bioinformatics tools for sequence comparison. An algorithm is described to find single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in whole genome data. It scales to hundreds of bacterial or viral genomes, and can be used for finished and/or draft genomes available as unassembled contigs or raw, unassembled reads. The method is fast to compute, finding SNPs and building a SNP phylogeny in minutes to hours, depending on the size and diversity of the input sequences. The SNP-based trees that result are consistent with known taxonomy and trees determined in other studies. The approach we describe can handle many gigabases of sequence in a single run. The algorithm is based on k-mer analysis.

Source record↗

Toward designing effective exascale scientific computing workflows: experiences and best practices

Many fields within scientific computing have embraced advances in big-data analysis and machine learning, which often requires the deployment of large, distributed and complicated workflows that may combine training neural networks, performing simulations, running inference, and performing database queries and data analysis in asynchronous, parallel and pipelined execution frameworks. Such a shift has brought into focus the need for scalable, efficient workflow management solutions with reproducibility, error and provenance handling, traceability, and checkpoint-restart capabilities, among other needs. Here, we discuss challenges and best-practices for deploying exascale-generation computational science workflows on resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). We present our experiences with large-scale deployment of distributed workflows on the Summit supercomputer, including for bioinformatics and computational biophysics, materials science, and deep learning model optimization. We also present problems and solutions created by working within a Python-centric software base on traditional HPC systems, and discuss steps that will be required before the convergence of HPC, AI, and data science can be fully realized. Our results point to a wealth of exciting new possibilities for harnessing this convergence to tackle new scientific challenges.

Coletti, Mark↗

Assessment of drug-induced arrhythmic risk using limit cycle and autocorrelation analysis of human iPSC-cardiomyocyte contractility

Cardiac safety assays incorporating label-free detection of human stem-cell derived cardiomyocyte contractility provide human relevance and medium throughput screening to assess compound-induced cardiotoxicity. In an effort to provide quantitative analysis of the large kinetic datasets resulting from these real-time studies, we applied bioinformatic approaches based on nonlinear dynamical system analysis, including limit cycle analysis and autocorrelation function, to systematically assess beat irregularity. The algorithms were integrated into a software program to seamlessly generate results for 96-well impedance-based data. Our approach was validated by analyzing dose- and time-dependent changes in beat patterns induced by known proarrhythmic compounds and screening a cardiotoxicity library to rank order compounds based on their proarrhythmic potential. We demonstrate a strong correlation for dose-dependent beat irregularity monitored by electrical impedance and quantified by autocorrelation analysis to traditional manual patch clamp potency values for hERG blockers. In addition, our platform identifies non-hERG blockers known to cause clinical arrhythmia. Our method provides a novel suite of medium-throughput quantitative tools for assessing compound effects on cardiac contractility and predicting compounds with potential proarrhythmia and may be applied to in vitro paradigms for pre-clinical cardiac safety evaluation. - Highlights: • Impedance-based monitoring of human iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte contractility • Limit cycle analysis of impedance data identifies aberrant oscillation patterns. • Nonlinear autocorrelation function quantifies beat irregularity. • Identification of hERG and non-hERG inhibitors with known risk of arrhythmia • Automated software processes limit cycle and autocorrelation analyses of 96w data.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

A public website for the automated assessment and validation of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic PCR assays

Abstract Summary Polymerase chain reaction-based assays are the current gold standard for detecting and diagnosing SARS-CoV-2. However, as SARS-CoV-2 mutates, we need to constantly assess whether existing PCR-based assays will continue to detect all known viral strains. To enable the continuous monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 assays, we have developed a web-based assay validation algorithm that checks existing PCR-based assays against the ever-expanding genome databases for SARS-CoV-2 using both thermodynamic and edit-distance metrics. The assay-screening results are displayed as a heatmap, showing the number of mismatches between each detection and each SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence. Using a mismatch threshold to define detection failure, assay performance is summarized with the true-positive rate (recall) to simplify assay comparisons. Availability and implementation The assay evaluation website and supporting software are Open Source and freely available at https://covid19.edgebioinformatics.org/#/assayValidation, https://github.com/jgans/thermonucleotide BLAST and https://github.com/LANL-Bioinformatics/assay_validation. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Improving deep learning-based protein distance prediction in CASP14

Abstract Motivation Accurate prediction of residue–residue distances is important for protein structure prediction. We developed several protein distance predictors based on a deep learning distance prediction method and blindly tested them in the 14th Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14). The prediction method uses deep residual neural networks with the channel-wise attention mechanism to classify the distance between every two residues into multiple distance intervals. The input features for the deep learning method include co-evolutionary features as well as other sequence-based features derived from multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). Three alignment methods are used with multiple protein sequence/profile databases to generate MSAs for input feature generation. Based on different configurations and training strategies of the deep learning method, five MULTICOM distance predictors were created to participate in the CASP14 experiment. Results Benchmarked on 37 hard CASP14 domains, the best performing MULTICOM predictor is ranked 5th out of 30 automated CASP14 distance prediction servers in terms of precision of top L/5 long-range contact predictions [i.e. classifying distances between two residues into two categories: in contact (<8 Angstrom) and not in contact otherwise] and performs better than the best CASP13 distance prediction method. The best performing MULTICOM predictor is also ranked 6th among automated server predictors in classifying inter-residue distances into 10 distance intervals defined by CASP14 according to the precision of distance classification. The results show that the quality and depth of MSAs depend on alignment methods and sequence databases and have a significant impact on the accuracy of distance prediction. Using larger training datasets and multiple complementary features improves prediction accuracy. However, the number of effective sequences in MSAs is only a weak indicator of the quality of MSAs and the accuracy of predicted distance maps. In contrast, there is a strong correlation between the accuracy of contact/distance predictions and the average probability of the predicted contacts, which can therefore be more effectively used to estimate the confidence of distance predictions and select predicted distance maps. Availability and implementation The software package, source code and data of DeepDist2 are freely available at https://github.com/multicom-toolbox/deepdist and https://zenodo.org/record/4712084#.YIIM13VKhQM. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

From DNA to FBA: How to Build Your Own Genome-Scale Metabolic Model

Microbiological studies are increasingly relying on in silico methods to perform exploration and rapid analysis of genomic data, and functional genomics studies are supplemented by the new perspectives that genome-scale metabolic models offer. A mathematical model consisting of a microbe’s entire metabolic map can be rapidly determined from whole-genome sequencing and annotating the genomic material encoded in its DNA. Flux-balance analysis (FBA), a linear programming technique that uses metabolic models to predict the phenotypic responses imposed by environmental elements and factors, is the leading method to simulate and manipulate cellular growth in silico. However, the process of creating an accurate model to use in FBA consists of a series of steps involving a multitude of connections between bioinformatics databases, enzyme resources, and metabolic pathways. We present the methodology and procedure to obtain a metabolic model using PyFBA, an extensible Pythonbased open-source software package aimed to provide a platform where functional annotations are used to build metabolic models (http://linsalrob.github.io/PyFBA). Backed by the Model SEED biochemistry database, PyFBA contains methods to reconstruct a microbe’s metabolic map, run FBA upon different media conditions, and gap-fill its metabolism. The extensibility of PyFBA facilitates novel techniques in creating accurate genome-scale metabolic models.

genome annotation↗

Outcome of the First wwPDB/CCDC/D3R Ligand Validation Workshop

Crystallographic studies of ligands bound to biological macromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids) represent an important source of information concerning drug-target interactions, providing atomic level insights into the physical chemistry of complex formation between macromolecules and ligands. Of the more than 115,000 entries extant in the Protein Data Bank archive, ~75% include at least one non-polymeric ligand. Ligand geometrical and stereochemical quality, the suitability of ligand models for in silico drug discovery/design, and the goodness-of-fit of ligand models to electron density maps vary widely across the archive. We describe the proceedings and conclusions from the first Worldwide Protein Data Bank/Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre/Drug Design Data Resource (wwPDB/CCDC/D3R) Ligand Validation Workshop held at the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics at Rutgers University on July 30-31, 2015. Experts in protein crystallography from academe and industry came together with non-profit and for-profit software providers for crystallography and with experts in computational chemistry and data archiving to discuss and make recommendations on best practices, as framed by a series of questions central to structural studies of macromolecule-ligand complexes. What data concerning bound ligands should be archived in the Protein Data Bank? How should the ligands be best represented? How should structural models of macromolecule-ligand complexes be validated? What supplementary information should accompany publications of structural studies of biological macromolecules? Consensus recommendations on best practices developed in response to each of these questions are provided, together with some details regarding implementation. Important issues addressed but not resolved at the workshop are also enumerated.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗