Dataset Information

NIBBS-search for fast and accurate prediction of phenotype-biased metabolic systems.

ABSTRACT: Understanding of genotype-phenotype associations is important not only for furthering our knowledge on internal cellular processes, but also essential for providing the foundation necessary for genetic engineering of microorganisms for industrial use (e.g., production of bioenergy or biofuels). However, genotype-phenotype associations alone do not provide enough information to alter an organism's genome to either suppress or exhibit a phenotype. It is important to look at the phenotype-related genes in the context of the genome-scale network to understand how the genes interact with other genes in the organism. Identification of metabolic subsystems involved in the expression of the phenotype is one way of placing the phenotype-related genes in the context of the entire network. A metabolic system refers to a metabolic network subgraph; nodes are compounds and edges labels are the enzymes that catalyze the reaction. The metabolic subsystem could be part of a single metabolic pathway or span parts of multiple pathways. Arguably, comparative genome-scale metabolic network analysis is a promising strategy to identify these phenotype-related metabolic subsystems. Network Instance-Based Biased Subgraph Search (NIBBS) is a graph-theoretic method for genome-scale metabolic network comparative analysis that can identify metabolic systems that are statistically biased toward phenotype-expressing organismal networks. We set up experiments with target phenotypes like hydrogen production, TCA expression, and acid-tolerance. We show via extensive literature search that some of the resulting metabolic subsystems are indeed phenotype-related and formulate hypotheses for other systems in terms of their role in phenotype expression. NIBBS is also orders of magnitude faster than MULE, one of the most efficient maximal frequent subgraph mining algorithms that could be adjusted for this problem. Also, the set of phenotype-biased metabolic systems output by NIBBS comes very close to the set of phenotype-biased subgraphs output by an exact maximally-biased subgraph enumeration algorithm ( MBS-Enum ). The code (NIBBS and the module to visualize the identified subsystems) is available at http://freescience.org/cs/NIBBS.

SUBMITTER: Schmidt MC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3349732 | biostudies-other | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

ACCESS DATA

Publications

NIBBS-search for fast and accurate prediction of phenotype-biased metabolic systems.

Schmidt Matthew C MC Rocha Andrea M AM Padmanabhan Kanchana K Shpanskaya Yekaterina Y Banfield Jill J Scott Kathleen K Mihelcic James R JR Samatova Nagiza F NF

PLoS computational biology 20120510 5

Understanding of genotype-phenotype associations is important not only for furthering our knowledge on internal cellular processes, but also essential for providing the foundation necessary for genetic engineering of microorganisms for industrial use (e.g., production of bioenergy or biofuels). However, genotype-phenotype associations alone do not provide enough information to alter an organism's genome to either suppress or exhibit a phenotype. It is important to look at the phenotype-related g ...[more]

PMID: 22589706

Similar Datasets

Project description:BACKGROUND:There are many different types of microRNAs (miRNAs) and elucidating their functions is still under intensive research. A fundamental step in functional annotation of a new miRNA is to classify it into characterized miRNA families, such as those in Rfam and miRBase. With the accumulation of annotated miRNAs, it becomes possible to use deep learning-based models to classify different types of miRNAs. In this work, we investigate several key issues associated with successful application of deep learning models for miRNA classification. First, as secondary structure conservation is a prominent feature for noncoding RNAs including miRNAs, we examine whether secondary structure-based encoding improves classification accuracy. Second, as there are many more non-miRNA sequences than miRNAs, instead of assigning a negative class for all non-miRNA sequences, we test whether using softmax output can distinguish in-distribution and out-of-distribution samples. Finally, we investigate whether deep learning models can correctly classify sequences from small miRNA families. RESULTS:We present our trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models for classifying miRNAs using different types of feature learning and encoding methods. In the first method, we explicitly encode the predicted secondary structure in a matrix. In the second method, we use only the primary sequence information and one-hot encoding matrix. In addition, in order to reject sequences that should not be classified into targeted miRNA families, we use a threshold derived from softmax layer to exclude out-of-distribution sequences, which is an important feature to make this model useful for real transcriptomic data. The comparison with the state-of-the-art ncRNA classification tools such as Infernal shows that our method can achieve comparable sensitivity and accuracy while being significantly faster. CONCLUSION:Automatic feature learning in CNN can lead to better classification accuracy and sensitivity for miRNA classification and annotation. The trained models and also associated codes are freely available at https://github.com/HubertTang/DeepMir.

Project description:BACKGROUND: Due to the growing amount of biological knowledge that is incorporated into metabolic network models, their analysis has become more and more challenging. Here, we examine the capabilities of the recently introduced chemical organization theory (OT) to ease this task. Considering only network stoichiometry, the theory allows the prediction of all potentially persistent species sets and therewith rigorously relates the structure of a network to its potential dynamics. By this, the phenotypes implied by a metabolic network can be predicted without the need for explicit knowledge of the detailed reaction kinetics. RESULTS: We propose an approach to deal with regulation - and especially inhibitory interactions - in chemical organization theory. One advantage of this approach is that the metabolic network and its regulation are represented in an integrated way as one reaction network. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach we examine a model by Covert and Palsson (J Biol Chem, 277(31), 2002) of the central metabolism of E. coli that incorporates the regulation of all involved genes. Our method correctly predicts the known growth phenotypes on 16 different substrates. Without specific assumptions, organization theory correctly predicts the lethality of knockout experiments in 101 out of 116 cases. Taking into account the same model specific assumptions as in the regulatory flux balance analysis (rFBA) by Covert and Palsson, the same performance is achieved (106 correctly predicted cases). Two model specific assumptions had to be considered: first, we have to assume that secreted molecules do not influence the regulatory system, and second, that metabolites with increasing concentrations indicate a lethal state. CONCLUSION: The introduced approach to model a metabolic network and its regulation in an integrated way as one reaction network makes organization analysis a universal technique to study the potential behavior of biological network models. Applying multiple methods like OT and rFBA is shown to be valuable to uncover critical assumptions and helps to improve model coherence.

Project description:MotivationSearching genomes for non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) by their secondary structure has become an important goal for bioinformatics. For pseudoknot-free structures, ncRNA search can be effective based on the covariance model and CYK-type dynamic programming. However, the computational difficulty in aligning an RNA sequence to a pseudoknot has prohibited fast and accurate search of arbitrary RNA structures. Our previous work introduced a graph model for RNA pseudoknots and proposed to solve the structure-sequence alignment by graph optimization. Given k candidate regions in the target sequence for each of the n stems in the structure, we could compute a best alignment in time O(k(t)n) based upon a tree width t decomposition of the structure graph. However, to implement this method to programs that can routinely perform fast yet accurate RNA pseudoknot searches, we need novel heuristics to ensure that, without degrading the accuracy, only a small number of stem candidates need to be examined and a tree decomposition of a small tree width can always be found for the structure graph.ResultsThe current work builds on the previous one with newly developed preprocessing algorithms to reduce the values for parameters k and t and to implement the search method into a practical program, called RNATOPS, for RNA pseudoknot search. In particular, we introduce techniques, based on probabilistic profiling and distance penalty functions, which can identify for every stem just a small number k (e.g. k <or= 10) of plausible regions in the target sequence to which the stem needs to align. We also devised a specialized tree decomposition algorithm that can yield tree decomposition of small tree width t (e.g. t <or= 4) for almost all RNA structure graphs. Our experiments show that with RNATOPS it is possible to routinely search prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes for specific RNA structures of medium to large sizes, including pseudoknots, with high sensitivity and high specificity, and in a reasonable amount of time.

Dataset Information

NIBBS-search for fast and accurate prediction of phenotype-biased metabolic systems.

Publications

NIBBS-search for fast and accurate prediction of phenotype-biased metabolic systems.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets