0000000000311836
AUTHOR
Claudia Giallombardo
An Integrative Framework for the Construction of Big Functional Networks
We present a methodology for biological data integration, aiming at building and analysing large functional networks which model complex genotype-phenotype associations. A functional network is a graph where nodes represent cellular components (e.g., genes, proteins, mRNA, etc.) and edges represent associations among such molecules. Different types of components may cohesist in the same network, and associations may be related to physical[biochemical interactions or functional/phenotipic relationships. Due to both the large amount of involved information and the computational complexity typical of the problems in this domain, the proposed framework is based on big data technologies (Spark a…
FEDRO: a software tool for the automatic discovery of candidate ORFs in plants with c →u RNA editing
RNA editing is an important mechanism for gene expression in plants organelles. It alters the direct transfer of genetic information from DNA to proteins, due to the introduction of differences between RNAs and the corresponding coding DNA sequences. Software tools successful for the search of genes in other organisms not always are able to correctly perform this task in plants organellar genomes. Moreover, the available software tools predicting RNA editing events utilise algorithms that do not account for events which may generate a novel start codon. We present Fedro, a Java software tool implementing a novel strategy to generate candidate Open Reading Frames (ORFs) resulting from Cytidi…
Automatic simulation of RNA editing in plants for the identification of novel putative Open Reading Frames
In plant mitochondria an essential mechanism for gene expression is RNA editing, often influencing the synthesis of functional proteins. RNA editing alters the linearity of genetic information transfer, intro- ducing differences between RNAs and their coding DNA sequences that hind both experimental and computational research of genes. Thus common software tools for gene search, successfully exploited to find canonic genes, often can fail in discovering genes encrypted in the genome of plants. In this work we propose a novel strategy useful to intercept candidate coding sequences resulting from some possible editing substitutions on the start and stop codons of a given input organism DNA. O…
Discovering new proteins in plant mitochondria by RNA editing simulation
In plant mitochondria an essential mechanism for gene expression is RNA editing, often influencing the synthesis of functional proteins. RNA editing alters the linearity of genetic information transfer. Indeed it causes differences between RNAs and their coding DNA sequences that hinder both experimental and computational research of genes. Therefore common software tools for gene search, successfully applied to find canonical genes, often fail in discovering genes encrypted in the genome of plants. Here we propose a novel strategy useful to identify candidate coding sequences resulting from possible editing substitutions. In particular, we consider c!u substitutions leading to the creation…