Search results for "ARCHITECTURE"
showing 10 items of 3706 documents
Evolutionary stability of topologically associating domains is associated with conserved gene regulation
2018
AbstractBackgroundThe human genome is highly organized in the three-dimensional nucleus. Chromosomes fold locally into topologically associating domains (TADs) defined by increased intra-domain chromatin contacts. TADs contribute to gene regulation by restricting chromatin interactions of regulatory sequences, such as enhancers, with their target genes. Disruption of TADs can result in altered gene expression and is associated to genetic diseases and cancers. However, it is not clear to which extent TAD regions are conserved in evolution and whether disruption of TADs by evolutionary rearrangements can alter gene expression.ResultsHere, we hypothesize that TADs represent essential functiona…
The genetic architecture of low-temperature adaptation in the wine yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae
2017
[Background] Low-temperature growth and fermentation of wine yeast can enhance wine aroma and make them highly desirable traits for the industry. Elucidating response to cold in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is, therefore, of paramount importance to select or genetically improve new wine strains. As most enological traits of industrial importance in yeasts, adaptation to low temperature is a polygenic trait regulated by many interacting loci.
Epigenetic Modulation of Chromatin States and Gene Expression by G-Quadruplex Structures
2020
G-quadruplexes are four-stranded helical nucleic acid structures formed by guanine-rich sequences. A considerable number of studies have revealed that these noncanonical structural motifs are widespread throughout the genome and transcriptome of numerous organisms, including humans. In particular, G-quadruplexes occupy strategic locations in genomic DNA and both coding and noncoding RNA molecules, being involved in many essential cellular and organismal functions. In this review, we first outline the fundamental structural features of G-quadruplexes and then focus on the concept that these DNA and RNA structures convey a distinctive layer of epigenetic information that is critical for the c…
Demo
2017
We present an innovative smartphone-centric tracking system for indoor and outdoor environments, based on the joint utilization of dead-reckoning and computer vision (CV) techniques. The system is explicitly designed for visually impaired people (although it could be easily generalized to other users) and it is built under the assumption that special reference signals, such as painted lines, colored tapes or tactile pavings are deployed in the environment for guiding visually impaired users along pre-defined paths. Thanks to highly optimized software, we are able to execute the CV and sensor-fusion algorithms in run-time on low power hardware such as a normal smartphone, precisely tracking …
Clustering of low-correlated spatial gene expression patterns in the mouse brain in the Allen Brain Atlas
2018
In this paper, clustering techniques are applied to spatial gene expression patterns with a low genomic correlation between the sagittal and coronal projections. The data analysed here are hosted on an available public DB named ABA (Allen Brain Atlas). The results are compared to those obtained by Bohland et al. on the complementary dataset (high correlation values). We prove that, by analysing a reduced dataset,hence reducing the computational burden, we get the same accuracy in highlighting different neuroanatomical region.
CUDA-enabled hierarchical ward clustering of protein structures based on the nearest neighbour chain algorithm
2015
Clustering of molecular systems according to their three-dimensional structure is an important step in many bioinformatics workflows. In applications such as docking or structure prediction, many algorithms initially generate large numbers of candidate poses (or decoys), which are then clustered to allow for subsequent computationally expensive evaluations of reasonable representatives. Since the number of such candidates can easily range from thousands to millions, performing the clustering on standard central processing units (CPUs) is highly time consuming. In this paper, we analyse and evaluate different approaches to parallelize the nearest neighbour chain algorithm to perform hierarc…
A topological look at human trabecular bone tissue
2017
Bone quality is affected by trabecular architecture at microscopic level. Various abnormalities of bone tissue lead to altered strength and to an increased susceptibility to fracture, such as Osteoporosis and Osteoarthritis, two major health burdens of our society. These are two complex musculoskeletal diseases that mainly concern bone tissue. In the last twenty years, there has been a growing interest in finding an appropriate topological model for the micro-architecture of trabecular bone tissue. In particular, we prove that these models involve general topological spaces. The appropriate notion to deal with is that of CW-complex.
An effective extension of the applicability of alignment-free biological sequence comparison algorithms with Hadoop
2016
Alignment-free methods are one of the mainstays of biological sequence comparison, i.e., the assessment of how similar two biological sequences are to each other, a fundamental and routine task in computational biology and bioinformatics. They have gained popularity since, even on standard desktop machines, they are faster than methods based on alignments. However, with the advent of Next-Generation Sequencing Technologies, datasets whose size, i.e., number of sequences and their total length, is a challenge to the execution of alignment-free methods on those standard machines are quite common. Here, we propose the first paradigm for the computation of k-mer-based alignment-free methods for…
A detailed experimental study of a DNA computer with two endonucleases
2017
Abstract Great advances in biotechnology have allowed the construction of a computer from DNA. One of the proposed solutions is a biomolecular finite automaton, a simple two-state DNA computer without memory, which was presented by Ehud Shapiro’s group at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The main problem with this computer, in which biomolecules carry out logical operations, is its complexity – increasing the number of states of biomolecular automata. In this study, we constructed (in laboratory conditions) a six-state DNA computer that uses two endonucleases (e.g. AcuI and BbvI) and a ligase. We have presented a detailed experimental verification of its feasibility. We described the effe…
Biomolecular computers with multiple restriction enzymes
2017
Abstract The development of conventional, silicon-based computers has several limitations, including some related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the von Neumann “bottleneck”. Biomolecular computers based on DNA and proteins are largely free of these disadvantages and, along with quantum computers, are reasonable alternatives to their conventional counterparts in some applications. The idea of a DNA computer proposed by Ehud Shapiro’s group at the Weizmann Institute of Science was developed using one restriction enzyme as hardware and DNA fragments (the transition molecules) as software and input/output signals. This computer represented a two-state two-symbol finite automaton t…