Search results for "Information Science"
showing 10 items of 3627 documents
Common Hits Approach: Combining Pharmacophore Modeling and Molecular Dynamics Simulations.
2017
We present a new approach that incorporates flexibility based on extensive MD simulations of protein-ligand complexes into structure-based pharmacophore modeling and virtual screening. The approach uses the multiple coordinate sets saved during the MD simulations and generates for each frame a pharmacophore model. Pharmacophore models with the same pharmacophore features are pooled. In this way the high number of pharmacophore models that results from the MD simulation is reduced to only a few hundred representative pharmacophore models. Virtual screening runs are performed with every representative pharmacophore model; the screening results are combined and rescored to generate a single hi…
Measuring the clustering effect of BWT via RLE
2017
Abstract The Burrows–Wheeler Transform (BWT) is a reversible transformation on which are based several text compressors and many other tools used in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. The BWT is not actually a compressor, but a transformation that performs a context-dependent permutation of the letters of the input text that often create runs of equal letters (clusters) longer than the ones in the original text, usually referred to as the “clustering effect” of BWT. In particular, from a combinatorial point of view, great attention has been given to the case in which the BWT produces the fewest number of clusters (cf. [5] , [16] , [21] , [23] ). In this paper we are concerned about t…
Lost Strings in Genomes: What Sense Do They Make?
2017
We studied the sets of avoided strings to be observed over a family of genomes. It was found that the length of the minimal avoided string rarely exceeds 9 nucleotides, with neither respect to a phylogeny of a genome under consideration. The lists of the avoided strings observed over the sets of (related) genomes have been analyzed. Very low correlation between the phylogeny, and the set of those strings has been found.
Coupling News Sentiment with Web Browsing Data Improves Prediction of Intra-Day Price Dynamics
2015
The new digital revolution of big data is deeply changing our capability of understanding society and forecasting the outcome of many social and economic systems. Unfortunately, information can be very heterogeneous in the importance, relevance, and surprise it conveys, affecting severely the predictive power of semantic and statistical methods. Here we show that the aggregation of web users' behavior can be elicited to overcome this problem in a hard to predict complex system, namely the financial market. Specifically, our in-sample analysis shows that the combined use of sentiment analysis of news and browsing activity of users of Yahoo! Finance greatly helps forecasting intra-day and dai…
Facilitation of Health Professionals Responsible Autonomy with Easy-to-Use Hospital Data Querying Language
2018
Support for the development of responsible autonomy as opposite to management that is based on direct control is found to be by far more effective approach in healthcare management, especially when it concerns physicians as the most influential group of health professionals. It is therefore important to obtain a process-oriented knowledge system where physicians would be able to autonomously answer questions which are outside the scope of pre-made direct control reports. However, the ad-hoc data querying process is slow and error-prone due to inability of health professionals to access data directly without involving IT experts. The problem lies in the complexity of means used to query data…
Linear-time sequence comparison using minimal absent words & applications
2016
Sequence comparison is a prerequisite to virtually all comparative genomic analyses. It is often realized by sequence alignment techniques, which are computationally expensive. This has led to increased research into alignment-free techniques, which are based on measures referring to the composition of sequences in terms of their constituent patterns. These measures, such as q-gram distance, are usually computed in time linear with respect to the length of the sequences. In this article, we focus on the complementary idea: how two sequences can be efficiently compared based on information that does not occur in the sequences. A word is an absent word of some sequence if it does not occur in…
Dynamic longitudinal behavior in animals exposed to chronic social defeat stress
2020
AbstractChronic social defeat (CSD) can lead to impairments in social interaction and other behaviors that are supposed to model features of major depressive disorder (MDD). Not all animals subjected to CSD, however, develop these impairments, and maintained social interaction in some animals is widely used as a model for resilience to stress-induced mental dysfunctions. So far, animals have mainly been studied shortly (24 hours and 7 days) after CSD exposure and longitudinal development of behavioral phenotypes in individual animals has been mostly neglected. We have analyzed social interaction and novel object recognition behavior of stressed mice at different time points after CSD and ha…
Retrotransposon insertions can initiate colorectal cancer and are associated with poor survival
2019
Genomic instability pathways in colorectal cancer (CRC) have been extensively studied, but the role of retrotransposition in colorectal carcinogenesis remains poorly understood. Although retrotransposons are usually repressed, they become active in several human cancers, in particular those of the gastrointestinal tract. Here we characterize retrotransposon insertions in 202 colorectal tumor whole genomes and investigate their associations with molecular and clinical characteristics. We find highly variable retrotransposon activity among tumors and identify recurrent insertions in 15 known cancer genes. In approximately 1% of the cases we identify insertions in APC, likely to be tumor-initi…
Case-based surveillance of measles in Sicily during 2012-2017: The changing molecular epidemiology and implications for vaccine strategies.
2018
Following the indication of the World Health Organization, a national plan for the elimination of measles was approved in Italy and this included the improvement of the molecular surveil- lance of measles viruses and the interruption of indigenous transmission of the disease. Nevertheless, large outbreaks continue to occur in almost all regions of the country, includ- ing Sicily. Here we describe the epidemiology and molecular dynamics of measles viruses as a result of the measles surveillance activity carried out by the “Reference Laboratory for Measles and Rubella” in Sicily over a 5-year period. Biological samples of 259 suspected measles cases were tested for viral RNA detection and a t…
Objective Assessment of Nuclear and Cortical Cataracts through Scheimpflug Images: Agreement with the LOCS III Scale.
2016
Purpose To assess nuclear and cortical opacities through the objective analysis of Scheimpflug images, and to check the correlation with the Lens Opacity Classification System III (LOCS III). Methods Nuclear and cortical opacities were graded according to the LOCS III rules after pupil dilation. The maximum and average pixel intensity values along an elliptical mask within the lens nucleus were taken to analyse nuclear cataracts. A new metric based on the percentage of opaque pixels within a region of interest was used to analyse cortical cataracts. The percentage of opaque pixels was also calculated for half, third and quarter areas from the region of interest’s periphery. Results The maxi…