IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Reconstruction of phylogenetic trees is a fundamental problem in computational biology. While excellent heuristic methods are available for many variants of this problem, new advances in phylogeny inference will be required if we are to be able to continue to make effective use of the rapidly growing stores of variation data now being gathered. In this paper, we present two integer linear programm... View full abstract»

Genomic rearrangement operations can be very useful to infer the phylogenetic relationship of gene orders representing species. We study the problem of finding potential ancestral gene orders for the gene orders of given taxa, such that the corresponding rearrangement scenario has a minimal number of reversals, and where each of the reversals has to preserve the common intervals of the given input... View full abstract»

In comparative genomics, algorithms that sort permutations by reversals are often used to propose evolutionary scenarios of rearrangements between species. One of the main problems of such methods is that they give one solution while the number of optimal solutions is huge, with no criteria to discriminate among them. Bergeron et al. started to give some structure to the set of optimal solutions, ... View full abstract»

The prediction of the protein tertiary structure from solely its residue sequence (the so called Protein Folding Problem) is one of the most challenging problems in Structural Bioinformatics. We focus on the protein residue contact map. When this map is assigned it is possible to reconstruct the 3D structure of the protein backbone. The general problem of recovering a set of 3D coordinates consist... View full abstract»

The recent explosion in procurement and availability of high-dimensional gene and protein expression profile data sets for cancer diagnostics has necessitated the development of sophisticated machine learning tools with which to analyze them. While some investigators are focused on identifying informative genes and proteins that play a role in specific diseases, other researchers have attempted in... View full abstract»

It is a consensus in microarray analysis that identifying potential local patterns, characterized by coherent groups of genes and conditions, may shed light on the discovery of previously undetectable biological cellular processes of genes, as well as macroscopic phenotypes of related samples. In orderto simultaneously cluster genes and conditions, we have previously developed a fast coclustering ... View full abstract»

Useful information on transcriptional networks has been extracted by regression analyses of gene expression data and DNA-protein binding data. However, a potential limitation of these approaches is their assumption on the common and constant activity level of a transcription factor (TF) on all of the genes in any given experimental condition, for example, any TF is assumed to be either an activato... View full abstract»

The subcellular locations of proteins are important functional annotations. An effective and reliable subcellular localization method is necessary for proteomics research. This paper introduces a new method - PairProSVM - to automatically predict the subcellular locations of proteins. The profiles of all protein sequences in the training set are constructed by PSI-BLAST, and the pairwise profile a... View full abstract»

A principal goal of microarray studies is to identify the genes showing differential expression under distinct conditions. In such studies, the selection of an optimal test statistic is a crucial challenge, which depends on the type and amount of data under analysis. Although previous studies on simulated or spike-in data sets do not provide practical guidance on how to choose the best method for ... View full abstract»

The trans-genomic query (TGQ) problem-enabling the free query of biological information, even across genomes-is a central challenge facing bioinformatics. Solutions to this problem can alter the nature of the field, moving it beyond the jungle of data integration and expanding the number and scope of questions that can be answered. An alignment table is a binary relationship on locations (sequence... View full abstract»

The aim of genetic mapping is to locate the loci responsible for specific traits such as complex diseases. These traits are normally caused by mutations at multiple loci of unknown locations and interactions. In this work, we model the biological system that relates DNA polymorphisms with complex traits as a linear mixing process. Given this model, we propose a new fine-scale genetic mapping metho... View full abstract»

Under a stochastic model of molecular sequence evolution the probability of each possible pattern of a characters is well defined. The Kimura's three-substitution-types (K3ST) model of evolution, allows analytical expression for these probabilities of by means of the Hadamard conjugation as a function of the phylogeny T and the substitution probabilities on each edge of TM . In this paper we produ... View full abstract»

Split networks are increasingly being used in phylogenetic analysis. Usually, a simple equal angle algorithm is used to draw such networks, producing layouts that leave much room for improvement. Addressing the problem of producing better layouts of split networks, this paper presents an algorithm for maximizing the area covered by the network, describes an extension of the equal-daylight algorith... View full abstract»