A computational model for compressed sensing RNAi cellular screening

Compressed sensing methods for DNA microarrays, RNA interference, and metagenomics

Compressed sensing (CS) is a sparse signal sampling methodology for efficiently acquiring and reconstructing a signal from relatively few measurements. Recent work shows that CS is well-suited to be applied to problems in genomics, including probe design in microarrays, RNA interference (RNAi), and taxonomic assignment in metagenomics. The principle of using different CS recovery methods in these applications has thus been established, but a comprehensive study of using a wide range of CS methods has not been done. For each of these applications, we apply three hitherto unused CS methods, namely, l1-magic, CoSaMP, and l1-homotopy, in conjunction with CS measurement matrices such as randomly generated CS m matrix, Hamming matrix, and projective geometry-based matrix. We find that, in RNAi, the l1-magic (the standard package for l1 minimization) and l1-homotopy methods show significant reduction in reconstruction error compared to the baseline. In metagenomics, we find that l1-homotopy as well as CoSaMP estimate concentration with significantly reduced time when compared to the GPSR and WGSQuikr methods.

Size unbiased representative enzymatically generated RNAi (SURER) library and application for RNAi therapeutic screens

RNA interference (RNAi) libraries screens have become widely used for small RNA (sRNA) therapeutic targets development. However, conventional enzymatically libraries, typically prepared using the type 2 restriction enzyme MmeI, produce sRNAs between 18 and 20 bp, much shorter than the usual lengths of 19-23 bp. Here we develop a size unbiased representative enzymatically generated RNAi (SURER) library, which employs type 3 restriction modification enzyme EcoP15I to produce sRNAs ranging from 19 to 23 bp using a group of rationally designed linkers, which can completely mimic the length of sRNAs naturally generated by Dicer enzyme in living cells, and the screening results of SURER libraries showed high recombination rate and knockdown efficiency. SURER library provides a useful tool for RNAi therapeutics screening in a fast and simple way.