Fast algorithms for computing sequence distances by exhaustive substring composition

A Novel Approach to Clustering Genome Sequences Using Inter-nucleotide Covariance

Classification of DNA sequences is an important issue in the bioinformatics study, yet most existing methods for phylogenetic analysis including Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) are time-consuming and computationally expensive. The alignment-free methods are popular nowadays, whereas the manual intervention in those methods usually decreases the accuracy. Also, the interactions among nucleotides are neglected in most methods. Here we propose a new Accumulated Natural Vector (ANV) method which represents each DNA sequence by a point in ℝ¹⁸. By calculating the Accumulated Indicator Functions of nucleotides, we can further find an Accumulated Natural Vector for each sequence. This new Accumulated Natural Vector not only can capture the distribution of each nucleotide, but also provide the covariance among nucleotides. Thus global comparison of DNA sequences or genomes can be done easily in ℝ¹⁸. The tests of ANV of datasets of different sizes and types have proved the accuracy and time-efficiency of the new proposed ANV method.

Classification of various genomic sequences based on distribution of repeated k-word

In order to extract phylogenetic information from DNA sequences, alignment-free methods and alignment-based methods are used. Alignment-based methods have high complexity and conventional alignment-free methods have low accuracy. In this paper, a new alignment-free method based on the distribution of repeated k-word measure is proposed. This novel measure is based on k-words and its multiple repeated words. We can get higher performance than conventional word count methods in case of using proposed scheme while maintaining total time complexity. The proposed measure shows better performance compared to conventional alignment-free methods with respect to RF distance.

MissMax: alignment-free sequence comparison with mismatches through filtering and heuristics

Background

Measuring sequence similarity is central for many problems in bioinformatics. In several contexts alignment-free techniques based on exact occurrences of substrings are faster, but also less accurate, than alignment-based approaches. Recently, several studies attempted to bridge the accuracy gap with the introduction of approximate matches in the definition of composition-based similarity measures.

Results

In this work we present MissMax, an exact algorithm for the computation of the longest common substring with mismatches between each suffix of a sequence x and a sequence y. This collection of statistics is useful for the computation of two similarity measures: the longest and the average common substring with k mismatches. As a further contribution we provide a “relaxed” version of MissMax that does not guarantee the exact solution, but it is faster in practice and still very precise.

Prediction of high-risk types of human papillomaviruses using statistical model of protein "sequence space"

Discrimination of high-risk types of human papillomaviruses plays an important role in the diagnosis and remedy of cervical cancer. Recently, several computational methods have been proposed based on protein sequence-based and structure-based information, but the information of their related proteins has not been used until now. In this paper, we proposed using protein “sequence space” to explore this information and used it to predict high-risk types of HPVs. The proposed method was tested on 68 samples with known HPV types and 4 samples without HPV types and further compared with the available approaches. The results show that the proposed method achieved the best performance among all the evaluated methods with accuracy 95.59% and F1-score 90.91%, which indicates that protein “sequence space” could potentially be used to improve prediction of high-risk types of HPVs.

Applications of alignment-free methods in epigenomics

Epigenetic mechanisms play an important role in the regulation of cell type-specific gene activities, yet how epigenetic patterns are established and maintained remains poorly understood. Recent studies have supported a role of DNA sequences in recruitment of epigenetic regulators. Alignment-free methods have been applied to identify distinct sequence features that are associated with epigenetic patterns and to predict epigenomic profiles. Here, we review recent advances in such applications, including the methods to map DNA sequence to feature space, sequence comparison and prediction models. Computational studies using these methods have provided important insights into the epigenetic regulatory mechanisms.

Study of LZ-word distribution and its application for sequence comparison

Lempel-Ziv complexity has been widely used for sequence comparison and achieved promising results, but until now components' distribution in exhaustive history has not been studied. This paper investigated the whole distribution of LZ-words and presented a novel statistical method for sequence comparison. With the components' length in mind, we revised Lempel-Ziv complexity and obtained various sets of LZ-words. Instead of calculating the LZ-words' contents, we defined a series of set operations on LZ-word set to compare biological sequences. In order to assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, we performed two sets of experiments and compared it with alignment-based methods.

Integrating overlapping structures and background information of words significantly improves biological sequence comparison

Word-based models have achieved promising results in sequence comparison. However, as the important statistical properties of words in biological sequence, how to use the overlapping structures and background information of the words to improve sequence comparison is still a problem. This paper proposed a new statistical method that integrates the overlapping structures and the background information of the words in biological sequences. To assess the effectiveness of this integration for sequence comparison, two sets of evaluation experiments were taken to test the proposed model. The first one, performed via receiver operating curve analysis, is the application of proposed method in discrimination between functionally related regulatory sequences and unrelated sequences, intron and exon. The second experiment is to evaluate the performance of the proposed method with f-measure for clustering Hepatitis E virus genotypes. It was demonstrated that the proposed method integrating the overlapping structures and the background information of words significantly improves biological sequence comparison and outperforms the existing models.

An efficient algorithm for systematic analysis of nucleotide strings suitable for siRNA design

BACKGROUND

The "off-target" silencing effect hinders the development of siRNA-based therapeutic and research applications. Existing solutions for finding possible locations of siRNA seats within a large database of genes are either too slow, miss a portion of the targets, or are simply not designed to handle a very large number of queries. We propose a new approach that reduces the computational time as compared to existing techniques.

FINDINGS

The proposed method employs tree-based storage in a form of a modified truncated suffix tree to sort all possible short string substrings within given set of strings (i.e. transcriptome). Using the new algorithm, we pre-computed a list of the best siRNA locations within each human gene ("siRNA seats"). siRNAs designed to reside within siRNA seats are less likely to hybridize off-target. These siRNA seats could be used as an input for the traditional "set-of-rules" type of siRNA designing software. The list of siRNA seats is available through a publicly available database located at http://web.cos.gmu.edu/~gmanyam/siRNA_db/search.php

CONCLUSIONS

In attempt to perform top-down prediction of the human siRNA with minimized off-target hybridization, we developed an efficient algorithm that employs suffix tree based storage of the substrings. Applications of this approach are not limited to optimal siRNA design, but can also be useful for other tasks involving selection of the characteristic strings specific to individual genes. These strings could then be used as siRNA seats, as specific probes for gene expression studies by oligonucleotide-based microarrays, for the design of molecular beacon probes for Real-Time PCR and, generally, any type of PCR primers.

Numerical characteristics of word frequencies and their application to dissimilarity measure for sequence comparison

Sequence comparison is one of the major tasks in bioinformatics, which can be used to study structural and functional conservation, as well as evolutionary relations among the sequences. Numerous dissimilarity measures achieve promising results in sequence comparison, but challenges remain. This paper studied numerical characteristics of word frequencies and proposed a novel dissimilarity measure for sequence comparison. Instead of using the word frequencies directly, the proposed measure considers both the word frequencies and overlapping structures of words. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed measure, we tested it with two experiments and further compared it with alignment-based and alignment-free measures. The results demonstrate that the proposed measure extracting more information on the overlapping structures of the words improves the efficiency of sequence comparison.

The subsequence composition of polypeptides

The quantitative underpinning of the information content of biosequences represents an elusive goal and yet also an obvious prerequisite to the quantitative modeling and study of biological function and evolution. Several past studies have addressed the question of what distinguishes biosequences from random strings, the latter being clearly unpalatable to the living cell. Such studies typically analyze the organization of biosequences in terms of their constituent characters or substrings and have, in particular, consistently exposed a tenacious lack of compressibility on behalf of biosequences. This article attempts, perhaps for the first time, an assessement of the structure and randomness of polypeptides in terms on newly introduced parameters that relate to the vocabulary of their (suitably constrained) subsequences rather than their substrings. It is shown that such parameters grasp structural/functional information, and are related to each other under a specific set of rules that span biochemically diverse polypeptides. Measures on subsequences separate few amino acid strings from their random permutations, but show that the random permutations of most polypeptides amass along specific linear loci.