BioTextQuest+: a knowledge integration platform for literature mining and concept discovery

in Bioinformatics (2014)

The iterative process of finding relevant information in biomedical literature and performing bioinformatics analyses might result in an endless loop for an inexperienced user, considering the exponential ... [more ▼]

The iterative process of finding relevant information in biomedical literature and performing bioinformatics analyses might result in an endless loop for an inexperienced user, considering the exponential growth of scientific corpora and the plethora of tools designed to mine PubMed® and related biological databases. Herein, we describe BioTextQuest+, a web-based interactive knowledge exploration platform with significant advances to its predecessor (BioTextQuest), aiming to bridge processes such as bioentity recognition, functional annotation, document clustering and data integration towards literature mining and concept discovery. BioTextQuest+ enables PubMed and OMIM querying, retrieval of abstracts related to a targeted request and optimal detection of genes, proteins, molecular functions, pathways and biological processes within the retrieved documents. The front-end interface facilitates the browsing of document clustering per subject, the analysis of term co-occurrence, the generation of tag clouds containing highly represented terms per cluster and at-a-glance popup windows with information about relevant genes and proteins. Moreover, to support experimental research, BioTextQuest+ addresses integration of its primary functionality with biological repositories and software tools able to deliver further bioinformatics services. The Google-like interface extends beyond simple use by offering a range of advanced parameterization for expert users. We demonstrate the functionality of BioTextQuest+ through several exemplary research scenarios including author disambiguation, functional term enrichment, knowledge acquisition and concept discovery linking major human diseases, such as obesity and ageing. [less ▲]

Caipirini: using gene sets to rank literature

in BioData Mining (2012), 5(1),

Background: Keeping up-to-date with bioscience literature is becoming increasingly challenging. Several recent methods help meet this challenge by allowing literature search to be launched based on lists ... [more ▼]

Background: Keeping up-to-date with bioscience literature is becoming increasingly challenging. Several recent methods help meet this challenge by allowing literature search to be launched based on lists of abstracts that the user judges to be ‘interesting’. Some methods go further by allowing the user to provide a second input set of ‘uninteresting’ abstracts; these two input sets are then used to search and rank literature by relevance. In this work we present the service ‘Caipirini’ (http:// caipirini.org) that also allows two input sets, but takes the novel approach of allowing ranking of literature based on one or more sets of genes. Results: To evaluate the usefulness of Caipirini, we used two test cases, one related to the human cell cycle, and a second related to disease defense mechanisms in Arabidopsis thaliana. In both cases, the new method achieved high precision in finding literature related to the biological mechanisms underlying the input data sets. Conclusions: To our knowledge Caipirini is the first service enabling literature search directly based on biological relevance to gene sets; thus, Caipirini gives the research community a new way to unlock hidden knowledge from gene sets derived via high-throughput experiments. [less ▲]

ReLiance: a machine learning and literature-based prioritization of receptor—ligand pairings.

in Bioinformatics (2012), 28(18), 569-574

Motivation: The prediction of receptor—ligand pairings is an important area of research as intercellular communications are mediated by the successful interaction of these key proteins. As the exhaustive ... [more ▼]

Motivation: The prediction of receptor—ligand pairings is an important area of research as intercellular communications are mediated by the successful interaction of these key proteins. As the exhaustive assaying of receptor—ligand pairs is impractical, a computational approach to predict pairings is necessary. We propose a workflow to carry out this interaction prediction task, using a text mining approach in conjunction with a state of the art prediction method, as well as a widely accessible and comprehensive dataset. Among several modern classifiers, random forests have been found to be the best at this prediction task. The training of this classifier was carried out using an experimentally validated dataset of Database of Ligand-Receptor Partners (DLRP) receptor—ligand pairs. New examples, co-cited with the training receptors and ligands, are then classified using the trained classifier. After applying our method, we find that we are able to successfully predict receptor—ligand pairs within the GPCR family with a balanced accuracy of 0.96. Upon further inspection, we find several supported interactions that were not present in the Database of Interacting Proteins (DIPdatabase). We have measured the balanced accuracy of our method resulting in high quality predictions stored in the available database ReLiance. Availability: http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/?bioiuser/ReLianceDB/ index.php Contact: yves.moreau@esat.kuleuven.be; ernesto.iacucci@gmail. com Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online [less ▲]

Medusa: A tool for exploring and clustering biological networks.

in BMC Research Notes (2011), 4(1), 384

Background: Biological processes such as metabolic pathways, gene regulation or protein-protein interactions are often represented as graphs in systems biology. The understanding of such networks, their ... [more ▼]

Background: Biological processes such as metabolic pathways, gene regulation or protein-protein interactions are often represented as graphs in systems biology. The understanding of such networks, their analysis, and their visualization are today important challenges in life sciences. While a great variety of visualization tools that try to address most of these challenges already exists, only few of them succeed to bridge the gap between visualization and network analysis. Findings: Medusa is a powerful tool for visualization and clustering analysis of large-scale biological networks. It is highly interactive and it supports weighted and unweighted multi-edged directed and undirected graphs. It combines a variety of layouts and clustering methods for comprehensive views and advanced data analysis. Its main purpose is to integrate visualization and analysis of heterogeneous data from different sources into a single network. Conclusions: Medusa provides a concise visual tool, which is helpful for network analysis and interpretation. Medusa is offered both as a standalone application and as an applet written in Java. It can be found at: https:// sites.google.com/site/medusa3visualization. [less ▲]

GPCRs, G-proteins, Effectors and their interactions: Human-gpDB, a database employing advanced visualization tools and data integration techniques

in Database: the Journal of Biological Databases and Curation (2010)

G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are a major family of membrane receptors in eukaryotic cells. They play a crucial role in the communication of a cell with the environment. Ligands bind to GPCRs on the ... [more ▼]

G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are a major family of membrane receptors in eukaryotic cells. They play a crucial role in the communication of a cell with the environment. Ligands bind to GPCRs on the outside of the cell, activating them by causing a conformational change, and allowing them to bind to G-proteins. Through their interaction with G-proteins, several effector molecules are activated leading to many kinds of cellular and physiological responses. The great importance of GPCRs and their corresponding signal transduction pathways is indicated by the fact that they take part in many diverse disease processes and that a large part of efforts towards drug development today is focused on them. We present Human-gpDB, a database which currently holds information about 713 human GPCRs, 36 human G-proteins and 99 human effectors. The collection of information about the interactions between these molecules was done manually and the current version of Human-gpDB holds information for about 1663 connections between GPCRs and G-proteins and 1618 connections between G-proteins and effectors. Major advantages of Human-gpDB are the integration of several external data sources and the support of advanced visualization techniques. Human-gpDB is a simple, yet a powerful tool for researchers in the life sciences field as it integrates an up-to-date, carefully curated collection of human GPCRs, G-proteins, effectors and their interactions. The database may be a reference guide for medical and pharmaceutical research, especially in the areas of understanding human diseases and chemical and drug discovery. [less ▲]

A reference guide for tree analysis and visualization

in BioData Mining (2010), 3(1), 1

The quantities of data obtained by the new high-throughput technologies, such as microarrays or ChIP-Chip arrays, and the large-scale OMICS-approaches, such as genomics, proteomics and transcriptomics ... [more ▼]

The quantities of data obtained by the new high-throughput technologies, such as microarrays or ChIP-Chip arrays, and the large-scale OMICS-approaches, such as genomics, proteomics and transcriptomics, are becoming vast. Sequencing technologies become cheaper and easier to use and, thus, large-scale evolutionary studies towards the origins of life for all species and their evolution becomes more and more challenging. Databases holding information about how data are related and how they are hierarchically organized expand rapidly. Clustering analysis is becoming more and more difficult to be applied on very large amounts of data since the results of these algorithms cannot be efficiently visualized. Most of the available visualization tools that are able to represent such hierarchies, project data in 2D and are lacking often the necessary user friendliness and interactivity. For example, the current phylogenetic tree visualization tools are not able to display easy to understand large scale trees with more than a few thousand nodes. In this study, we review tools that are currently available for the visualization of biological trees and analysis, mainly developed during the last decade. We describe the uniform and standard computer readable formats to represent tree hierarchies and we comment on the functionality and the limitations of these tools. We also discuss on how these tools can be developed further and should become integrated with various data sources. Here we focus on freely available software that offers to the users various tree-representation methodologies for biological data analysis. [less ▲]

OnTheFly: a tool for automated document-based text annotation, data linking and network generation

in Bioinformatics (2009), 25(7), 977-978

OnTheFly is a web-based application that applies biological named entity recognition to enrich Microsoft Office, PDF and plain text documents. The input files are converted into the HTML format and then ... [more ▼]

OnTheFly is a web-based application that applies biological named entity recognition to enrich Microsoft Office, PDF and plain text documents. The input files are converted into the HTML format and then sent to the Reflect tagging server, which highlights biological entity names like genes, proteins and chemicals, and attaches to them JavaScript code to invoke a summary pop-up window. The window provides an overview of relevant information about the entity, such as a protein description, the domain composition, a link to the 3D structure and links to other relevant online resources. OnTheFly is also able to extract the bioentities mentioned in a set of files and to produce a graphical representation of the networks of the known and predicted associations of these entities by retrieving the information from the STITCH database. [less ▲]

GIBA: a clustering tool for detecting protein complexes

in BMC Bioinformatics (2009), 10

Background: During the last years, high throughput experimental methods have been developed which generate large datasets of protein - protein interactions (PPIs). However, due to the experimental ... [more ▼]

Background: During the last years, high throughput experimental methods have been developed which generate large datasets of protein - protein interactions (PPIs). However, due to the experimental methodologies these datasets contain errors mainly in terms of false positive data sets and reducing therefore the quality of any derived information. Typically these datasets can be modeled as graphs, where vertices represent proteins and edges the pairwise PPIs, making it easy to apply automated clustering methods to detect protein complexes or other biological significant functional groupings. Methods: In this paper, a clustering tool, called GIBA (named by the first characters of its developers' nicknames), is presented. GIBA implements a two step procedure to a given dataset of protein-protein interaction data. First, a clustering algorithm is applied to the interaction data, which is then followed by a filtering step to generate the final candidate list of predicted complexes. Results: The efficiency of GIBA is demonstrated through the analysis of 6 different yeast protein interaction datasets in comparison to four other available algorithms. We compared the results of the different methods by applying five different performance measurement metrices. Moreover, the parameters of the methods that constitute the filter have been checked on how they affect the final results. Conclusion: GIBA is an effective and easy to use tool for the detection of protein complexes out of experimentally measured protein - protein interaction networks. The results show that GIBA has superior prediction accuracy than previously published methods. [less ▲]

Arena3D: visualization of biological networks in 3D

in BMC Systems Biology (2008), 2

Background: Complexity is a key problem when visualizing biological networks; as the number of entities increases, most graphical views become incomprehensible. Our goal is to enable many thousands of ... [more ▼]

Background: Complexity is a key problem when visualizing biological networks; as the number of entities increases, most graphical views become incomprehensible. Our goal is to enable many thousands of entities to be visualized meaningfully and with high performance. Results: We present a new visualization tool, Arena3D, which introduces a new concept of staggered layers in 3D space. Related data - such as proteins, chemicals, or pathways - can be grouped onto separate layers and arranged via layout algorithms, such as Fruchterman-Reingold, distance geometry, and a novel hierarchical layout. Data on a layer can be clustered via k-means, affinity propagation, Markov clustering, neighbor joining, tree clustering, or UPGMA ('unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic mean'). A simple input format defines the name and URL for each node, and defines connections or similarity scores between pairs of nodes. The use of Arena3D is illustrated with datasets related to Huntington's disease. Conclusion: Arena3D is a user friendly visualization tool that is able to visualize biological or any other network in 3D space. It is free for academic use and runs on any platform. It can be downloaded or lunched directly from http://arena3d.org. Java3D library and Java 1.5 need to be pre-installed for the software to run. [less ▲]