The ability of human nuclear DNA to cause false positive low-abundance heteroplasmy calls varies across the mitochondrial genome.

Background: Low-abundance mutations in mitochondrial populations (mutations with minor allele frequency ≤ 1%), are associated with cancer, aging, and neurodegenerative disorders. While recent progress in high-throughput sequencing technology has significantly improved the heteroplasmy identification process, the ability of this technology to detect low-abundance mutations can be affected by the presence of similar sequences originating from nuclear DNA (nDNA). To determine to what extent nDNA can cause false positive low-abundance heteroplasmy calls, we have identified mitochondrial locations of all subsequences that are common or similar (one mismatch allowed) between nDNA and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).

Using Mutual Information to Discover Temporal Patterns in Gene Expression Data.

Finding relations among gene expressions involves the definition of the similarity between experimental data. A simplest similarity measure is the Correlation Coefficient. It is able to identify linear dependences only; moreover, is sensitive to experimental errors.