Publications by authors named "Duncan P Brown"

Article Synopsis
  • Rapid increases in e-cigarette use have raised concerns about their potential abuse and harmful effects, prompting a need for effective monitoring systems.
  • An ideal surveillance system should gather real-time data, target specific populations, account for those who can't take surveys, and include geo-location capabilities.
  • The study explored using text classification on Tweets to detect e-cigarette use and found strong performance from advanced classifiers, paving the way for improved monitoring approaches.
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Motivation: Automatic clustering of protein sequences is an important problem in computational biology. The recent explosion in genome sequences has given biological researchers a vast number of novel protein sequences. However, the majority of these sequences have no experimental evidence for their molecular function in the cell, and the responsibility for correctly annotating these sequences falls upon the bioinformatics community.

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Function prediction by homology is widely used to provide preliminary functional annotations for genes for which experimental evidence of function is unavailable or limited. This approach has been shown to be prone to systematic error, including percolation of annotation errors through sequence databases. Phylogenomic analysis avoids these errors in function prediction but has been difficult to automate for high-throughput application.

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The Berkeley Phylogenomics Group presents PhyloFacts, a structural phylogenomic encyclopedia containing almost 10,000 'books' for protein families and domains, with pre-calculated structural, functional and evolutionary analyses. PhyloFacts enables biologists to avoid the systematic errors associated with function prediction by homology through the integration of a variety of experimental data and bioinformatics methods in an evolutionary framework. Users can submit sequences for classification to families and functional subfamilies.

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