A prospective evaluation of AI-augmented epidemiology to forecast COVID-19 in the USA and Japan.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the global need for reliable models of disease spread. We propose an AI-augmented forecast modeling framework that provides daily predictions of the expected number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths, cases, and hospitalizations during the following 4 weeks. We present an international, prospective evaluation of our models' performance across all states and counties in the USA and prefectures in Japan.

SAMSCOPE: an OpenGL-based real-time interactive scale-free SAM viewer.

Summary: Existing SAM visualization tools like 'samtools tview' (Li et al., 2009) are limited to a small region of the genome, and tools like Tablet (Milne et al., 2010) are limited to a relatively small number of reads and may fail outright on large datasets.

COPICAT: a software system for predicting interactions between proteins and chemical compounds.

Unlabelled: Since tens of millions of chemical compounds have been accumulated in public chemical databases, fast comprehensive computational methods to predict interactions between chemical compounds and proteins are needed for virtual screening of lead compounds. Previously, we proposed a novel method for predicting protein-chemical interactions using two-layer Support Vector Machine classifiers that require only readily available biochemical data, i.e.

Murasaki: a fast, parallelizable algorithm to find anchors from multiple genomes.

Background: With the number of available genome sequences increasing rapidly, the magnitude of sequence data required for multiple-genome analyses is a challenging problem. When large-scale rearrangements break the collinearity of gene orders among genomes, genome comparison algorithms must first identify sets of short well-conserved sequences present in each genome, termed anchors. Previously, anchor identification among multiple genomes has been achieved using pairwise alignment tools like BLASTZ through progressive alignment tools like TBA, but the computational requirements for sequence comparisons of multiple genomes quickly becomes a limiting factor as the number and scale of genomes grows.

Chickens possess centromeres with both extended tandem repeats and short non-tandem-repetitive sequences.

The centromere is essential for faithful chromosome segregation by providing the site for kinetochore assembly. Although the role of the centromere is conserved throughout evolution, the DNA sequences associated with centromere regions are highly divergent among species and it remains to be determined how centromere DNA directs kinetochore formation. Despite the active use of chicken DT40 cells in studies of chromosome segregation, the sequence of the chicken centromere was unclear.

Whole genome assembly of a natto production strain Bacillus subtilis natto from very short read data.

Background: Bacillus subtilis natto is closely related to the laboratory standard strain B. subtilis Marburg 168, and functions as a starter for the production of the traditional Japanese food "natto" made from soybeans. Although re-sequencing whole genomes of several laboratory domesticated B.

Accurate identification of orthologous segments among multiple genomes.

Motivation: The accurate detection of orthologous segments (also referred to as syntenic segments) plays a key role in comparative genomics, as it is useful for inferring genome rearrangement scenarios and computing whole-genome alignments. Although a number of algorithms for detecting orthologous segments have been proposed, none of them contain a framework for optimizing their parameter values.

Methods: In the present study, we propose an algorithm, named OSfinder (Orthologous Segment finder), which uses a novel scoring scheme based on stochastic models.

Stem kernels for RNA sequence analyses.

Several computational methods based on stochastic context-free grammars have been developed for modeling and analyzing functional RNA sequences. These grammatical methods have succeeded in modeling typical secondary structures of RNA, and are used for structural alignment of RNA sequences. However, such stochastic models cannot sufficiently discriminate member sequences of an RNA family from nonmembers and hence detect noncoding RNA regions from genome sequences.

[Development of a large-scale comparative genome system and its application to the analysis of mycobacteria genomes].

As the number of whole genome sequences available continues to increase rapidly, the raw scale of the sequence data being used in analysis is the first hurdle for comparative genome analysis. When performing whole genome alignments, large-scale rearrangements make it necessary to first find out roughly which short well-conserved segments correspond to what other segments (termed anchors). Successful results have been achieved by adapting tools like BLAT and BLASTZ on a problem-to-problem basis, but the work required to perform a single alignment is considerable.