A Fixed-Parameter Tractable Algorithm for Finding Agreement Cherry-Reduced Subnetworks in Level-1 Orchard Networks.

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The effective reproductive number: Modeling and prediction with application to the multi-wave Covid-19 pandemic.

Classical compartmental models of infectious disease assume that spread occurs through a homogeneous population. This produces poor fits to real data, because individuals vary in their number of epidemiologically-relevant contacts, and hence in their ability to transmit disease. In particular, network theory suggests that super-spreading events tend to happen more often at the beginning of an epidemic, which is inconsistent with the homogeneity assumption.

The Development of a Comprehensive Clinicopathologic Registry for Glomerular Diseases Using Natural Language Processing.

Background: Glomerulonephritis (GN) represents a common cause of chronic kidney disease, and treatment to slow or prevent progression of GN is associated with significant morbidity. Large patient registries have improved the understanding of risk stratification, treatment selection, and definitions of treatment response in GN, but can be resource-intensive, with incomplete patient capture.

Objective: To describe the creation of a comprehensive clinicopathologic registry for all patients undergoing kidney biopsy in Manitoba, using natural language processing software for data extraction from pathology reports, as well as to describe cohort characteristics and outcomes.

Human-supervised clustering of multidimensional data using crowdsourcing.

Clustering is a central task in many data analysis applications. However, there is no universally accepted metric to decide the occurrence of clusters. Ultimately, we have to resort to a consensus between experts.

Defining Phylogenetic Network Distances Using Cherry Operations.

In phylogenetic networks, picking a cherry consists of removing a leaf that shares a parent with another leaf, or removing a reticulate edge whose endpoints are parents of leaves. Cherry-picking operations were recently shown to have several structural and algorithmic applications in the study of networks, for instance in determining their reconstructibility or in solving the network hybridization and network containment problems. In particular, some networks within certain classes are isomorphic if they can be reduced to a single node by the same sequence of cherry-picking operations.

BOPAL 2.0 and a study of tRNA and rRNA gene evolution in .

We present BOPAL 2.0, an improved version of the BOPAL algorithm for the evolutionary history inference of tRNA and rRNA genes in bacterial genomes. Our approach can infer complete evolutionary scenarios and ancestral gene orders on a phylogeny and considers a wide range of events such as duplications, deletions, substitutions, inversions and transpositions.

Operon-based approach for the inference of rRNA and tRNA evolutionary histories in bacteria.

Background: In bacterial genomes, rRNA and tRNA genes are often organized into operons, i.e. segments of closely located genes that share a single promoter and are transcribed as a single unit.

Reconstruction of ancestral RNA sequences under multiple structural constraints.

Background: Secondary structures form the scaffold of multiple sequence alignment of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) families. An accurate reconstruction of ancestral ncRNAs must use this structural signal. However, the inference of ancestors of a single ncRNA family with a single consensus structure may bias the results towards sequences with high affinity to this structure, which are far from the true ancestors.

A graph-theoretic approach for inparalog detection.

Understanding the history of a gene family that evolves through duplication, speciation, and loss is a fundamental problem in comparative genomics. Features such as function, position, and structural similarity between genes are intimately connected to this history; relationships between genes such as orthology (genes related through a speciation event) or paralogy (genes related through a duplication event) are usually correlated with these features. For example, recent work has shown that in human and mouse there is a strong connection between function and inparalogs, the paralogs that were created since the speciation event separating the human and mouse lineages.

Evolution of orthologous tandemly arrayed gene clusters.

Background: Tandemly Arrayed Gene (TAG) clusters are groups of paralogous genes that are found adjacent on a chromosome. TAGs represent an important repertoire of genes in eukaryotes. In addition to tandem duplication events, TAG clusters are affected during their evolution by other mechanisms, such as inversion and deletion events, that affect the order and orientation of genes.

Genome halving and double distance with losses.

Given a phylogenetic tree involving whole genome duplication events, we contribute to solving the problem of computing the rearrangement and double cut-and-join (DCJ) distances on a branch of the tree linking a duplication node d to a speciation node or a leaf s. In the case of a genome G at s containing exactly two copies of each gene, the genome halving problem is to find a perfectly duplicated genome D at d minimizing the rearrangement distance with G. We generalize the existing exact linear-time algorithm for genome halving to the case of a genome G with missing gene copies.