Publications by authors named "Pi-Jing Wei"

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are crucial for understanding organismal molecular mechanisms and processes. Construction of GRN in the epithelioma papulosum cyprini (EPC) cells of cyprinid fish by spring viremia of carp virus (SVCV) infection helps understand the immune regulatory mechanisms that enhance the survival capabilities of cyprinid fish. Although many computational methods have been used to infer GRNs, specialized approaches for predicting the GRN of EPC cells following SVCV infection are lacking.

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Inferring gene regulatory network (GRN) is one of the important challenges in systems biology, and many outstanding computational methods have been proposed; however there remains some challenges especially in real datasets. In this study, we propose Directed Graph Convolutional neural network-based method for GRN inference (DGCGRN). To better understand and process the directed graph structure data of GRN, a directed graph convolutional neural network is conducted which retains the structural information of the directed graph while also making full use of neighbor node features.

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The inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression profiles has been a key issue in systems biology, prompting many researchers to develop diverse computational methods. However, most of these methods do not reconstruct directed GRNs with regulatory types because of the lack of benchmark datasets or defects in the computational methods. Here, we collect benchmark datasets and propose a deep learning-based model, DeepFGRN, for reconstructing fine gene regulatory networks (FGRNs) with both regulation types and directions.

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Cancer is a complex and evolutionary disease mainly driven by the accumulation of genetic variations in genes. Identifying cancer driver genes is important. However, most related studies have focused on the population level.

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Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) participate in many biological processes, and reconstructing them plays an important role in systems biology. Although many advanced methods have been proposed for GRN reconstruction, their predictive performance is far from the ideal standard, so it is urgent to design a more effective method to reconstruct GRN. Moreover, most methods only consider the gene expression data, ignoring the network structure information contained in GRN.

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A large amount of evidence shows that biomarkers are discriminant features related to disease development. Thus, the identification of disease biomarkers has become a basic problem in the analysis of complex diseases in the medical fields, such as disease stage judgment, disease diagnosis and treatment. Research based on networks have become one of the most popular methods.

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Background And Objective: The promoter is a fragment of DNA and a specific sequence with transcriptional regulation function in DNA. Promoters are located upstream at the transcription start site, which is used to initiate downstream gene expression. So far, promoter identification is mainly achieved by biological methods, which often require more effort.

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Promoter is a key DNA element located near the transcription start site, which regulates gene transcription by binding RNA polymerase. Thus, the identification of promoters is an important research field in synthetic biology. Nannochloropsis is an important unicellular industrial oleaginous microalgae, and at present, some studies have identified some promoters with specific functions by biological methods in Nannochloropsis, whereas few studies used computational methods.

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Background: As one of the deadliest diseases in the world, cancer is driven by a few somatic mutations that disrupt the normal growth of cells, and leads to abnormal proliferation and tumor development. The vast majority of somatic mutations did not affect the occurrence and development of cancer; thus, identifying the mutations responsible for tumor occurrence and development is one of the main targets of current cancer treatments.

Results: To effectively identify driver genes, we adopted a semi-local centrality measure and gene mutation effect function to assess the effect of gene mutations on changes in gene expression patterns.

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Background: Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a class of single-stranded RNA molecules with a closed-loop structure. A growing body of research has shown that circRNAs are closely related to the development of diseases. Because biological experiments to verify circRNA-disease associations are time-consuming and wasteful of resources, it is necessary to propose a reliable computational method to predict the potential candidate circRNA-disease associations for biological experiments to make them more efficient.

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Identifying driver genes that contribute to cancer progression from numerous passenger genes, although a central goal, is a major challenge. The protein-protein interaction network provides convenient and reasonable assistance for driver gene discovery. Random walk-based methods have been widely used to prioritize nodes in social or biological networks.

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Background: Although there are huge volumes of genomic data, how to decipher them and identify driver events is still a challenge. The current methods based on network typically use the relationship between genomic events and consequent changes in gene expression to nominate putative driver genes. But there may exist some relationships within the transcriptional network.

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Complex diseases are known to be associated with disease genes. Uncovering disease-gene associations is critical for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases. Computational algorithms which effectively predict candidate disease-gene associations prior to experimental proof can greatly reduce the associated cost and time.

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Background: Cancer is a complex disease which is characterized by the accumulation of genetic alterations during the patient's lifetime. With the development of the next-generation sequencing technology, multiple omics data, such as cancer genomic, epigenomic and transcriptomic data etc., can be measured from each individual.

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Aim: To study the stereoselectivity of satropane (3-paramethylbenzene sulfonyloxy-6-acetoxy tropane), a novel tropane analog, on iris muscarinic receptor activation and intraocular hypotension.

Methods: The assays for radioligand-receptor binding, the contractile responses of isolated iris muscle, the miosis response, and the intraocular hypotension of the enantiomers of satropane were investigated.

Results: In the binding analysis, S(-)satropane (lesatropane) completely competed against the [3H]quinuclydinyl benzilate-labeled ligand at muscarinic receptors in the iris muscle, whereas R(+)satropane failed to completely compete.

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