Evaluating facilitators' challenges administering a program building on existing strengths in families facing difficulties.

The primary objective of this study was to understand the challenges faced by 12 facilitators (9 women and 3 men) of the Strengthening Families Program (SFP) implemented in the Adélard-Dugré and Jean-Nicolet neighbourhoods of Trois-Rivières, Quebec. This objective was operationalized as the following question: How did facilitators manage to buy in to, and align themselves with, program principles while avoiding an expert stance and remaining focused on participating families' strengths? This question has not been investigated before in connection with the SFP program. This study was conducted between 2011 and 2014, and relied on semi-annual group interviews.

Computational identification of RNA functional determinants by three-dimensional quantitative structure-activity relationships.

Anti-infection drugs target vital functions of infectious agents, including their ribosome and other essential non-coding RNAs. One of the reasons infectious agents become resistant to drugs is due to mutations that eliminate drug-binding affinity while maintaining vital elements. Identifying these elements is based on the determination of viable and lethal mutants and associated structures.

An efficient method for exploring the space of gene tree/species tree reconciliations in a probabilistic framework.

Background: Inferring an evolutionary scenario for a gene family is a fundamental problem with applications both in functional and evolutionary genomics. The gene tree/species tree reconciliation approach has been widely used to address this problem, but mostly in a discrete parsimony framework that aims at minimizing the number of gene duplications and/or gene losses. Recently, a probabilistic approach has been developed, based on the classical birth-and-death process, including efficient algorithms for computing posterior probabilities of reconciliations and orthology prediction.

Space of gene/species trees reconciliations and parsimonious models.

We describe algorithms to study the space of all possible reconciliations between a gene tree and a species tree, that is counting the size of this space, uniformly generate a random reconciliation, and exploring this space in optimal time using combinatorial operators. We also extend these algorithms for optimal and sub-optimal reconciliations according to the three usual combinatorial costs (duplication, loss, and mutation). Applying these algorithms to simulated and real gene family evolutionary scenarios, we observe that the LCA (Last Common Ancestor) based reconciliation is almost always identical to the real one.

Modeling RNA tertiary structure motifs by graph-grammars.

A new approach, graph-grammars, to encode RNA tertiary structure patterns is introduced and exemplified with the classical sarcin-ricin motif. The sarcin-ricin motif is found in the stem of the crucial ribosomal loop E (also referred to as the sarcin-ricin loop), which is sensitive to the alpha-sarcin and ricin toxins. Here, we generate a graph-grammar for the sarcin-ricin motif and apply it to derive putative sequences that would fold in this motif.