Protein/peptide microarrays are rapidly gaining momentum in the diagnosis of cancer. High-density and high-throughput peptide arrays are being extensively used to detect tumor biomarkers, examine kinase activity, identify antibodies having low serum titers, and locate antibody signatures. Improving the yield of microarray fabrication involves solving a hard combinatorial optimization problem called the border length minimization problem (BLMP).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMinimotifs are short contiguous segments of proteins that have a known biological function. The hundreds of thousands of minimotifs discovered thus far are an important part of the theoretical understanding of the specificity of protein-protein interactions, posttranslational modifications, and signal transduction that occur in cells. However, a longstanding problem is that the different abstractions of the sequence definitions do not accurately capture the specificity, despite decades of effort by many labs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEfficient tile sets for self assembling rectilinear shapes is of critical importance in algorithmic self assembly. A lower bound on the tile complexity of any deterministic self assembly system for an × square is [Formula: see text] (inferred from the Kolmogrov complexity). Deterministic self assembly systems with an optimal tile complexity have been designed for squares and related shapes in the past.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Parallel Distrib Comput
November 2011
In this paper we present efficient algorithms for sorting on the Parallel Disks Model (PDM). Numerous asymptotically optimal algorithms have been proposed in the literature. However many of these merge based algorithms have large underlying constants in the time bounds, because they suffer from the lack of read parallelism on PDM.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Bioinformatics
October 2011
Background: Motifs are patterns found in biological sequences that are vital for understanding gene function, human disease, drug design, etc. They are helpful in finding transcriptional regulatory elements, transcription factor binding sites, and so on. As a result, the problem of identifying motifs is very crucial in biology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Assembling genomic sequences from a set of overlapping reads is one of the most fundamental problems in computational biology. Algorithms addressing the assembly problem fall into two broad categories - based on the data structures which they employ. The first class uses an overlap/string graph and the second type uses a de Bruijn graph.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtein-protein interactions are important to understanding cell functions; however, our theoretical understanding is limited. There is a general discontinuity between the well-accepted physical and chemical forces that drive protein-protein interactions and the large collections of identified protein-protein interactions in various databases. Minimotifs are short functional peptide sequences that provide a basis to bridge this gap in knowledge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiscrete Math Algorithms Appl
January 2010
Sequence assembly from short reads is an important problem in biology. It is known that solving the sequence assembly problem exactly on a bi-directed de Bruijn graph or a string graph is intractable. However, finding a shortest double stranded DNA string (SDDNA) containing all the -long words in the reads seems to be a good heuristic to get close to the original genome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF