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SBC seminar series, 2013

Every second Tuesday, at 10:30.
Lunch room floor 2, Science for Life Laboratory, Tomtebodavägen 23A, Solna.
Please note: Time and location may vary; please check the information below

Seminars by external speakers are scheduled as long in advance as possible, while those by internal SBC speakers are only scheduled for two months ahead and are held according to a rolling schedule. If you want additional information about the SBC seminars by email, please join our mailing list seminars@sbc.su.se.


(List of previous seminars from 2013 is here).
Tuesday June 410:30 Satish NairStockholm University
Lunch room at Scilifelab, floor 2 Master thesis presentation
Abstract soon to come.
Tuesday June 4~11:00 Daniele RaimondiStockholm University
Lunch room at Scilifelab, floor 2 Master thesis presentation: Deep learning ensemble methodology for direct information contact prediction
Recently, several new contact prediction methods have been published. They use (i) large sets of multiple aligned sequences (ii) and assume that correlations between columns in these alignments can be the results of residue interactions and thus clues of residues spatial proximity in the native structure. These methods are clearly superior to earlier methods when it comes to predicting contacts in proteins. PconsC [2] has been developed by Marcin J. Skwark and combines predictions from two direct information methods, PSICOV [4] and plmDCA [3], and two alignment methods, HHblits and jackHmmer, at four different e-value thresholds, obtaining an improvement of the predictive performances with respect to the single methods on which it is based. The aim of this thesis project was to further improve the quality of these predictions.

To achieve this goal, I developed a Deep Learning architecture able of performing structured predictions, taking into consideration the significant amount of information underlying the contact prediction problem instead of simply considering each residue pair independent from the others (in [1] has been shown how contacts in the native structure can hardly involve a single pair of residues). I implemented a multilayer learner using Random Forest classiffers that improves contact predictions by being able to abstract some typical inter/multi residue relationships among neighbouring residue pairs, namely by learning how to recognize frequent visual patterns (mainly Secondary Structure features, such as alfa-helices and beta-sheets) in the contact maps. This abstraction ability can relocate the most uncertain predictions into the recognized patterns, reconstructing them and thus improving significantly the precision of the overall contact map.

This Deep Learning approach, along with some additional features (e.g. predicted Secondary Structure and predicted Relative Solvent Accessibility) can provide a further 20% improvement of PconsC predictive performances.

References
[1] Pietro Di Lena, Ken Nagata and Pierre Baldi, Deep architectures for protein contact map prediction Vol. 28 no. 19 2012, pages 2449 2457 BIOINFOR- MATICS doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bts475
[2] Marcin J. Skwark, Abbi Abdel-Rehim and Arne Elofsson, PconsC: Combi- nation of direct information methods and alignments improves contact pre- diction, Bioinformatics (2013) doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt259
[3] Ekeberg, M., Lovkvist, C., Lan, Y., Weigt, M., and Aurell, E. (2013). Im- proved contact prediction in proteins: Using pseudolikelihoods to infer Potts models, Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys, 87(1-1), 012707.
[4] Jones, D., Buchan, D., Cozzetto, D., and Pontil, M. (2012), PSICOV: pre- cise structural contact prediction using sparse inverse covariance estimation on large multiple sequence alignments, Bioinformatics, 28(2), 184 190.
Tuesday June 1110:30 Teepo NiinimäkiUniversity of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Lunch room at Scilifelab, floor 2
Abstract soon to come.
Tuesday September 310:30 Michael Y. GalperinNCBI, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
Lunch room at Scilifelab, floor 2 Genomic and biogeochemical clues to the origin of line
In the past, origin of life on Earth has been treated mostly as a philosophical problem with little connection to everyday biological research. Even after the possibility of abiotic origin of amino acids and nucleic acid bases had been demonstrated in 1953, there has been no agreement on the energy source(s) for the formation of increasingly complex biopolymers (redox or thermal gradients, UV, atmospheric electricity, etc.), the driving force(s) leading to the emergence of the first life forms (natural selection vs spontaneous self-organization), their properties (RNA-based vs metabolism-based, autotrophic vs heterotrophic, etc.), or place of origin (deep sea vs fresh water). The availability of genomic data for diverse bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, including various extremophiles, allowed us to take a new look at this problem. By identifying the common genome core of all (known) living organisms, and the shared properties of their cells, it has become possible to deduce simple and reasonable biogeochemical constraints on the conditions that led to the origin of life and to get an insight on where it has happened and how. In turn, these reconstructions lead to new questions that can now be addressed experimentally, bringing the whole enterprise into the realm of “normal” science. The most surprising result of these studies is the growing impression that the origin of life has been a natural consequence of the geochemical conditions that existed on the primordial Earth, rather than a one-time improbable accident.

Mulkidjanian AY and Galperin MY (2009) Biol Direct 4:27. PMID:19703275
Mulkidjanian AY et al. (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:E821. PMID: 22331915
Tuesday September 1010:30 Walter BasileStockholm University
Lunch room at Scilifelab, floor 2 Orphan genes
Title and abstract to come


Previous seminars at SBC: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Viktor Granholm

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