TOM: enhancement and extension of a tool suite for in silico approaches to multigenic hereditary disorders

The study of complex hereditary diseases is a very challenging area of research. The expanding set of in silico approaches offers a flourishing ground for the acceleration of meaningful findings in this area by exploitation of rich and diverse sources of omic data. These approaches are cheap, flexible, extensible, often complementary and can continuously integrate new information and tests to improve the selection of genes responsible for hereditary diseases.

LEARNING OVERLAPPING COMMUNITIES IN COMPLEX NETWORKS VIA NON-NEGATIVE MATRIX FACTORIZATION

Community structure is an important topological phenomenon typical of complex networks. Accurately unveiling communities is thus crucial to understand and capture the many-faceted nature of complex networks. Communities in real world frequently overlap, i.e. nodes can belong to more than one community. Therefore, quantitatively evaluating the extent to which a node belongs to a community is a key step to find overlapping boundaries between communities. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a technique that has been used to detect overlapping communities.

SPNConverter: a new link between static and dynamic complex network analysis

The signaling Petri net (SPN) simulator, designed to provide insights into the trends of molecules' activity levels in response to an external stimulus, contributes to the systems biology necessity of analyzing the dynamics of large-scale cellular networks. Implemented into the freely available software, BioLayout Express(3D), the simulator is publicly available and easy to use, provided the input files are prepared in the GraphML format, typically using the network editing software, yEd, and standards specific to the software.

A non standard finite difference model for a class of renewal equations in epidemiology

Mathematical models based on non-linear integral and integro-differential equations are gaining increasing attention in mathematical epidemiology due to their ability to incorporate the past infection dynamic into its current development. This property is particularly suitable to represent the evolution of diseases where the dependence of infectivity on the time since becoming infected plays a crucial role.

AMG Preconditioners based on Parallel Hybrid Coarsening and Multi-objective Graph Matching

We describe preliminary results from a multiobjective graph matching algorithm, in the coarsening step of an aggregation-based Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) preconditioner, for solving large and sparse linear systems of equations on highend parallel computers. We have two objectives. First, we wish to improve the convergence behavior of the AMG method when applied to highly anisotropic problems. Second, we wish to extend the parallel package PSCToolkit to exploit multi-threaded parallelism at the node level on multi-core processors.

Discovering coherent biclusters from gene expression data using zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams

The biclustering method can be a very useful analysis tool when some genes have multiple functions and experimental conditions are diverse in gene expression measurement. This is because the biclustering approach, in contrast to the conventional clustering techniques, focuses on finding a subset of the genes and a subset of the experimental conditions that together exhibit coherent behavior. However, the biclustering problem is inherently intractable, and it is often computationally costly to find biclusters with high levels of coherence.