Adapting functional genomic tools to metagenomic analyses: investigating the role of gut bacteria in relation to obesity

With the expanding availability of sequencing technologies, research previously centered on the human genome can now afford to include the study of humans' internal ecosystem (human microbiome). Given the scale of the data involved in this metagenomic research (two orders of magnitude larger than the human genome) and their importance in relation to human health, it is crucial to guarantee (along with the appropriate data collection and taxonomy) proper tools for data analysis.

Partitioning networks into communities by message passing

Community structures are found to exist ubiquitously in a number of systems conveniently represented as complex networks. Partitioning networks into communities is thus important and crucial to both capture and simplify these systems' complexity. The prevalent and standard approach to meet this goal is related to the maximization of a quality function, modularity, which measures the goodness of a partition of a network into communities. However, it has recently been found that modularity maximization suffers from a resolution limit, which prevents its effectiveness and range of applications.

Mining Gene Sets for Measuring Similarities

In recent years, the development of high throughput devices for the massive parallel analyses of genomic data has lead to the generation of large amount of new biological evidences and has triggered the proliferation of data mining algorithms for the extraction of meaningful information. Microarrays for gene expression analyses are part of this revolution and provide important insight in molecular biology often in the form of coherent sets of genes representing previously uncharacterized processes.

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.

Enhanced pClustering and its applications to gene expression data

Clustering has been one of the most popular methods to discover useful biological insights from DNA microarray. An interesting paradigm is simultaneous clustering of both genes and experiments. This "biclustering "paradigm aims at discovering clusters that consist of a subset of the genes showing a coherent expression pattern over a subset of conditions. The pClustering approach is a technique that belongs to this paradigm. Despite many theoretical advantages, this technique has been rarely applied to actual gene expression data analysis.

TOM: a web-based integrated approach for identification of candidate disease genes

The massive production of biological data by means of highly parallel devices like microarrays for gene expression has paved the way to new possible approaches in molecular genetics. Among them the possibility of inferring biological answers by querying large amounts of expression data. Based on this principle, we present here TOM, a web-based resource for the efficient extraction of candidate genes for hereditary diseases. The service requires the previous knowledge of at least another gene responsible for the disease and the linkage area, or else of two disease associated genetic intervals.

PRISMA L1 and L2 Performances within the PRISCAV Project: The Pignola Test Site in Southern Italy

In March 2019, the PRISMA (PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa) hyper-spectral satellite was launched by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and it is currently operational on a global basis. The mission includes the hyperspectral imager PRISMA working in the 400-2500 nm spectral range with 237 bands and a panchromatic (PAN) camera (400-750 nm). This paper presents an evaluation of the PRISMA top-of-atmosphere (TOA) L1 products using different in situ measurements acquired over a fragmented rural area in Southern Italy (Pignola) between October 2019 and July 2021.