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Biomedical subjects

Jane Jijun Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Jane Jijun Liu.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

GO-Diff: mining functional differentiation between EST-based transcriptomes.

BACKGROUND: Large-scale sequencing efforts produced millions of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) collectively representing differentiated biochemical and functional states. Analysis of these EST libraries reveals differential gene expressions, and therefore EST data sets constitute valuable resources for comparative transcriptomics. To translate differentially expressed genes into a better understanding of the underlying biological phenomena, existing microarray analysis approaches usually involve the integration of gene expression with Gene Ontology (GO) databases to derive comparable functional profiles. However, methods are not available yet to process EST-derived transcription maps to enable GO-based global functional profiling for comparative transcriptomics in a high throughput manner. RESULTS: Here we present GO-Diff, a GO-based functional profiling approach towards high throughput EST-based gene expression analysis and comparative transcriptomics. Utilizing holistic gene expression information, the software converts EST frequencies into EST Coverage Ratios of GO Terms. The ratios are then tested for statistical significances to uncover differentially represented GO terms between the compared transcriptomes, and functional differences are thus inferred. We demonstrated the validity and the utility of this software by identifying differentially represented GO terms in three application cases: intra-species comparison; meta-analysis to test a specific hypothesis; inter-species comparison. GO-Diff findings were consistent with previous knowledge and provided new clues for further discoveries. A comprehensive test on the GO-Diff results using series of comparisons between EST libraries of human and mouse tissues showed acceptable levels of consistency: 61% for human-human; 69% for mouse-mouse; 47% for human-mouse. CONCLUSION: GO-Diff is the first software integrating EST profiles with GO knowledge databases to mine functional differentiation between biological systems, e.g. tissues of the same species or the same tissue cross species. With rapid accumulation of EST resources in the public domain and expanding sequencing effort in individual laboratories, GO-Diff is useful as a screening tool before undertaking serious expression studies.

Animals↗

Multiclass cancer classification and biomarker discovery using GA-based algorithms.

MOTIVATION: The development of microarray-based high-throughput gene profiling has led to the hope that this technology could provide an efficient and accurate means of diagnosing and classifying tumors, as well as predicting prognoses and effective treatments. However, the large amount of data generated by microarrays requires effective reduction of discriminant gene features into reliable sets of tumor biomarkers for such multiclass tumor discrimination. The availability of reliable sets of biomarkers, especially serum biomarkers, should have a major impact on our understanding and treatment of cancer. RESULTS: We have combined genetic algorithm (GA) and all paired (AP) support vector machine (SVM) methods for multiclass cancer categorization. Predictive features can be automatically determined through iterative GA/SVM, leading to very compact sets of non-redundant cancer-relevant genes with the best classification performance reported to date. Interestingly, these different classifier sets harbor only modest overlapping gene features but have similar levels of accuracy in leave-one-out cross-validations (LOOCV). Further characterization of these optimal tumor discriminant features, including the use of nearest shrunken centroids (NSC), analysis of annotations and literature text mining, reveals previously unappreciated tumor subclasses and a series of genes that could be used as cancer biomarkers. With this approach, we believe that microarray-based multiclass molecular analysis can be an effective tool for cancer biomarker discovery and subsequent molecular cancer diagnosis.

Algorithms↗

A comparative analysis of HGSC and Celera human genome assemblies and gene sets.

MOTIVATION: Since the simultaneous publication of the human genome assembly by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (HGSC) and Celera Genomics, several comparisons have been made of various aspects of these two assemblies. In this work, we set out to provide a more comprehensive comparative analysis of the two assemblies and their associated gene sets. RESULTS: The local sequence content for both draft genome assemblies has been similar since the early releases, however it took a year for the quality of the Celera assembly to approach that of HGSC, suggesting an advantage of HGSC's hierarchical shotgun (HS) sequencing strategy over Celera's whole genome shotgun (WGS) approach. While similar numbers of ab initio predicted genes can be derived from both assemblies, Celera's Otto approach consistently generated larger, more varied gene sets than the Ensembl gene build system. The presence of a non-overlapping gene set has persisted with successive data releases from both groups. Since most of the unique genes from either genome assembly could be mapped back to the other assembly, we conclude that the gene set discrepancies do not reflect differences in local sequence content but rather in the assemblies and especially the different gene-prediction methodologies.

Databases, Protein↗