International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design

The human evolution and cancer evolution have been researched for several years, but little is known about the molecular similarities between human and cancer evolution. One interesting and important question when comparing and analyzing human evolution and cancer evolution is whether cancer susceptibility is related to human evolution. There are a few microarray studies on human evolution or cancer development. Yet, to date, no microarray studies have been performed with both. Since cancer is an evolution on a small time and space scale, we compared and analyzed liver gene expression data among orangutan, chimpanzee, human, nontumor tissue, and primary cancer using linear mixed model, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Gene Ontology (GO), and Human Evolution Based Cancer Gene Expression Analysis...

Discovering patterns in time-course genomic data can provide insights on the dynamics of biological systems in health and disease. Here, we present a Platform for Analysis of Time-course High-dimensional data (PATH) with applications in genomics research. This web application provides a user-friendly interface with interactive data visualisation, dimension reduction, pattern discovery, and feature selection based on the principal trend analysis (PTA). Furthermore, the web application enables interactive and integrative analysis of time-course high-dimensional data based on the Joint PTA...

Gene dynamic analysis is essential in identifying target genes involved pathogenesis of various diseases, including cancer. Cancer prognosis is often influenced by hypoxia. We apply a multi-step pipeline to study dynamic gene expressions in response to hypoxia in three cancer cell lines: prostate (DU145), colon (HT29), and breast (MCF7) cancers. We identified 26 distinct temporal expression patterns for prostate cell line, and 29 patterns for colon and breast cell lines. The module-based dynamic networks have been developed for all three cell lines...

Background: Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of brain dementia characterized by gradual loss of memory followed by further deterioration of other cognitive function. Large-scale genome-wide association studies have identified and validated more than 20 AD risk genes. However, how these genes are related to the brain-wide breakdown of structural connectivity in AD patients remains unknown. Methods: We used the genotype and DTI data in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database...

Reactivation of latently infected cells has emerged as an important strategy for eradication of HIV. However, genetic mechanisms of regulation after reactivation remain unclear. We describe a five-step pipeline to study the dynamics of the gene regulatory network following a viral reactivation using high-dimensional ordinary differential equations. Our pipeline implements a combination of five different methods, by detecting temporally differentially expressed genes (step 1), clustering genes with similar temporal expression patterns into a small number of response modules (step2), performing a functional enrichment analysis within each gene response module (step 3), identifying a network structure based on the gene response modules using ordinary differential equations (ODE) and a high-dimensional variable selection technique (step 4), and obtaining a gene regulatory model based on refined parameter estimates using nonlinear least squares (step 5)...

Hydrogen/deuterium exchange detected by mass spectrometry (HDXMS) provides valuable information on protein structure and dynamics. Although HDX-MS data is often interpreted using crystal structures, it was suggested that conformational ensembles produced by molecular dynamics simulations yield more accurate interpretations. In this paper, we analyse the complement protein C3d by performing an HDX-MS experiment, and evaluate several interpretation methodologies using an existing prediction model to derive HDX-MS data from protein structure...

The TCF7L2 transcription factor (TF) is a member of Wnt signalling pathway, and may influence transcription of several genes by binding to distinct regulatory regions. Genome-wide studies have identified thousands of TCF7L2 binding sites and have revealed some associated TF partners. However, there is still a large uncharted region in the hierarchical regulatory network for TCF7L2 and the partner TFs in MCF7 cells. We analysed ChIP-seq data by searching for motifs in the enriched peak region based on TF-specific position weight matrix (PWM)...

Three-dimensional (3D) high resolution microscopic images have high potential for improving the understanding of both normal and disease processes where structural changes or spatial relationship of disease features are significant. In this paper, we develop a complete framework applicable to 3D pathology analytical imaging, with an application to whole slide images of sequential liver slices for 3D vessel structure analysis. The analysis workflow consists of image registration, segmentation, vessel cross-section association, interpolation, and volumetric rendering...

LXR (encoded by NR1H2 and 3) and FXR (known as bile acid receptor) encoded by NR1H4 (nuclear receptor subfamily 1, group H and member 4) are nuclear receptors in humans and are important regulators of bile acid production, cholesterol, fatty acid and glucose homeostasis hence responsible for liver detoxification. Several strategies for drug design with numerous ligands for this target have failed owing to the inability of the ligand to access the target/receptor or their early metabolisation. In this work, we have evaluated FXR and LXR structure bound with agonist and compared the binding energy affinity of active ligands present in live green-real veggies with reference drugs (ligands) present in the market...

Vibrio cholera, a gram-negative bacterium, has been categorised into clinical and environmental species. Phylogenetic studies have been performed to investigate the relationships of the V. cholerae populations in worldwide. In this study, phylogenetic relationship between V. cholerae isolates from Iran and other regions of the world was determined, based on three housekeeping genes analysis. Results for Iranian strains showed that congruency of asd and hlyA phylogenetic trees were remarkably higher than recA tree...

Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) is involved in triggering migraine. Many strategies for antimigraine drug designing have been employed using various CGRP antagonist/ligands but most of them have failed due to their inability to reach target CGRP receptor as they get metabolised before conferring their pharmacological action and they are also toxic to the liver. In the present study, we evaluated the binding of our active ligands present in real veggies with the CGRP receptor crystal structure and compared their binding energy and affinity with other reference anti-migraine drugs/ligands present in the market...

Machine learning techniques have been widely used in drug discovery and development in the areas of cheminformatics. Aspartyl aminopeptidase (M18AAP) of Plasmodium falciparum is crucial for survival of malaria parasite. We have created predictive models using weka and evaluated their performance based on various statistical parameters. Random Forest based model was found to be the most specificity (97.94%), with best accuracy (97.3%), MCC (0.306) as well as ROC (86.1%). The accuracy and MCC of these models indicated that they could be used to classify huge dataset of unknown compounds to predict their antimalarial compounds to develop effective drugs...

Natural flavonoid derivatives against cancer for selective KB cell lines (oral human epidermoid carcinoma) are analysed to determine the relationship between biological activities and structural properties of these molecules. Molecular alignment was performed for 88 natural flavonoid derivatives; out of these 88 molecules, 69 molecules were taken into training set and rest of the 19 molecules were used in test set prediction. We describe our elucidation of their structure activity relation (SAR) using three-dimensional quantitative structure activity relationship (3D-QSAR) models...

The main goal of this study is to understand the molecular-level interactions of neuraminidase inhibitor. The molecular docking, molecular dynamics and binding energy calculation analyses were carried out and the results revealed that the 150-cavitiy in the active site may play an important role in binding of drugs. Free energy calculations revealed that electrostatic interaction is more favourable for Oseltamivir interaction with H1N1 and van der Waals interaction is more favourable for H5N1, whereas Zanamivir favours the electrostatic interaction in both the strains (H1N1 and H5N1)...

Transcription factors (TFs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), the two main gene regulators in the biological system, control the gene expression at the transcriptional and post-transcriptional level, respectively. However, little is known regarding whether the miRNATF co-regulatory mechanisms, predicted by several studies, truly reflect the molecular interactions in cellular systems. To tackle this important issue, we developed an integrative framework by utilising four independent miRNA and matched mRNA expression profiling datasets to identify reproducible regulations, and demonstrated this approach in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)...

The heat shock response is a general mechanism by which organisms deal with physical insults such as sudden changes in temperature, osmotic and oxidative stresses, and exposure to toxic substances. Plasmodium falciparum is exposed to drastic temperature changes as a part of its life cycle and maintains an extensive repertoire of heat shock response-related proteins. As these proteins serve to maintain the parasite in the face of anti-malarial drugs as well, better understanding of the heat shock-related systems in the malaria parasite will lead to therapeutic approaches that frustrate these systems, leading to more effective use of anti-malarials...

Availability of complete human genome is a crucial factor for genetic studies to explore possible association between the genome and complex diseases. Haplotype, as a set of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on a single chromosome, is believed to contain promising data for disease association studies, detecting natural positive selection and recombination hotspots. Various computational methods for haplotype reconstruction from aligned fragment of SNPs have already been proposed. This study presents a novel approach to obtain paternal and maternal haplotypes form the SNP fragments on minimum error correction (MEC) model...

Stochastic modelling and simulation is a well-known approach for predicting the behaviour of biochemical systems. Its main applications lie in those systems wherein the inherently random fluctuations of some species are significant, as often is the case whenever just a few macromolecules have a large effect on the rest of the system. The Gillespie's stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) is a standard method to properly realise the stochastic nature of reactions. In this paper we propose an improvement to SSA based on the Huffman tree, a binary tree which is used to define an optimal data compression algorithm...

In present study, adjacent path eccentric distance sum indices proposed in Part-I of the manuscript were successfully utilised for the development of models for cycloxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitory activity. Values of diverse molecular descriptors (MDs) for each of 38 indomethacin analogues involved in the dataset were computed. A total of 55 diverse MDs were ultimately shortlisted for further analysis. The suitable models were developed using decision tree (DT), random forest (RF) and moving average analysis (MAA)...

In the present study, three detour matrix-based topological indices (TIs) termed as adjacent path eccentric distance sum indices 1-3 (denoted by (A)ξ(1)(PDS), (A)ξ(2)(PDS) and (A)ξ(3)(PDS)) as well as their topochemical versions (denoted by (A)ξ(1c)(PDS), (A)ξ(2c)(PDS) and (A)ξ(3c)(PDS)) have been conceptualised. Values of the proposed TIs were computed for all possible cyclic and acyclic structures containing three, four, five vertices using an in-house computer programme. Proposed TIs were evaluated for discriminating power, degeneracy, intercorrelation and sensitivity towards branching as well relative position of substituent(s) in cyclic structures...