Molecular Biology and Genetics / Moleküler Biyoloji ve Genetik

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11147/9

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 16
    Citation - Scopus: 18
    Computational and Bioinformatics Methods for Microrna Gene Prediction
    (Humana Press, 2014) Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have attracted ever-increasing interest in recent years. Since experimental approaches for determining miRNAs are nontrivial in their application, computational methods for the prediction of miRNAs have gained popularity. Such methods can be grouped into two broad categories (1) performing ab initio predictions of miRNAs from primary sequence alone and (2) additionally employing phylogenetic conservation. Most methods acknowledge the importance of hairpin or stem-loop structures and employ various methods for the prediction of RNA secondary structure. Machine learning has been employed in both categories with classification being the predominant method. In most cases, positive and negative examples are necessary for performing classification. Since it is currently elusive to experimentally determine all possible miRNAs for an organism, true negative examples are hard to come by, and therefore the accuracy assessment of algorithms is hampered. In this chapter, first RNA secondary structure prediction is introduced since it provides a basis for miRNA prediction. This is followed by an assessment of homology and then ab initio miRNA prediction methods.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 37
    Citation - Scopus: 46
    Computational Methods for Microrna Target Prediction
    (Humana Press, 2014) Hamzeiy, Hamid; Yousef, Malik; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are important players in gene regulation. The final and maybe the most important step in their regulatory pathway is the targeting. Targeting is the binding of the miRNA to the mature RNA via the RNA-induced silencing complex. Expression patterns of miRNAs are highly specific in respect to external stimuli, developmental stage, or tissue. This is used to diagnose diseases such as cancer in which the expression levels of miRNAs are known to change considerably. Newly identified miRNAs are increasing in number with every new release of miRBase which is the main online database providing miRNA sequences and annotation. Many of these newly identified miRNAs do not yet have identified targets. This is especially the case in animals where the miRNA does not bind to its target as perfectly as it does in plants. Valid targets need to be identified for miRNAs in order to properly understand their role in cellular pathways. Experimental methods for target validations are difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Having considered all these facts it is of crucial importance to have accurate computational miRNA target predictions. There are many proposed methods and algorithms available for predicting targets for miRNAs, but only a few have been developed to become available as independent tools and software. There are also databases which collect and store information regarding predicted miRNA targets. Current approaches to miRNA target prediction produce a huge amount of false positive and an unknown amount of false negative results, and thus the need for better approaches is evermore evident. This chapter aims to give some detail about the current tools and approaches used for miRNA target prediction, provides some grounds for their comparison, and outlines a possible future.
  • Article
    Citation - Scopus: 19
    Feature Selection Has a Large Impact on One-Class Classification Accuracy for Micrornas in Plants
    (Hindawi Publishing Corporation, 2016) Yousef, Malik; Demirci, Müşerref Duygu Saçar; Khalifa, Waleed; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short RNA sequences involved in posttranscriptional gene regulation. Their experimental analysis is complicated and, therefore, needs to be supplemented with computational miRNA detection. Currently computational miRNA detection is mainly performed using machine learning and in particular two-class classification. For machine learning, the miRNAs need to be parametrized and more than 700 features have been described. Positive training examples for machine learning are readily available, but negative data is hard to come by. Therefore, it seems prerogative to use one-class classification instead of two-class classification. Previously, we were able to almost reach two-class classification accuracy using one-class classifiers. In this work, we employ feature selection procedures in conjunction with one-class classification and show that there is up to 36% difference in accuracy among these feature selection methods. The best feature set allowed the training of a one-class classifier which achieved an average accuracy of 95.6% thereby outperforming previous two-class-based plant miRNA detection approaches by about 0.5%. We believe that this can be improved upon in the future by rigorous filtering of the positive training examples and by improving current feature clustering algorithms to better target pre-miRNA feature selection.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 30
    Machine Learning Methods for Microrna Gene Prediction
    (Humana Press, 2014) Saçar, Müşerref Duygu; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are single-stranded, small, noncoding RNAs of about 22 nucleotides in length, which control gene expression at the posttranscriptional level through translational inhibition, degradation, adenylation, or destabilization of their target mRNAs. Although hundreds of miRNAs have been identified in various species, many more may still remain unknown. Therefore, discovery of new miRNA genes is an important step for understanding miRNA-mediated posttranscriptional regulation mechanisms. It seems that biological approaches to identify miRNA genes might be limited in their ability to detect rare miRNAs and are further limited to the tissues examined and the developmental stage of the organism under examination. These limitations have led to the development of sophisticated computational approaches attempting to identify possible miRNAs in silico. In this chapter, we discuss computational problems in miRNA prediction studies and review some of the many machine learning methods that have been tried to address the issues.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 4
    Citation - Scopus: 7
    Master Regulators of Posttranscriptional Gene Expression Are Subject To Regulation
    (Humana Press, 2014) Hamid, Syed Muhammad; Akgül, Bünyamin
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNAs of 17-25 nt in length that control gene expression posttranscriptionally. As master regulators of posttranscriptional gene expression, miRNAs themselves are subject to tight regulation at multiple steps. The most common mechanisms include miRNA transcription, processing, and localization. Additionally, intricate feedback loops between miRNAs and transcription factors result in unidirectional, reciprocal, or self-directed elegant control mechanisms. In this chapter, we focus on the posttranscriptional regulatory mechanisms that generate miRNAs whose sequence might be slightly different from the miRNA-coding sequences. Hopefully, this information will be helpful in the discovery of novel miRNAs as well as in the analysis of deep-sequencing data and ab initio prediction of miRNAs. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014.
  • Conference Object
    Citation - Scopus: 19
    Data Mining for Microrna Gene Prediction: on the Impact of Class Imbalance and Feature Number for Microrna Gene Prediction
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2013) Saçar, Müşerref Duygu; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small, non-coding RNAs which are involved in the posttranscriptional modulation of gene expression. Their short (18-24) single stranded mature sequences are involved in targeting specific genes. It turns out that experimental methods are limited and that it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish all miRNAs and their targets experimentally. Therefore, many tools for the prediction of miRNA genes and miRNA targets have been proposed. Most of these tools are based on machine learning methods and within that area mostly two-class classification is employed. Unfortunately, truly negative data is impossible to attain and only approximations of negative data are currently available. Also, we recently showed that the available positive data is not flawless. Here we investigate the impact of class imbalance on the learner accuracy and find that there is a difference of up to 50% between the best and worst precision and recall values. In addition, we looked at increasing number of features and found a curve maximizing at 0.97 recall and 0.91 precision with quickly decaying performance after inclusion of more than 100 features. © 2013 IEEE.