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By integrating biological and bioinformatics data, Turek et al. (2023) [[21]] performed a genome assembly on the B10v3 cucumber genome and presented a well-organized and annotated reference genome of cucumber, contributing to better understanding of the cucumber genome. Using genome-wide classification and functional annotation, Cenci et al. (2022) [[18]] effectively characterized a large gene family across multiple species and established a classification framework for gene functional transfer, enabling a better understanding of the evolutionary history of one gene. In addition, several papers explored functional genomics of plant genomes, such as gene functional annotation and the development of functional genomics tools. Comparative genomics and functional genomics are two basic branches of plant genomics. [Extracted from the article]

Recent advances in single-cell sequencing assays for the transposase-accessibility chromatin (scATAC-seq) technique have provided cell-specific chromatin accessibility landscapes of cis-regulatory elements, providing deeper insights into cellular states and dynamics. However, few research efforts have been dedicated to modeling the relationship between regulatory grammars and single-cell chromatin accessibility and incorporating different analysis scenarios of scATAC-seq data into the general framework. To this end, we propose a unified deep learning framework based on the ProdDep Transformer Encoder, dubbed PROTRAIT, for scATAC-seq data analysis. Specifically motivated by the deep language model, PROTRAIT leverages the ProdDep Transformer Encoder to capture the syntax of transcription factor (TF)-DNA binding motifs from scATAC-seq peaks for predicting single-cell chromatin accessibility and learning single-cell embedding. Based on cell embedding, PROTRAIT annotates cell types using the Louvain algorithm. Furthermore, according to the identified likely noises of raw scATAC-seq data, PROTRAIT denoises these values based on predated chromatin accessibility. In addition, PROTRAIT employs differential accessibility analysis to infer TF activity at single-cell and single-nucleotide resolution. Extensive experiments based on the Buenrostro2018 dataset validate the effeteness of PROTRAIT for chromatin accessibility prediction, cell type annotation, and scATAC-seq data denoising, therein outperforming current approaches in terms of different evaluation metrics. Besides, we confirm the consistency between the inferred TF activity and the literature review. We also demonstrate the scalability of PROTRAIT to analyze datasets containing over one million cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regulators in gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are crucial for identifying cell states. However, GRN inference based on scRNA-seq data has several problems, including high dimensionality and sparsity, and requires more label data. Therefore, we propose a meta-learning GRN inference framework to identify regulatory factors. Specifically, meta-learning solves the parameter optimization problem caused by high-dimensional sparse data features. In addition, a few-shot solution was used to solve the problem of lack of label data. A structural equation model (SEM) was embedded in the model to identify important regulators. We integrated the parameter optimization strategy into the bi-level optimization to extract the feature consistent with GRN reasoning. This unique design makes our model robust to small-scale data. By studying the GRN inference task, we confirmed that the selected regulators were closely related to gene expression specificity. We further analyzed the GRN inferred to find the important regulators in cell type identification. Extensive experimental results showed that our model effectively captured the regulator in single-cell GRN inference. Finally, the visualization results verified the importance of the selected regulators for cell type recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Furthermore, in terms of protein identification, Xu et al. concentrated on the study of antioxidant protein identification; they proposed a machine learning method, SeqSVM, to predict antioxidant proteins through extracted sequence features [[10]]. The identification of special protein or RNA molecules via computational methods is of great importance in understanding their biological functions and developing new treatments for diseases. Seven papers focus on describing protein function prediction or protein identification, which include the prediction of signal peptides in proteins, protein hydroxylation site prediction, protein-protein interaction (PPI) prediction, and protein identification. [Extracted from the article]

Computational identification of special protein molecules is a key issue in understanding protein function. It can guide molecular experiments and help to save costs. I assessed 18 papers published in the special issue of Int. J. Mol. Sci., and also discussed the related works. The computational methods employed in this special issue focused on machine learning, network analysis, and molecular docking. New methods and new topics were also proposed. There were in addition several wet experiments, with proven results showing promise. I hope our special issue will help in protein molecules identification researches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some drugs can be used to treat multiple diseases, suggesting potential patterns in drug treatment. Determination of drug treatment patterns can improve our understanding of the mechanisms of drug action, enabling drug repurposing. A drug can be associated with a multilayer tissue-specific protein–protein interaction (TSPPI) network for the diseases it is used to treat. Proteins usually interact with other proteins to achieve functions that cause diseases. Hence, studying drug treatment patterns is similar to studying common module structures in multilayer TSPPI networks. Therefore, we propose a network-based model to study the treatment patterns of drugs. The method was designated SDTP (studying drug treatment pattern) and was based on drug effects and a multilayer network model. To demonstrate the application of the SDTP method, we focused on analysis of trichostatin A (TSA) in leukemia, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. We constructed a TSPPI multilayer network and obtained candidate drug-target modules from the network. Gene ontology analysis provided insights into the significance of the drug-target modules and co-expression networks. Finally, two modules were obtained as potential treatment patterns for TSA. Through analysis of the significance, composition, and functions of the selected drug-target modules, we validated the feasibility and rationality of our proposed SDTP method for identifying drug treatment patterns. In summary, our novel approach used a multilayer network model to overcome the shortcomings of single-layer networks and combined the network with information on drug activity. Based on the discovered drug treatment patterns, we can predict the potential diseases that the drug can treat. That is, if a disease-related protein module has a similar structure, then the drug is likely to be a potential drug for the treatment of the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accumulating evidence progressively indicated that microRNAs (miRNAs) play a significant role in the pathogenesis of diseases through many experimental studies; therefore, developing powerful computational models to identify potential human miRNA–disease associations is vital for an understanding of the disease etiology and pathogenesis. In this paper, a weighted interactive network was firstly constructed by combining known miRNA–disease associations, as well as the integrated similarity between diseases and the integrated similarity between miRNAs. Then, a new computational method implementing the newly weighted interactive network was developed for discovering potential miRNA–disease associations (WINMDA) by integrating the T most similar neighbors and the shortest path algorithm. Simulation results show that WINMDA can achieve reliable area under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve (AUC) results of 0.9183 ± 0.0007 in 5-fold cross-validation, 0.9200 ± 0.0004 in 10-fold cross-validation, 0.9243 in global leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV), and 0.8856 in local LOOCV. Furthermore, case studies of colon neoplasms, gastric neoplasms, and prostate neoplasms based on the Human microRNA Disease Database (HMDD) database were implemented, for which 94% (colon neoplasms), 96% (gastric neoplasms), and 96% (prostate neoplasms) of the top 50 predicting miRNAs were confirmed by recent experimental reports, which also demonstrates that WINMDA can effectively uncover potential miRNA–disease associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]