Search

Gonadotropes represent approximately 5–15% of the total endocrine cell population in the mammalian anterior pituitary. Therefore, assessing the effects of experimental manipulation on virtually any parameter of gonadotrope biology is difficult to detect and parse from background noise. In non-rodent species, applying techniques such as high-throughput ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequencing is problematic due to difficulty in isolating and analyzing individual endocrine cell populations. Herein, we exploited cell-specific properties inherent to the proximal promoter of the human glycoprotein hormone alpha subunit gene (CGA) to genetically target the expression of a fluorescent reporter (green fluorescent protein [GFP]) selectively to ovine gonadotropes. Dissociated ovine pituitary cells were cultured and infected with an adenoviral reporter vector (Ad-hαCGA-eGFP). We established efficient gene targeting by successfully enriching dispersed GFP-positive cells with flow cytometry. Confirming enrichment of gonadotropes specifically, we detected elevated levels of luteinizing hormone (LH) but not thyrotropin-stimulating hormone (TSH) in GFP-positive cell populations compared to GFP-negative populations. Subsequently, we used next-generation sequencing to obtain the transcriptional profile of GFP-positive ovine gonadotropes in the presence or absence of estradiol 17-beta (E2), a key modulator of gonadotrope function. Compared to non-sorted cells, enriched GFP-positive cells revealed a distinct transcriptional profile consistent with established patterns of gonadotrope gene expression. Importantly, we also detected nearly 200 E2-responsive genes in enriched gonadotropes, which were not apparent in parallel experiments on non-enriched cell populations. From these data, we conclude that CGA-targeted adenoviral gene transfer is an effective means for selectively labeling and enriching ovine gonadotropes suitable for investigation by numerous experimental approaches.

A few classes of RNA-RNA interaction (RRI) with complex roles in cellular functions, such as miRNA-target and lncRNAs, have already been studied. Accordingly, RRI bioinformatics tools proposed in the last decade are tailored for those specific classes. Interestingly, there are somewhat unnoticed mRNA-mRNA interactions in the literature with potentially drastic biological roles. Hence, there is a need for high-throughput generic RRI bioinformatics tools that can be used in more comprehensive settings. In this work, we revisit two of the RRI partition function algorithms, piRNA and rip. These are equivalent methods that implement the most comprehensive and computationally intensive thermodynamic model for RRI. We propose simpler models that are shown to retain the vast majority of the thermodynamic information that the more complex models capture. Specifically, we simplify the energy model by ignoring the system’s entropy and show its equivalency to a base-pair counting model. We allow different weights for base-pairs to maximize the correlations with the full thermodynamic model. Our newly developed algorithm, BPPart, is 225× faster than piRNA and is more expressive and easier to analyze due to its simplicity and order of magnitude reduction in the number of dynamic programming tables. Still, based on our analysis of both the real and randomly generated data, its scores achieve a correlation of 0.855 with piRNA at 37^{∘}C. Finally, we illustrate one use-case of such simpler models to generate hypotheses about the roles of specific RNAs in various diseases. We have made our tool publicly available and believe that this faster and more expressive model will make the incorporation of physics-guided information in complex RRI analysis and prediction models more accessible., LIPIcs, Vol. 201, 21st International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI 2021), pages 14:1-14:24

Graph Traversal Edit Distance (GTED) is a measure of distance (or dissimilarity) between two graphs introduced. This measure is based on the minimum edit distance between two strings formed by the edge labels of respective Eulerian traversals of the two graphs. GTED was motivated by and provides the first mathematical formalism for sequence coassembly and de novo variation detection in bioinformatics. Many problems in applied machine learning deal with graphs (also called networks), including social networks, security, web data mining, protein function prediction, and genome informatics. The kernel paradigm beautifully decouples the learning algorithm from the underlying geometric space, which renders graph kernels important for the aforementioned applications. In this article, we introduce a tool, PyGTED to compute GTED. It implements the algorithm based on the polynomial time algorithm devised for it by the authors. Informally, the GTED is the minimum edit distance between two strings formed by the edge labels of respective Eulerian traversals of the two graphs.

Many real-world dynamics can be modeled as nonlinear time-delay systems. In order to capture a more realistic model for system dynamics, the exact values of time-delay should be taken into account. For nonlinear time-delay systems, the estimation of delays in both state and output equations is discussed. A cost function is defined based on least-square error between actual and estimated values of the output measurement. The value of time-delays in the nonlinear system are then derived using a gradient-based optimization method. Because of the implicit description of the cost function with respect to the delay value, its gradients cannot be obtained by standard analytical differentiation rules. In this case, the optimal computational methods are utilized to derive two formulas for computing the gradient. An optimization scheme is then formulated to estimate both state and output delays. The effectiveness of the proposed estimation method is finally demonstrated using the simulation results on a benchmark chemical process.