ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: BioHackathon 2010 was the third in a series of meetings hosted by the Database Center for Life Sciences (DBCLS) in Tokyo, Japan. The overall goal of the BioHackathon series is to improve the quality and accessibility of life science research data on the Web by bringing together representatives from public databases, analytical tool providers, and cyber-infrastructure researchers to jointly tackle important challenges in the area of in silico biological research. RESULTS: The theme of BioHackathon 2010 was the 'Semantic Web', and all attendees gathered with the shared goal of producing Semantic Web data from their respective resources, and/or consuming or interacting those data using their tools and interfaces. We discussed on topics including guidelines for designing semantic data and interoperability of resources. We consequently developed tools and clients for analysis and visualization. CONCLUSION: We provide a meeting report from BioHackathon 2010, in which we describe the discussions, decisions, and breakthroughs made as we moved towards compliance with Semantic Web technologies - from source provider, through middleware, to the end-consumer.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The interaction between biological researchers and the bioinformatics tools they use is still hampered by incomplete interoperability between such tools. To ensure interoperability initiatives are effectively deployed, end-user applications need to be aware of, and support, best practices and standards. Here, we report on an initiative in which software developers and genome biologists came together to explore and raise awareness of these issues: BioHackathon 2009. RESULTS: Developers in attendance came from diverse backgrounds, with experts in Web services, workflow tools, text mining and visualization. Genome biologists provided expertise and exemplar data from the domains of sequence and pathway analysis and glyco-informatics. One goal of the meeting was to evaluate the ability to address real world use cases in these domains using the tools that the developers represented. This resulted in i) a workflow to annotate 100,000 sequences from an invertebrate species; ii) an integrated system for analysis of the transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) enriched based on differential gene expression data obtained from a microarray experiment; iii) a workflow to enumerate putative physical protein interactions among enzymes in a metabolic pathway using protein structure data; iv) a workflow to analyze glyco-gene-related diseases by searching for human homologs of glyco-genes in other species, such as fruit flies, and retrieving their phenotype-annotated SNPs. CONCLUSIONS: Beyond deriving prototype solutions for each use-case, a second major purpose of the BioHackathon was to highlight areas of insufficiency. We discuss the issues raised by our exploration of the problem/solution space, concluding that there are still problems with the way Web services are modeled and annotated, including: i) the absence of several useful data or analysis functions in the Web service "space"; ii) the lack of documentation of methods; iii) lack of compliance with the SOAP/WSDL specification among and between various programming-language libraries; and iv) incompatibility between various bioinformatics data formats. Although it was still difficult to solve real world problems posed to the developers by the biological researchers in attendance because of these problems, we note the promise of addressing these issues within a semantic framework.
ABSTRACT
Web services have become a key technology for bioinformatics, since life science databases are globally decentralized and the exponential increase in the amount of available data demands for efficient systems without the need to transfer entire databases for every step of an analysis. However, various incompatibilities among database resources and analysis services make it difficult to connect and integrate these into interoperable workflows. To resolve this situation, we invited domain specialists from web service providers, client software developers, Open Bio* projects, the BioMoby project and researchers of emerging areas where a standard exchange data format is not well established, for an intensive collaboration entitled the BioHackathon 2008. The meeting was hosted by the Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS) and Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC) and was held in Tokyo from February 11th to 15th, 2008. In this report we highlight the work accomplished and the common issues arisen from this event, including the standardization of data exchange formats and services in the emerging fields of glycoinformatics, biological interaction networks, text mining, and phyloinformatics. In addition, common shared object development based on BioSQL, as well as technical challenges in large data management, asynchronous services, and security are discussed. Consequently, we improved interoperability of web services in several fields, however, further cooperation among major database centers and continued collaborative efforts between service providers and software developers are still necessary for an effective advance in bioinformatics web service technologies.
ABSTRACT
MOTIVATION: Large-scale detection and classification of alternative splicing and transcriptional initiation (ASTI) is the first step towards detailed studies of the functional implication and mechanisms of these phenomena. RESULTS: We have developed an algorithm that classifies all observed units of ASTI into an extendable set of distinct types (e.g. cassette type) by converting a collection of alignments between a genomic DNA sequence and cDNA sequences into binary description. This description system can uniquely and compactly encode not only typical patterns but also any rare patterns that are usually collectively assigned to 'others.' More than 150 distinct ASTI types were found when this system was applied to genome-wide detection of ASTI units in human and five other eukaryotes. AVAILABILITY: The data detected by this system are available through ASTRA (http://alterna.cbrc.jp/), a database equipped with a Java-based browser that can interactively reorganize the order of displayed splicing patterns on demand.
Subject(s)
Alternative Splicing/genetics , Databases, Genetic , Sequence Alignment/methods , Sequence Analysis, DNA/methods , Transcription Initiation Site , User-Computer Interface , Algorithms , Artificial Intelligence , Base Sequence , Computer Graphics , Molecular Sequence Data , Pattern Recognition, Automated/methodsABSTRACT
The genome-wide detection of alternative splicing and transcriptional initiation (ASTI) was conducted in six eukaryotes (human, mouse, fruit fly, nematode, cress and rice) whose genome sequencing has been completed or nearly completed. Transcriptional isoforms were collected by mapping a batch of full-length cDNA sequences onto the respective cognate genomic sequences. Isoforms mapped on the same gene locus were compared pair-wise, ASTI patterns were segmented into minimal spans, and then the minimal patterns (ASTI units) were classified into unique types, such as the cassette type or the alternative donor site. All these procedures were performed automatically under the same conditions so that the results obtained from different species could be compared directly. The fraction of loci that underwent ASTI of the total mapped loci was the largest for mammals and fruit fly, and the smallest for plants. Exactly the same trend was observed for the number of unique ASTI types found in each species. The observed fractional representations of the ASTI types were similar between evolutionarily close species, such as human and mouse or cress and rice. On the other hand, the relative orders of abundance in individual ASTI type were considerably different between evolutionarily distant species, such as between mammals and plants. In human and mouse, alternative splicing other than the retained introns tended to occur within the protein coding sequence (CDS) regions rather than within the untranslated regions (UTRs), whereas this tendency was obscure in the other four species. In all the species examined, the difference in alternative exon lengths was most likely in multiples of three, and this tendency was most prominent when the alternative exons were embedded within the CDSs. These observations are generally consistent with the idea that higher organisms utilize the ASTI mechanisms more extensively and in a more complicated manner than lower organisms, and that ASTI actively participates in the enhancement of the functional and structural diversity of products generated from a limited number of genes on a genome.
