March 20, 2017

Informatics Approaches to Uncover the Molecular Mechanisms of Endometriosis in Clinical Patients

Endometriosis, a complex and common gynecological disorder affecting 5–10% of reproductive-age women, is characterized by the growth of endometrial tissue outside of the uterine cavity. Accumulating evidence indicates that various epigenetic aberrations are associated with endometriosis. In our study, we have methylation data and clinical information on 80 patients (36 controls and 44 cases) from a clinical study. Our objectives are to identify the genomic regions associated with endometriosis and identify the specific genes associated with endometriosis after adjusting for potential confounding variables. We have developed a bioinformatics methylation data analysis pipeline in-house using several open source tools including FastQC,…

March 13, 2017

A Deep Natural Network Method for Predicting Mitochondrially Localized Proteins in Plants

Targeting and translocation of proteins to the appropriate subcellular compartments is crucial for cell organization and function. Some newly synthesized proteins are transported to mitochondria with the assistance of complex targeting sequences containing either an N-terminal pre-sequence or a multitude of internal signals. Compared with experimental approaches, computational predictions provide an efficient way to infer subcellular localization for any given protein. However, it is still challenging to predict plant mitochondrially localized proteins accurately due to various limitations. Consequently, the performance of current tools is unsatisfactory. We present a novel computational approach for large-scale prediction of plant mitochondrial proteins. We collected…

March 6, 2017

Geonmic Selection using Deep Learning method

Genomic selection is an approach to enhance the quantitative traits in plant and animal breeding program at early stage using whole genome molecular markers, especially for long life-cycle species. It’s based on the assumption that all quantitative trait loci (QTL) tend to be in linkage disequilibrium with at least on marker. Statistical methods, such as ridge regression, best linear unbiased prediction (RR-BLUP)[1], Bayes A[2], Bayesian LASSO[3] are widely used for genomic selection problem works SNP matrix.  Other machine learning methods (random forrest, support vector machine and neural network)[4] are also been applied for this study. In this work, we are…

Feb. 17, 2017

A pilot study of ePHR implementation impact on physician workflow

The ePHR (electronic Personal Health Record) is a self-service technology (SST) used in health care, which can serve as an electronic information source for patients, physician and the government. Based on the literature review, we found that there are some concerns and barriers during the ePHR implement in industry perspectives, physicians’ perspective, patients’ perspectives and technology perspectives. In the pilot study of ePHR implementation impact on physician workflow, we conduct a qualitative analysis using structured physician interviews, and a quantitative analysis for physician workflow observations. We try to create recommendations for ePHR implementation for a variety…

Feb. 13, 2017

Decoding the auxin code: uncovering new players in the auxin pathway through WGCNA analysis

Auxins are a class of phytohormones in plants which have an active role in growth and development. The Auxin hormone control pathway in maize meristem is not well studied and has significant scope for in-depth exploration. Previous studies have not shown much novel information about how Auxin is regulated. Weighted Gene co-expression analysis takes results from differentially expressed genes and organizes them into clusters and modules showing possible interactions and co-regulation. These clusters usually highlight unique interactions which cannot be seen by most other methods. We present our ongoing work in building gene co-regulatory networks using certain gene knockouts in…

Feb. 6, 2017

RDF-Based Method to Uncover Implicit Health Communication Episodes from Unstructured Health Data

Health communication is the process that coordinates health services such as specimen transaction, oral interactions, medical records, and more. Healthcare workflows are based on communication established historically through the practice of healthcare or by the leadership in health institutions. However, during healthcare practices communication doesn’t flow according to plan; interpersonal miscommunication, technical glitches, information overload, etc. risk inefficient healthcare services. We hypothesize that health records contain information related to communication and we can retrieve it in order to address issues of communication. We present an informatics pipeline to retrieve health communication episodes from unstructured health data. The method uses Resource…

Jan. 30, 2017

Comparison of histone patterns in orthologus regions between mouse and human tissues

With the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies, a considerable effort has been put into sequencing the epigenome of different species. The efforts such as “Encode” and “Roadmap” epigenomics projects provide an opportunity to compare epigenomes across species (especially between human and mouse). This study is an effort to understand how different histone modifications vary/co-appear between orthologus regions of the two species. In this work, we have also used various measures of orthologus similarity between each pair of orthologus genes and explore how histone modifications are conserved with respect to changes in these similarity measures. These measures of similarity include “gene…

Jan. 23, 2017

Building an online quality improvement information exchange for home visiting programs in Missouri

Early childhood home visiting programs date back to the 1880s and deliver a vital public service of providing and connecting families with health, educational, and economic resources to support optimal development. Continuous quality improvement (CQI) consists of systematic and continuous actions that lead to measurable improvement in services for targeted groups. CQI initiatives (CQII) in home visiting programs have traditionally occurred within a local implementing agency (LIA), parent organization, or funding provision. LIA CQII are often lost to the benefit of external agencies facing similar challenges. We developed a web-based environment, the Gateway, to virtually connect and engage users within…

Dec. 5, 2016

Genetic variation, population structure, and genome assembly of the threatened Neosho madtom catfish

The Neosho madtom (Noturus placidus) is a small catfish, generally less than 3 inches in length, unique to the Neosho-Spring River system within the Arkansas River Basin. It was federally listed as threatened in 1990, largely due to habitat loss. As part of conservation efforts, we generated whole genome Illumina paired-end sequence data from ten Neosho madtom (average 39X coverage) originating from three geographically separated subpopulations to evaluate genetic diversity and population structure. One slender madtom (Noturus exilis) was also sequenced as an outgroup. Although over 1 million variants were found between Neosho and slender madtom, only 86,155 SNPs were…