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At least 577 records · Page 32

OpenMDlr: parallel, open-source tools for general protein structure modeling and refinement from pairwise distances

Easy-to-use, open-source, general-purpose programs for modeling a protein structure from inter-atomic distances are needed for modeling from experimental data and refinement of predicted protein structures. OpenMDlr is an open-source Python package for modeling protein structures from pairwise distances between any atoms, and optionally, dihedral angles. Finally, we provide a user-friendly input format for harnessing modern biomolecular force fields in an easy-to-install package that can efficiently make use of multiple compute cores.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Predicted structural proteome of Sphagnum divinum and proteome-scale annotation

Sphagnum-dominated peatlands store a substantial amount of terrestrial carbon. The genus is undersampled and under-studied. No experimental crystal structure from any Sphagnum species exists in the Protein Data Bank and fewer than 200 Sphagnum-related genes have structural models available in the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. Tools and resources are needed to help bridge these gaps, and to enable the analysis of other structural proteomes now made possible by accurate structure prediction. We present the predicted structural proteome (25,134 primary transcripts) of Sphagnum divinum computed using AlphaFold, structural alignment results of all high-confidence models against an annotated nonredundant crystallographic database of over 90,000 structures, a structure-based classification of putative Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers across this proteome, and the computational method to perform this proteome-scale structure-based annotation.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

The Unified Phenotype Ontology : a framework for cross-species integrative phenomics

Phenotypic data are critical for understanding biological mechanisms and consequences of genomic variation, and are pivotal for clinical use cases such as disease diagnostics and treatment development. For over a century, vast quantities of phenotype data have been collected in many different contexts covering a variety of organisms. The emerging field of phenomics focuses on integrating and interpreting these data to inform biological hypotheses. A major impediment in phenomics is the wide range of distinct and disconnected approaches to recording the observable characteristics of an organism. Phenotype data are collected and curated using free text, single terms or combinations of terms, using multiple vocabularies, terminologies, or ontologies. Integrating these heterogeneous and often siloed data enables the application of biological knowledge both within and across species. Existing integration efforts are typically limited to mappings between pairs of terminologies; a generic knowledge representation that captures the full range of cross-species phenomics data is much needed. We have developed the Unified Phenotype Ontology (uPheno) framework, a community effort to provide an integration layer over domain-specific phenotype ontologies, as a single, unified, logical representation. uPheno comprises (1) a system for consistent computational definition of phenotype terms using ontology design patterns, maintained as a community library; (2) a hierarchical vocabulary of species-neutral phenotype terms under which their species-specific counterparts are grouped; and (3) mapping tables between species-specific ontologies. This harmonized representation supports use cases such as cross-species integration of genotype-phenotype associations from different organisms and cross-species informed variant prioritization.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Mondo: integrating disease terminology across communities

Precision medicine aims to enhance diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis by integrating multimodal data at the point of care. However, challenges arise due to the vast number of diseases, differing methods of classification, and conflicting terminological coding systems and practices used to represent molecular definitions of disease. This lack of interoperability artificially constrains the potential for diagnosis, clinical decision support, care outcome analysis, as well as data linkage across research domains to support the development or repurposing of therapeutics. There is a clear and pressing need for a unified system for managing disease entities⁠—including identifiers, synonyms, and definitions. To address these issues, we created the Mondo disease ontology—a community-driven, open-source, unified disease classification system that harmonizes diverse terminologies into a consistent, computable framework. Mondo integrates key medical and biomedical terminologies, including Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), Orphanet, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIt), and more, to provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of disease concepts with fully provenanced and attributed links back to the sources. Mondo can be used as the handle for curation of gene–disease associations utilized in diagnostic applications, research applications such as computational phenotyping, and in clinical coding systems in clinical decision support by pointing the clinician to the numerous knowledge resources linked to the Mondo identifier. Mondo's community-centric approach, stewarded by the Monarch Initiative's expertise in ontologies, ensures that the ontology remains adaptable to the evolving needs of biomedical research and clinical communities, as well as the knowledge providers.

biomedical informatics↗

Stellar wind impact on early atmospheres around unmagnetized Earth-like planets

ABSTRACT Stellar rotation at early ages plays a crucial role in the survival of primordial atmospheres around Earth-mass exoplanets. Earth-like planets orbiting fast-rotating stars may undergo complete photoevaporation within the first few hundred Myr driven by the enhanced stellar XUV [X-rays and extreme ultraviolet (EUV)] radiation, while planets orbiting slow-rotating stars are expected to experience difficulty in losing their primordial envelopes. Besides the action of stellar radiation, stellar winds induce additional erosion on these primordial atmospheres, altering their morphology, extent, and causing supplementary atmospheric losses. In this paper, we study the impact of activity-dependent stellar winds on primordial atmospheres to evaluate the extent to which the action of these winds can be significant in the whole planetary evolution at early evolutionary stages. We performed 3D magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations of the interaction of photoevaporating atmospheres around unmagnetized Earth-mass planets in the time span between 50 and 500 Myr, analysing the joint evolution of stellar winds and atmospheres for both fast- and slow-rotating stars. Our results reveal substantial changes in the evolution of primordial atmospheres when influenced by fast-rotating stars, with a significant reduction in extent at early ages. In contrast, atmospheres embedded in the stellar winds from slow-rotating stars remain largely unaltered. The interaction of the magnetized stellar winds with the ionized upper atmospheres of these planets allows us to evaluate the formation and evolution of different MHD structures, such as double bow shocks and induced magnetospheres. This work will shed light on the first evolutionary stages of Earth-like exoplanets, which are of crucial relevance in terms of planet habitability.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗

The Human Phenotype Ontology in 2024: phenotypes around the world

The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) is a widely used resource that comprehensively organizes and defines the phenotypic features of human disease, enabling computational inference and supporting genomic and phenotypic analyses through semantic similarity and machine learning algorithms. The HPO has widespread applications in clinical diagnostics and translational research, including genomic diagnostics, gene-disease discovery, and cohort analytics. In recent years, groups around the world have developed translations of the HPO from English to other languages, and the HPO browser has been internationalized, allowing users to view HPO term labels and in many cases synonyms and definitions in ten languages in addition to English. Since our last report, a total of 2239 new HPO terms and 49235 new HPO annotations were developed, many in collaboration with external groups in the fields of psychiatry, arthrogryposis, immunology and cardiology. The Medical Action Ontology (MAxO) is a new effort to model treatments and other measures taken for clinical management. Finally, the HPO consortium is contributing to efforts to integrate the HPO and the GA4GH Phenopacket Schema into electronic health records (EHRs) with the goal of more standardized and computable integration of rare disease data in EHRs.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

The Monarch Initiative in 2019: an integrative data and analytic platform connecting phenotypes to genotypes across species

In biology and biomedicine, relating phenotypic outcomes with genetic variation and environmental factors remains a challenge: patient phenotypes may not match known diseases, candidate variants may be in genes that haven’t been characterized, research organisms may not recapitulate human or veterinary diseases, environmental factors affecting disease outcomes are unknown or undocumented, and many resources must be queried to find potentially significant phenotypic associations. The Monarch Initiative (https://monarchinitiative.org) integrates information on genes, variants, genotypes, phenotypes and diseases in a variety of species, and allows powerful ontology-based search. We develop many widely adopted ontologies that together enable sophisticated computational analysis, mechanistic discovery and diagnostics of Mendelian diseases. Our algorithms and tools are widely used to identify animal models of human disease through phenotypic similarity, for differential diagnostics and to facilitate translational research. Launched in 2015, Monarch has grown with regards to data (new organisms, more sources, better modeling); new API and standards; ontologies (new Mondo unified disease ontology, improvements to ontologies such as HPO and uPheno); user interface (a redesigned website); and community development. Monarch data, algorithms and tools are being used and extended by resources such as GA4GH and NCATS Translator, among others, to aid mechanistic discovery and diagnostics.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

The western redcedar genome reveals low genetic diversity in a self-compatible conifer

We assembled the 9.8-Gbp genome of western redcedar (WRC; Thuja plicata), an ecologically and economically important conifer species of the Cupressaceae. The genome assembly, derived from a uniquely inbred tree produced through five generations of self-fertilization (selfing), was determined to be 86% complete by BUSCO analysis, one of the most complete genome assemblies for a conifer. Population genomic analysis revealed WRC to be one of the most genetically depauperate wild plant species, with an effective population size of approximately 300 and no significant genetic differentiation across its geographic range. Nucleotide diversity, π, is low for a continuous tree species, with many loci showing zero diversity, and the ratio of π at zero- to fourfold degenerate sites is relatively high (approximately 0.33), suggestive of weak purifying selection. Using an array of genetic lines derived from up to five generations of selfing, we explored the relationship between genetic diversity and mating system. Although overall heterozygosity was found to decline faster than expected during selfing, heterozygosity persisted at many loci, and nearly 100 loci were found to deviate from expectations of genetic drift, suggestive of associative overdominance. Nonreference alleles at such loci often harbor deleterious mutations and are rare in natural populations, implying that balanced polymorphisms are maintained by linkage to dominant beneficial alleles. This may account for how WRC remains responsive to natural and artificial selection, despite low genetic diversity.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Addressing Load Imbalance in Bioinformatics and Biomedical Applications: Efficient Scheduling across Multiple GPUs

Computational bioinformatics and biomedical applications frequently contain heterogeneously sized units of work or tasks, for instance due to variability in the sizes of biological sequences and molecules. Variable-sized workloads lead to load imbalances in parallel implementations which detract from efficiency and performance. Many modern computing resources now have multiple graphics processing units(GPUs) per computer for acceleration. These multiple GPU resources need to be used efficiently through balancing of workloads across the GPUs. OpenMP is a portable directive-based parallel programming API used ubiquitously in bioscience applications to program CPUs; recently, the use of OpenMP directives for GPU acceleration has become possible. Here, motivated by experiences with imbalanced loads in GPU-accelerated bioinformatics applications, we address the load balancing problem using OpenMP task-to-GPU scheduling combined with OpenMP GPU offloading for multiply heterogeneous workloads – loads with both variable input sizes, and simultaneously, variable convergence rates for algorithms with a stochastic component – scheduled across multiple GPUs. We aim to develop strategies which are both easy to use and have lower overheads, and may be incorporated incrementally in existing programs which already make use of OpenMP for CPU-based threading in order to make use of multi-GPU computers. We test different combinations of input size variability and convergence rate variability, and characterize the effects of these different scenarios on the performance of scheduling strategies across multiple GPUs with OpenMP. We present several dynamic scheduling solutions for different parallel patterns, explore optimizations, and provide publicly available example computational kernels to make these strategies easy to use in programs. This work will enable application developers to efficiently and easily use multiple GPUs for imbalanced workloads found in bioinformatics and biomedical applications.

Thavappiragasam, Mathialakan↗

Portability for GPU-accelerated molecular docking applications for cloud and HPC: can portable compiler directives provide performance across all platforms?

High-throughput structure-based screening of drug-like molecules has become a common tool in biomedical research. Recently, acceleration with graphics processing units (GPUs) has provided a large performance boost for molecular docking programs. Both cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) resources have been used for large screens with molecular docking programs; while NVIDIA GPUs have dominated cloud and HPC resources, new vendors such as AMD and Intel are now entering the field, creating the problem of software portability across different GPUs. Ideally, software productivity could be maximized with portable programming models that are able to maintain high performance across architectures. While in many cases compiler directives have been used as an easy way to offload parallel regions of a CPU-based program to a GPU accelerator, they may also be an attractive programming model for providing portability across different GPU vendors, in which case the porting process may proceed in the reverse direction: from low-level, architecture-specific code to higher-level directive-based abstractions. MiniMDock is a new mini-application (miniapp) designed to capture the essential computational kernels found in molecular docking calculations, such as are used in phar-maceutical drug discovery efforts, in order to test different solutions for porting across GPU architectures. Here we extend MiniMDock to GPU offloading with OpenMP directives, and compare to performance of kernels using CUDA and HIP on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, respectively, as well as across different compilers, exploring performance bottlenecks. We document this reverse-porting process, from highly optimized device code to a higher-level version using directives, compare code structure, and describe barriers that were overcome in this effort.

Thavappiragasam, Mathialakan↗

Proteome-scale Deployment of Protein Structure Prediction Workflows on the Summit Supercomputer

Deep learning has contributed to major advances in the prediction of protein structure from sequence, a fundamental problem in structural bioinformatics. With predictions now approaching the accuracy of crystallographic experiments, and with accelerators like GPUs and TPUs making inference using large models rapid, genome-level structure prediction becomes an obvious aim. Leadership-class computing resources can be used to perform genome-scale protein structure prediction using state-of-the-art deep learning models, providing a wealth of new data for systems biology applications. Here we describe our efforts to efficiently deploy the AlphaFold v.2 program, for full-proteome structure prediction, at scale on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's resources, including the Summit supercomputer. We performed inference to produce the predicted structures for 40,526 protein sequences, corresponding to four prokaryotic proteomes and one plant proteome, using under 4,400 total Summit node hours, equivalent to using the majority of the supercomputer for a little over one hour. We also designed an optimized structure refinement that reduced the time for the relaxation stage of the AlphaFold pipeline by over 10X for longer sequences. We demonstrate the types of analyses that can be performed on proteome-scale collections of sequences, including a search for novel quaternary structures and implications for functional annotation.

Gao, Mu↗

Supercomputing Pipelines Search for Therapeutics Against COVID-19

The urgent search for drugs to combat SARS-CoV-2 has included the use of supercomputers. The use of general-purpose graphical processing units (GPUs), massive parallelism, and new software for high-performance computing (HPC) has allowed researchers to search the vast chemical space of potential drugs faster than ever before. We developed a new drug discovery pipeline using the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help pioneer this effort, with new platforms that incorporate GPU-accelerated simulation and allow for the virtual screening of billions of potential drug compounds in days compared to weeks or months for their ability to inhibit SARS-COV-2 proteins. Here, this effort will accelerate the process of developing drugs to combat the current COVID-19 pandemic and other diseases.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

High-Performance Deep Learning Toolbox for Genome-Scale Prediction of Protein Structure and Function

Computational biology is one of many scientific disciplines ripe for innovation and acceleration with the advent of high-performance computing (HPC). In recent years, the field of machine learning has also seen significant benefits from adopting HPC practices. In this work, we present a novel HPC pipeline that incorporates various machine-learning approaches for structure-based functional annotation of proteins on the scale of whole genomes. Our pipeline makes extensive use of deep learning and provides computational insights into best practices for training advanced deep-learning models for high-throughput data such as proteomics data. We showcase methodologies our pipeline currently supports and detail future tasks for our pipeline to envelop, including large-scale sequence comparison using SAdLSA and prediction of protein tertiary structures using AlphaFold2.

Gao, Mu↗

Performance Portability of Molecular Docking Miniapp On Leadership Computing Platforms

Rapidly changing computer architectures, such as those found at high-performance computing (HPC) facilities, present the need for mini-applications (miniapps) that capture essential algorithms used in large applications to test program performance and portability, aiding transitions to new systems. The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled a flurry of activity in computational drug discovery, including the use of supercomputers and GPU acceleration for massive virtual screens for therapeutics. Recent work targeting COVID-19 at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) used the GPU-accelerated program AutoDock-GPU to screen billions of compounds on the Summit supercomputer. In this paper we present the development of a new miniapp, miniAutoDock-GPU, that can be used to evaluate the performance and portability of GPU-accelerated protein-ligand docking programs on different computer architectures. These tests are especially relevant as facilities transition from petascale systems and prepare for upcoming exascale systems that will use a variety of GPU vendors. The key calculations, namely, the Lamarckian genetic algorithm combined with a local search using a Solis-Wets based random optimization algorithm, are implemented. We developed versions of the miniapp using several different programming models for GPU acceleration, including a version using the CUDA runtime API for NVIDIA GPUs, and the Kokkos middle-ware API which is facilitated by C++ template libraries. A third version, currently in progress, uses the HIP programming model. These efforts will help facilitate the transition to exascale systems for this important emerging HPC application, as well as its use on a wide range of heterogeneous platforms.

Thavappiragasam, Mathialakan↗

Impacts of floating-point non-associativity on reproducibility for HPC and deep learning applications

Run to run variability in parallel programs caused by floating-point non-associativity has been known to significantly affect reproducibility in iterative algorithms, due to accumulating errors. Non-reproducibility can critically affect the efficiency and effectiveness of correctness testing for stochastic programs. Recently, the sensitivity of deep learning training and inference pipelines to floating-point non-associativity has been found to sometimes be extreme. It can prevent certification for commercial applications, accurate assessment of robustness and sensitivity, and bug detection. New approaches in scientific computing applications have coupled deep learning models with high-performance computing, leading to an aggravation of debugging and testing challenges. Here we perform an investigation of the statistical properties of floating-point non-associativity within modern parallel programming models, and analyze performance and productivity impacts of replacing atomic operations with deterministic alternatives on GPUs. We examine the recently-added deterministic options in PyTorch within the context of GPU deployment for deep learning, uncovering and quantifying the impacts of input parameters triggering run to run variability and reporting on the reliability and completeness of the documentation. Finally, we evaluate the strategy of exploiting automatic determinism that could be provided by deterministic hardware, using the Groq LPUTM accelerator for inference portions of the deep learning pipeline. We demonstrate the benefits that a hardware-based strategy can provide within reproducibility and correctness efforts.

Shanmugavelu, Sanjif↗

BioBits™ Bright: A fluorescent synthetic biology education kit

Synthetic biology offers opportunities for experiential educational activities at the intersection of the life sciences, engineering, and design. However, implementation of hands-on biology activities in classrooms is challenging because of the need for specialized equipment and expertise to grow living cells. We present BioBits™ Bright, a shelf-stable, just-add-water synthetic biology education kit with easy visual outputs enabled by expression of fluorescent proteins in freeze-dried, cell-free reactions. We introduce activities and supporting curricula for teaching the central dogma, tunable protein expression, and design-build-test cycles and report data generated by K-12 teachers and students. We also develop inexpensive incubators and imagers, resulting in a comprehensive kit costing <US$100 per 30-person classroom. The user-friendly resources of this kit promise to enhance biology education both inside and outside the classroom.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

GPU-Accelerated Drug Discovery with Docking on the Summit Supercomputer: Porting, Optimization, and Application to COVID-19 Research

Protein-ligand docking is an in silico tool used to screen potential drug compounds for their ability to bind to a given protein receptor within a drug-discovery campaign. Experimental drug screening is expensive and time consuming, and it is desirable to carry out large scale docking calculations in a high-throughput manner to narrow the experimental search space. Few of the existing computational docking tools were designed with high performance computing in mind. Therefore, optimizations to maximize use of high-performance computational resources available at leadership-class computing facilities enables these facilities to be leveraged for drug discovery. Here we present the porting, optimization, and validation of the AutoDock-GPU program for the Summit supercomputer, and its application to initial compound screening efforts to target proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the current COVID-19 pandemic.

LeGrand, Scott↗

Modeling protein structures from predicted contacts with modern molecular dynamics potentials: accuracy, sensitivity, and refinement

Protein structure prediction has become increasingly popular and successful in recent years. An essential step for fragment-free, template-free methods is the generation of a final three-dimensional protein model from a set of predicted amino acid contacts that are often described by interresidue pairwise atomic distances. Here we explore the use of modern, open-source molecular dynamics (MD) engines, which have been continually developed over the last three decades with all-atom Hamiltonians to model biomolecular structure and dynamics, to generate accurate protein structures starting from a set of inferred pairwise distances. Additionally, the ability of MD empirical physical potentials to correct inaccuracies in the predicted geometries is tested. We rigorously characterize the effect of modeling parameters on results, the effect of different amounts of error in the predicted distances on the final structures, and test the ability of post-processing analysis to sort the best models out of a set of statistical replicas. We find that with exact distances and with noisy distances, the method can produce excellent structural models, and that the molecular dynamics force field seems to help correct errors in distance predictions, resisting the effects of applied noise.

Davidson, Russ↗