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At least 1,171 records · Page 65

Battery-powered bargains? Assessing electric vehicle resale value in the United States

Abstract The resale market will play a critical role in expanding plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) adoption to middle- and lower-income households. Understanding PEV depreciation trends in comparison to those of conventional gasoline vehicles (CVs) is critical for assessing PEV affordability and informing relevant policy, such as subsidies for used PEVs. We deliver comprehensive, high-resolution estimates of value retention rates at the make-model level in the United States for battery electric vehicles (BEVs), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), and CVs using a database of 9 million used cars listed online between 2016 and 2022. While BEVs and PHEVs have depreciated at faster rates than CVs, this trend is changing, with newer model year BEVs and those with larger ranges have significantly higher retention rates than older model years with smaller ranges. Tesla BEVs are a notable exception following the opposite trend, with earlier model years holding their value better than newer model years. Subsidized BEVs in the new market are associated with lower prices for the same model in the resale market, with the $7500 federal subsidy translating to a 3% lower resale price on average. Finally, disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic have affected affordability across all vehicles, with mean listing prices rising 37% and 39% for CVs and BEVs, respectively, from January 2020 to March 2022 in inflation-adjusted 2019 dollars.

Environmental Sciences & Ecology↗

Enabling robust offline active learning for machine learning potentials using simple physics-based priors

Abstract Machine learning surrogate models for quantum mechanical simulations have enabled the field to efficiently and accurately study material and molecular systems. Developed models typically rely on a substantial amount of data to make reliable predictions of the potential energy landscape or careful active learning (AL) and uncertainty estimates. When starting with small datasets, convergence of AL approaches is a major outstanding challenge which has limited most demonstrations to online AL. In this work we demonstrate a Δ-machine learning (ML) approach that enables stable convergence in offline AL strategies by avoiding unphysical configurations with initial datasets as little as a single data point. We demonstrate our framework’s capabilities on a structural relaxation, transition state calculation, and molecular dynamics simulation, with the number of first principle calculations being cut down anywhere from 70%–90%. The approach is incorporated and developed alongside AMP torch , an open-source ML potential package, along with interactive Google Colab notebook examples.

Shuaibi, Muhammed↗

Machine-learned closure of URANS for stably stratified turbulence: connecting physical timescales & data hyperparameters of deep time-series models

Stably stratified turbulence (SST), a model that is representative of the turbulence found in the oceans and atmosphere, is strongly affected by fine balances between forces and becomes more anisotropic in time for decaying scenarios. Moreover, there is a limited understanding of the physical phenomena described by some of the terms in the Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) equations—used to numerically simulate approximate solutions for such turbulent flows. Rather than attempting to model each term in URANS separately, it is attractive to explore the capability of machine learning (ML) to model groups of terms, i.e. to directly model the force balances. We develop deep time-series ML for closure modeling of the URANS equations applied to SST. We consider decaying SST which are homogeneous and stably stratified by a uniform density gradient, enabling dimensionality reduction. We consider two time-series ML models: long short-term memory and neural ordinary differential equation. Both models perform accurately and are numerically stable in a posteriori (online) tests. Furthermore, we explore the data requirements of the time-series ML models by extracting physically relevant timescales of the complex system. We find that the ratio of the timescales of the minimum information required by the ML models to accurately capture the dynamics of the SST corresponds to the Reynolds number of the flow. The current framework provides the backbone to explore the capability of such models to capture the dynamics of high-dimensional complex dynamical system like SST flows.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Tripal, a community update after 10 years of supporting open source, standards-based genetic, genomic and breeding databases

Abstract Online, open access databases for biological knowledge serve as central repositories for research communities to store, find and analyze integrated, multi-disciplinary datasets. With increasing volumes, complexity and the need to integrate genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic, phenomic and environmental data, community databases face tremendous challenges in ongoing maintenance, expansion and upgrades. A common infrastructure framework using community standards shared by many databases can reduce development burden, provide interoperability, ensure use of common standards and support long-term sustainability. Tripal is a mature, open source platform built to meet this need. With ongoing improvement since its first release in 2009, Tripal provides full functionality for searching, browsing, loading and curating numerous types of data and is a primary technology powering at least 31 publicly available databases spanning plants, animals and human data, primarily storing genomics, genetics and breeding data. Tripal software development is managed by a shared, inclusive governance structure including both project management and advisory teams. Here, we report on the most important and innovative aspects of Tripal after 11 years development, including integration of diverse types of biological data, successful collaborative projects across member databases, and support for implementing FAIR principles.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Harnessing large language models’ zero-shot and few-shot learning capabilities for regulatory research

Abstract Large language models (LLMs) are sophisticated AI-driven models trained on vast sources of natural language data. They are adept at generating responses that closely mimic human conversational patterns. One of the most notable examples is OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has been extensively used across diverse sectors. Despite their flexibility, a significant challenge arises as most users must transmit their data to the servers of companies operating these models. Utilizing ChatGPT or similar models online may inadvertently expose sensitive information to the risk of data breaches. Therefore, implementing LLMs that are open source and smaller in scale within a secure local network becomes a crucial step for organizations where ensuring data privacy and protection has the highest priority, such as regulatory agencies. As a feasibility evaluation, we implemented a series of open-source LLMs within a regulatory agency’s local network and assessed their performance on specific tasks involving extracting relevant clinical pharmacology information from regulatory drug labels. Our research shows that some models work well in the context of few- or zero-shot learning, achieving performance comparable, or even better than, neural network models that needed thousands of training samples. One of the models was selected to address a real-world issue of finding intrinsic factors that affect drugs' clinical exposure without any training or fine-tuning. In a dataset of over 700 000 sentences, the model showed a 78.5% accuracy rate. Our work pointed to the possibility of implementing open-source LLMs within a secure local network and using these models to perform various natural language processing tasks when large numbers of training examples are unavailable.

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology↗

Snekmer: a scalable pipeline for protein sequence fingerprinting based on amino acid recoding

Abstract Motivation The vast expansion of sequence data generated from single organisms and microbiomes has precipitated the need for faster and more sensitive methods to assess evolutionary and functional relationships between proteins. Representing proteins as sets of short peptide sequences (kmers) has been used for rapid, accurate classification of proteins into functional categories; however, this approach employs an exact-match methodology and thus may be limited in terms of sensitivity and coverage. We have previously used similarity groupings, based on the chemical properties of amino acids, to form reduced character sets and recode proteins. This amino acid recoding (AAR) approach simplifies the construction of protein representations in the form of kmer vectors, which can link sequences with distant sequence similarity and provide accurate classification of problematic protein families. Results Here, we describe Snekmer, a software tool for recoding proteins into AAR kmer vectors and performing either (i) construction of supervised classification models trained on input protein families or (ii) clustering for de novo determination of protein families. We provide examples of the operation of the tool against a set of nitrogen cycling families originally collected using both standard hidden Markov models and a larger set of proteins from Uniprot and demonstrate that our method accurately differentiates these sequences in both operation modes. Availability and implementation Snekmer is written in Python using Snakemake. Code and data used in this article, along with tutorial notebooks, are available at http://github.com/PNNL-CompBio/Snekmer under an open-source BSD-3 license. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics Advances online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

RCSB Protein Data Bank 1D tools and services

Abstract Motivation Interoperability between polymer sequences and structural data is essential for providing a complete picture of protein and gene features and helping to understand biomolecular function. Results Herein, we present two resources designed to improve interoperability between the RCSB Protein Data Bank, the NCBI and the UniProtKB data resources and visualize integrated data therefrom. The underlying tools provide a flexible means of mapping between the different coordinate spaces and an interactive tool allows convenient visualization of the 1-dimensional data over the web. Availabilityand implementation https://1d-coordinates.rcsb.org and https://rcsb.github.io/rcsb-saguaro. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

An open-source high-content analysis workflow for CFTR function measurements using the forskolin-induced swelling assay

Abstract Motivation The forskolin-induced swelling (FIS) assay has become the preferential assay to predict the efficacy of approved and investigational CFTR-modulating drugs for individuals with cystic fibrosis (CF). Currently, no standardized quantification method of FIS data exists thereby hampering inter-laboratory reproducibility. Results We developed a complete open-source workflow for standardized high-content analysis of CFTR function measurements in intestinal organoids using raw microscopy images as input. The workflow includes tools for (i) file and metadata handling; (ii) image quantification and (iii) statistical analysis. Our workflow reproduced results generated by published proprietary analysis protocols and enables standardized CFTR function measurements in CF organoids. Availability and implementation All workflow components are open-source and freely available: the htmrenamer R package for file handling https://github.com/hmbotelho/htmrenamer; CellProfiler and ImageJ analysis scripts/pipelines https://github.com/hmbotelho/FIS_image_analysis; the Organoid Analyst application for statistical analysis https://github.com/hmbotelho/organoid_analyst; detailed usage instructions and a demonstration dataset https://github.com/hmbotelho/FIS_analysis. Distributed under GPL v3.0. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Hagemeijer, Marne C.↗

Persistent minimal sequences of SARS-CoV-2

Abstract Motivation Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused more than 14 million cases and more than half million deaths. Given the absence of implemented therapies, new analysis, diagnosis and therapeutics are of great importance. Results Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes from the current outbreak reveals the presence of short persistent DNA/RNA sequences that are absent from the human genome and transcriptome (PmRAWs). For the PmRAWs with length 12, only four exist at the same location in all SARS-CoV-2. At the gene level, we found one PmRAW of size 13 at the Spike glycoprotein coding sequence. This protein is fundamental for binding in human ACE2 and further use as an entry receptor to invade target cells. Applying protein structural prediction, we localized this PmRAW at the surface of the Spike protein, providing a potential targeted vector for diagnostics and therapeutics. In addition, we show a new pattern of relative absent words (RAWs), characterized by the progressive increase of GC content (Guanine and Cytosine) according to the decrease of RAWs length, contrarily to the virus and host genome distributions. New analysis shows the same property during the Ebola virus outbreak. At a computational level, we improved the alignment-free method to identify pathogen-specific signatures in balance with GC measures and removed previous size limitations. Availability and implementation https://github.com/cobilab/eagle. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Pratas, Diogo↗

A public website for the automated assessment and validation of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic PCR assays

Abstract Summary Polymerase chain reaction-based assays are the current gold standard for detecting and diagnosing SARS-CoV-2. However, as SARS-CoV-2 mutates, we need to constantly assess whether existing PCR-based assays will continue to detect all known viral strains. To enable the continuous monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 assays, we have developed a web-based assay validation algorithm that checks existing PCR-based assays against the ever-expanding genome databases for SARS-CoV-2 using both thermodynamic and edit-distance metrics. The assay-screening results are displayed as a heatmap, showing the number of mismatches between each detection and each SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence. Using a mismatch threshold to define detection failure, assay performance is summarized with the true-positive rate (recall) to simplify assay comparisons. Availability and implementation The assay evaluation website and supporting software are Open Source and freely available at https://covid19.edgebioinformatics.org/#/assayValidation, https://github.com/jgans/thermonucleotide BLAST and https://github.com/LANL-Bioinformatics/assay_validation. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

MOSAIC: a joint modeling methodology for combined circadian and non-circadian analysis of multi-omics data

Abstract Motivation Circadian rhythms are approximately 24-h endogenous cycles that control many biological functions. To identify these rhythms, biological samples are taken over circadian time and analyzed using a single omics type, such as transcriptomics or proteomics. By comparing data from these single omics approaches, it has been shown that transcriptional rhythms are not necessarily conserved at the protein level, implying extensive circadian post-transcriptional regulation. However, as proteomics methods are known to be noisier than transcriptomic methods, this suggests that previously identified arrhythmic proteins with rhythmic transcripts could have been missed due to noise and may not be due to post-transcriptional regulation. Results To determine if one can use information from less-noisy transcriptomic data to inform rhythms in more-noisy proteomic data, and thus more accurately identify rhythms in the proteome, we have created the Multi-Omics Selection with Amplitude Independent Criteria (MOSAIC) application. MOSAIC combines model selection and joint modeling of multiple omics types to recover significant circadian and non-circadian trends. Using both synthetic data and proteomic data from Neurospora crassa, we showed that MOSAIC accurately recovers circadian rhythms at higher rates in not only the proteome but the transcriptome as well, outperforming existing methods for rhythm identification. In addition, by quantifying non-circadian trends in addition to circadian trends in data, our methodology allowed for the recognition of the diversity of circadian regulation as compared to non-circadian regulation. Availability and implementation MOSAIC’s full interface is available at https://github.com/delosh653/MOSAIC. An R package for this functionality, mosaic.find, can be downloaded at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=mosaic.find. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

De los Santos, Hannah↗

VPF-Class: taxonomic assignment and host prediction of uncultivated viruses based on viral protein families

Abstract Motivation Two key steps in the analysis of uncultured viruses recovered from metagenomes are the taxonomic classification of the viral sequences and the identification of putative host(s). Both steps rely mainly on the assignment of viral proteins to orthologs in cultivated viruses. Viral Protein Families (VPFs) can be used for the robust identification of new viral sequences in large metagenomics datasets. Despite the importance of VPF information for viral discovery, VPFs have not yet been explored for determining viral taxonomy and host targets. Results In this work, we classified the set of VPFs from the IMG/VR database and developed VPF-Class. VPF-Class is a tool that automates the taxonomic classification and host prediction of viral contigs based on the assignment of their proteins to a set of classified VPFs. Applying VPF-Class on 731K uncultivated virus contigs from the IMG/VR database, we were able to classify 363K contigs at the genus level and predict the host of over 461K contigs. In the RefSeq database, VPF-class reported an accuracy of nearly 100% to classify dsDNA, ssDNA and retroviruses, at the genus level, considering a membership ratio and a confidence score of 0.2. The accuracy in host prediction was 86.4%, also at the genus level, considering a membership ratio of 0.3 and a confidence score of 0.5. And, in the prophages dataset, the accuracy in host prediction was 86% considering a membership ratio of 0.6 and a confidence score of 0.8. Moreover, from the Global Ocean Virome dataset, over 817K viral contigs out of 1 million were classified. Availability and implementation The implementation of VPF-Class can be downloaded from https://github.com/biocom-uib/vpf-tools. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Blinking statistics and molecular counting in direct stochastic reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM)

Abstract Motivation Many recent advancements in single-molecule localization microscopy exploit the stochastic photoswitching of fluorophores to reveal complex cellular structures beyond the classical diffraction limit. However, this same stochasticity makes counting the number of molecules to high precision extremely challenging, preventing key insight into the cellular structures and processes under observation. Results Modelling the photoswitching behaviour of a fluorophore as an unobserved continuous time Markov process transitioning between a single fluorescent and multiple dark states, and fully mitigating for missed blinks and false positives, we present a method for computing the exact probability distribution for the number of observed localizations from a single photoswitching fluorophore. This is then extended to provide the probability distribution for the number of localizations in a direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy experiment involving an arbitrary number of molecules. We demonstrate that when training data are available to estimate photoswitching rates, the unknown number of molecules can be accurately recovered from the posterior mode of the number of molecules given the number of localizations. Finally, we demonstrate the method on experimental data by quantifying the number of adapter protein linker for activation of T cells on the cell surface of the T-cell immunological synapse. Availability and implementation Software and data available at https://github.com/lp1611/mol_count_dstorm. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Patel, Lekha↗

Optimal Bayesian supervised domain adaptation for RNA sequencing data

Abstract Motivation When learning to subtype complex disease based on next-generation sequencing data, the amount of available data is often limited. Recent works have tried to leverage data from other domains to design better predictors in the target domain of interest with varying degrees of success. But they are either limited to the cases requiring the outcome label correspondence across domains or cannot leverage the label information at all. Moreover, the existing methods cannot usually benefit from other information available a priori such as gene interaction networks. Results In this article, we develop a generative optimal Bayesian supervised domain adaptation (OBSDA) model that can integrate RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) data from different domains along with their labels for improving prediction accuracy in the target domain. Our model can be applied in cases where different domains share the same labels or have different ones. OBSDA is based on a hierarchical Bayesian negative binomial model with parameter factorization, for which the optimal predictor can be derived by marginalization of likelihood over the posterior of the parameters. We first provide an efficient Gibbs sampler for parameter inference in OBSDA. Then, we leverage the gene-gene network prior information and construct an informed and flexible variational family to infer the posterior distributions of model parameters. Comprehensive experiments on real-world RNA-Seq data demonstrate the superior performance of OBSDA, in terms of accuracy in identifying cancer subtypes by utilizing data from different domains. Moreover, we show that by taking advantage of the prior network information we can further improve the performance. Availability and implementation The source code for implementations of OBSDA and SI-OBSDA are available at the following link. https://github.com/SHBLK/BSDA. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology↗

A variant selection framework for genome graphs

Abstract Motivation Variation graph representations are projected to either replace or supplement conventional single genome references due to their ability to capture population genetic diversity and reduce reference bias. Vast catalogues of genetic variants for many species now exist, and it is natural to ask which among these are crucial to circumvent reference bias during read mapping. Results In this work, we propose a novel mathematical framework for variant selection, by casting it in terms of minimizing variation graph size subject to preserving paths of length α with at most δ differences. This framework leads to a rich set of problems based on the types of variants [e.g. single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), indels or structural variants (SVs)], and whether the goal is to minimize the number of positions at which variants are listed or to minimize the total number of variants listed. We classify the computational complexity of these problems and provide efficient algorithms along with their software implementation when feasible. We empirically evaluate the magnitude of graph reduction achieved in human chromosome variation graphs using multiple α and δ parameter values corresponding to short and long-read resequencing characteristics. When our algorithm is run with parameter settings amenable to long-read mapping (α = 10 kbp, δ = 1000), 99.99% SNPs and 73% SVs can be safely excluded from human chromosome 1 variation graph. The graph size reduction can benefit downstream pan-genome analysis. Availability and implementation https://github.com/AT-CG/VF. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Reactome and the Gene Ontology: digital convergence of data resources

Abstract Motivation Gene Ontology Causal Activity Models (GO-CAMs) assemble individual associations of gene products with cellular components, molecular functions and biological processes into causally linked activity flow models. Pathway databases such as the Reactome Knowledgebase create detailed molecular process descriptions of reactions and assemble them, based on sharing of entities between individual reactions into pathway descriptions. Results To convert the rich content of Reactome into GO-CAMs, we have developed a software tool, Pathways2GO, to convert the entire set of normal human Reactome pathways into GO-CAMs. This conversion yields standard GO annotations from Reactome content and supports enhanced quality control for both Reactome and GO, yielding a nearly seamless conversion between these two resources for the bioinformatics community. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

CONSTAX2: improved taxonomic classification of environmental DNA markers

Abstract Summary CONSTAX—the CONSensus TAXonomy classifier—was developed for accurate and reproducible taxonomic annotation of fungal rDNA amplicon sequences and is based upon a consensus approach of RDP, SINTAX and UTAX algorithms. CONSTAX2 extends these features to classify prokaryotes as well as eukaryotes and incorporates BLAST-based classifiers to reduce classification errors. Additionally, CONSTAX2 implements a conda-installable command-line tool with improved classification metrics, faster training, multithreading support, capacity to incorporate external taxonomic databases and new isolate matching and high-level taxonomy tools, replete with documentation and example tutorials. Availability and implementation CONSTAX2 is available at https://github.com/liberjul/CONSTAXv2, and is packaged for Linux and MacOS from Bioconda with use under the MIT License. A tutorial and documentation are available at https://constax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. Data and scripts associated with the manuscript are available at https://github.com/liberjul/CONSTAXv2_ms_code. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗