Mass spectrometry is essential for analyzing and quantifying biological samples. The timsTOF platform is a prominent commercial tool for this purpose, particularly in bottom-up acquisition scenarios. The additional ion mobility dimension requires more complex data processing, yet most current software solutions for timsTOF raw data are proprietary or closed-source, limiting integration into custom workflows.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe field of epitranscriptomics is undergoing a technology-driven revolution. During past decades, RNA modifications like N6-methyladenosine (mA), pseudouridine (ψ), and 5-methylcytosine (mC) became acknowledged for playing critical roles in cellular processes. Direct RNA sequencing by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) enabled the detection of modifications in native RNA, by detecting noncanonical RNA nucleosides properties in raw data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrug Discov Today
June 2024
NAR Genom Bioinform
September 2023
Deep learning has emerged as a paradigm that revolutionizes numerous domains of scientific research. Transformers have been utilized in language modeling outperforming previous approaches. Therefore, the utilization of deep learning as a tool for analyzing the genomic sequences is promising, yielding convincing results in fields such as motif identification and variant calling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioinformatics
September 2023
Cancer therapy with clinically established anticancer drugs is frequently hampered by the development of drug resistance of tumors and severe side effects in normal organs and tissues. The demand for powerful, but less toxic, drugs is high. Phytochemicals represent an important reservoir for drug development and frequently exert less toxicity than synthetic drugs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the past three decades, humans have been confronted with different new coronavirus outbreaks. Since the end of the year 2019, COVID-19 threatens the world as a rapidly spreading infectious disease. For this work, we targeted the non-structural protein 16 (nsp16) as a key protein of SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV to develop broad-spectrum inhibitors of nsp16.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Mass spectrometry is an important experimental technique in the field of proteomics. However, analysis of certain mass spectrometry data faces a combination of two challenges: first, even a single experiment produces a large amount of multi-dimensional raw data and, second, signals of interest are not single peaks but patterns of peaks that span along the different dimensions. The rapidly growing amount of mass spectrometry data increases the demand for scalable solutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNucleic Acids Res
February 2021
Methods for the detection of m6A by RNA-Seq technologies are increasingly sought after. We here present NOseq, a method to detect m6A residues in defined amplicons by virtue of their resistance to chemical deamination, effected by nitrous acid. Partial deamination in NOseq affects all exocyclic amino groups present in nucleobases and thus also changes sequence information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMetrology has been successfully used in the last decade to quantify use-wear on stone tools. Such techniques have been mostly applied to fine-grained rocks (chert), while studies on coarse-grained raw materials have been relatively infrequent. In this study, confocal microscopy was employed to investigate polished surfaces on a coarse-grained lithology, quartzite.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNext-generation sequencing (NGS) methods lie at the heart of large parts of biological and medical research. Their fundamental importance has created a continuously increasing demand for processing and analysis methods of the data sets produced, addressing questions such as variant calling, metagenomic classification and quantification, genomic feature detection, or downstream analysis in larger biological or medical contexts. In addition to classical algorithmic approaches, machine-learning (ML) techniques are often used for such tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotivation: Error correction is a fundamental pre-processing step in many Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) pipelines, in particular for de novo genome assembly. However, existing error correction methods either suffer from high false-positive rates since they break reads into independent k-mers or do not scale efficiently to large amounts of sequencing reads and complex genomes.
Results: We present CARE-an alignment-based scalable error correction algorithm for Illumina data using the concept of minhashing.
BMC Bioinformatics
March 2020
Background: All-Food-Sequencing (AFS) is an untargeted metagenomic sequencing method that allows for the detection and quantification of food ingredients including animals, plants, and microbiota. While this approach avoids some of the shortcomings of targeted PCR-based methods, it requires the comparison of sequence reads to large collections of reference genomes. The steadily increasing amount of available reference genomes establishes the need for efficient big data approaches.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNucleic Acids Res
April 2020
Reverse transcription (RT) of RNA templates containing RNA modifications leads to synthesis of cDNA containing information on the modification in the form of misincorporation, arrest, or nucleotide skipping events. A compilation of such events from multiple cDNAs represents an RT-signature that is typical for a given modification, but, as we show here, depends also on the reverse transcriptase enzyme. A comparison of 13 different enzymes revealed a range of RT-signatures, with individual enzymes exhibiting average arrest rates between 20 and 75%, as well as average misincorporation rates between 30 and 75% in the read-through cDNA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModification mapping from cDNA data has become a tremendously important approach in epitranscriptomics. So-called reverse transcription signatures in cDNA contain information on the position and nature of their causative RNA modifications. Data mining of, e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany archeologists are skeptical about the capabilities of use-wear analysis to infer on the function of archeological tools, mainly because the method is seen as subjective, not standardized and not reproducible. Quantitative methods in particular have been developed and applied to address these issues. However, the importance of equipment, acquisition and analysis settings remains underestimated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHead and neck cancer (HNC) is the seventh most common malignancy in the world and its prevailing form, the head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), is characterized as aggressive and invasive cancer type. The transcription factor II A (TFIIA), initially described as general regulator of RNA polymerase II-dependent transcription, is part of complex transcriptional networks also controlling mammalian head morphogenesis. Posttranslational cleavage of the TFIIA precursor by the oncologically relevant protease Taspase1 is crucial in this process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioinformatics
December 2017
Motivation: Metagenomic shotgun sequencing studies are becoming increasingly popular with prominent examples including the sequencing of human microbiomes and diverse environments. A fundamental computational problem in this context is read classification, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe progress of next-generation sequencing has a major impact on medical and genomic research. This high-throughput technology can now produce billions of short DNA or RNA fragments in excess of a few terabytes of data in a single run. This leads to massive datasets used by a wide range of applications including personalized cancer treatment and precision medicine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCombination of reverse transcription (RT) and deep sequencing has emerged as a powerful instrument for the detection of RNA modifications, a field that has seen a recent surge in activity because of its importance in gene regulation. Recent studies yielded high-resolution RT signatures of modified ribonucleotides relying on both sequence-dependent mismatch patterns and reverse transcription arrests. Common alignment viewers lack specialized functionality, such as filtering, tailored visualization, image export and differential analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Bioinformatics
September 2016
Background: Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) is a popular method to reveal significant dependencies between predefined sets of gene symbols and observed phenotypes by evaluating the deviation of gene expression values between cases and controls. An established measure of inter-class deviation, the enrichment score, is usually computed using a weighted running sum statistic over the whole set of gene symbols. Due to the lack of analytic expressions the significance of enrichment scores is determined using a non-parametric estimation of their null distribution by permuting the phenotype labels of the probed patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProteomics analysis of paired cancer and control tissue can be applied to investigate pathological processes in tumors. Advancements in data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry allow for highly reproducible quantitative analysis of complex proteomic patterns. Optimized sample preparation workflows enable integrative multi-omics studies from the same tissue specimens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Cancer
April 2016
Cancer is a large class of diseases that are characterized by a common set of features, known as the Hallmarks of cancer. One of these hallmarks is the acquisition of genome instability and mutations. This, combined with high proliferation rates and failure of repair mechanisms, leads to clonal evolution as well as a high genotypic and phenotypic diversity within the tumor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNucleic Acids Res
November 2015
The combination of Reverse Transcription (RT) and high-throughput sequencing has emerged as a powerful combination to detect modified nucleotides in RNA via analysis of either abortive RT-products or of the incorporation of mismatched dNTPs into cDNA. Here we simultaneously analyze both parameters in detail with respect to the occurrence of N-1-methyladenosine (m(1)A) in the template RNA. This naturally occurring modification is associated with structural effects, but it is also known as a mediator of antibiotic resistance in ribosomal RNA.
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