Biol Direct
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This essay highlights critical aspects of the plausibility of pre-Darwinian evolution. It is based on a critical review of some better-known open, far-from-equilibrium system-based scenarios supposed to explain processes that took place before Darwinian evolution had emerged and that resulted in the origin of the first systems capable of Darwinian evolution. The researchers' responses to eight crucial questions are reviewed. The majority of the researchers claim that there would have been an evolutionary continuity between chemistry and "biology". A key question is how did this evolution begin before Darwinian evolution had begun? In other words the question is whether pre-Darwinian evolution is plausible. ⋯ This article was reviewed by Purificacion Lopez-Garcia, Anthony Poole, Doron Lancet, and Thomas Dandekar.
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As advances in life sciences and information technology bring profound influences on bioinformatics due to its interdisciplinary nature, bioinformatics is experiencing a new leap-forward from in-house computing infrastructure into utility-supplied cloud computing delivered over the Internet, in order to handle the vast quantities of biological data generated by high-throughput experimental technologies. Albeit relatively new, cloud computing promises to address big data storage and analysis issues in the bioinformatics field. Here we review extant cloud-based services in bioinformatics, classify them into Data as a Service (DaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and present our perspectives on the adoption of cloud computing in bioinformatics. ⋯ This article was reviewed by Frank Eisenhaber, Igor Zhulin, and Sandor Pongor.
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Recent studies suggest that gene expression profiles are a promising alternative for clinical cancer classification. One major problem in applying DNA microarrays for classification is the dimension of obtained data sets. In this paper we propose a multiclass gene selection method based on Partial Least Squares (PLS) for selecting genes for classification. The new idea is to solve multiclass selection problem with the PLS method and decomposition to a set of two-class sub-problems: one versus rest (OvR) and one versus one (OvO). We use OvR and OvO two-class decomposition for other recently published gene selection method. Ranked gene lists are highly unstable in the sense that a small change of the data set often leads to big changes in the obtained ordered lists. In this paper, we take a look at the assessment of stability of the proposed methods. We use the linear support vector machines (SVM) technique in different variants: one versus one, one versus rest, multiclass SVM (MSVM) and the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) as a classifier. We use balanced bootstrap to estimate the prediction error and to test the variability of the obtained ordered lists. ⋯ This paper shows that the proposed strategies can improve the performance of selected gene sets substantially. OvR and OvO techniques applied to existing gene selection methods improve results as well. The presented method allows to obtain a more reliable classifier with less classifier error. In the same time the method generates more stable ordered feature lists in comparison with existing methods.
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Independently evolving lineages mostly accumulate different changes, which leads to their gradual divergence. However, parallel accumulation of identical changes is also common, especially in traits with only a small number of possible states. ⋯ High, but below-neutral, rates of parallel amino acid replacements suggest that a majority of amino acid replacements that occur in evolution are subject to weak, but non-trivial, selection, as predicted by Ohta's nearly-neutral theory.
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In the accompanying paper by Virginie Rouillon and myself, our demonstration that homogenisation by gene conversion occurs readily among MHC class I genes was made possible because of the exceptional conservation of the CD94L locus between divergent species of separate taxa, suggesting that the molecules of this family are endowed with very important and well preserved biological functions. These results lead me to elaborate various hypotheses on several aspects of MHC evolution. ⋯ This article was reviewed by Stephan Beck, Lutz Walter and Pierre Pontarotti.