Discovering Biomolecular Mechanisms With Computational Biology

This anthology presents critical reviews of methods and high-impact applications in computational biology that lead to results that non-bioinformaticians must also know to design efficient experimental research plans. Discovering Biomolecular Mechanisms with Computational Biology explores the methodology of translating sequence strings into biological knowledge and considers exemplary groundbreaking results such as unexpected enzyme discoveries. This book also summarizes non-trivial theoretical predictions for regulatory and metabolic networks that have received experimental confirmation.

This anthology presents critical reviews of methods and high-impact applications in computational biology that lead to results that non-bioinformaticians must also know to design efficient experimental research plans. Discovering Biomolecular Mechanisms with Computational Biology explores the methodology of translating sequence strings into biological knowledge and considers exemplary groundbreaking results such as unexpected enzyme discoveries. This book also summarizes non-trivial theoretical predictions for regulatory and metabolic networks that have received experimental confirmation.

This volume addresses fundamental issues in the philosophy of science in the context of two most intriguing fields: biology and economics. Written by authorities and experts in the philosophy of biology and economics, Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics provides a structured study of the concepts of mechanism and causality in these disciplines and draws careful juxtapositions between philosophical apparatus and scientific practice. By exploring the issues that are most salient to the contemporary philosophies of biology and economics and by presenting comparative analyses, the book serves as a platform not only for gaining mutual understanding between scientists and philosophers of the life sciences and those of the social sciences, but also for sharing interdisciplinary research that combines both philosophical concepts in both fields. The book begins by defining the concepts of mechanism and causality in biology and economics, respectively. The second and third parts investigate philosophical perspectives of various causal and mechanistic issues in scientific practice in the two fields. These two sections include chapters on causal issues in the theory of evolution; experiments and scientific discovery; representation of causal relations and mechanism by models in economics. The concluding section presents interdisciplinary studies of various topics concerning extrapolation of life sciences and social sciences, including chapters on the philosophical investigation of conjoining biological and economic analyses with, respectively, demography, medicine and sociology.

Bioinformatics for Systems Biology bridges and unifies many disciplines. It presents the life scientist, computational biologist, and mathematician with a common framework. Only by linking the groups together may the true life sciences revolution move forward.

Computational methodologies and modeling play a growing role for investigating mechanisms, and for the diagnosis and therapy of human diseases. This progress gave rise to computational medicine, an interdisciplinary field at the interface of computer science and medicine. The main focus of computational medicine lies in the development of data analysis methods and mathematical modeling as well as computational simulation techniques specifically addressing medical problems. In this book, we present a number of computational medicine topics at several scales: from molecules to cells, organs, and organisms. At the molecular level, tools for the analysis of genome variations as well as cloud computing resources for medical genetics are reviewed. Then, an analysis of gene expression data and the application to the characterization of microbial communities are highlighted. At the protein level, two types of analyses for mass spectrometry data are reviewed: labeled quantitative proteomics and lipidomics, followed by protein sequence analysis and a 3D structure and drug design chapter. Finally, three chapters on clinical applications focus on the integration of biomolecular and clinical data for cancer research, biomarker discovery, and network-based methods for computational diagnostics.

Alternative techniques and tools for analyzing biomolecular networks With the recent rapid advances in molecular biology, high-throughput experimental methods have resulted in enormous amounts of data that can be used to study biomolecular networks in living organisms. With this development has come recognition of the fact that a complicated living organism cannot be fully understood by merely analyzing individual components. Rather, it is the interactions of components or biomolecular networks that are ultimately responsible for an organism's form and function. This book addresses the important need for a new set of computational tools to reveal essential biological mechanisms from a systems biology approach. Readers will get comprehensive coverage of analyzing biomolecular networks in cellular systems based on available experimental data with an emphasis on the aspects of network, system, integration, and engineering. Each topic is treated in depth with specific biological problems and novel computational methods: GENE NETWORKS—Transcriptional regulation; reconstruction of gene regulatory networks; and inference of transcriptional regulatory networks PROTEIN INTERACTION NETWORKS—Prediction of protein-protein interactions; topological structure of biomolecular networks; alignment of biomolecular networks; and network-based prediction of protein function METABOLIC NETWORKS AND SIGNALING NETWORKS—Analysis, reconstruction, and applications of metabolic networks; modeling and inference of signaling networks; and other topics and new trends In addition to theoretical results and methods, many computational software tools are referenced and available from the authors' Web sites. Biomolecular Networks is an indispensable reference for researchers and graduate students in bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology, computer science, and applied mathematics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2012, held in Regina, SK, Canada, in May 2013. The 17 regular papers and 15 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 initial submissions and are accompanied by 8 papers from the Graduate Student Symposium that were selected from 14 submissions. The papers cover a variety of topics within AI, such as: information extraction, knowledge representation, search, text mining, social networks, temporal associations.