Improving Performance of Protein Structure Similarity Searching by Distributing Computations in Hierarchical Multi-Agent System. In: Pan J, Chen S, Nguyen NT, editors. Computational Collective Intelligence. Technologies and Applications. Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 2010. pp. 320-9. [DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-16693-8_34]

Predicting Ion Channels Genes and Their Types With Machine Learning Techniques

Motivation: The number of ion channels is increasing rapidly. As many of them are associated with diseases, they are the targets of more than 700 drugs. The discovery of new ion channels is facilitated by computational methods that predict ion channels and their types from protein sequences. Methods: We used the SVMProt and the k-skip-n-gram methods to extract the feature vectors of ion channels, and obtained 188- and 400-dimensional features, respectively. The 188- and 400-dimensional features were combined to obtain 588-dimensional features. We then employed the maximum-relevance-maximum-distance method to reduce the dimensions of the 588-dimensional features. Finally, the support vector machine and random forest methods were used to build the prediction models to evaluate the classification effect. Results: Different methods were employed to extract various feature vectors, and after effective dimensionality reduction, different classifiers were used to classify the ion channels. We extracted the ion channel data from the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt, http://www.uniprot.org/) and Ligand-Gated Ion Channel databases (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/compneur-srv/LGICdb/LGICdb.php), and then verified the performance of the classifiers after screening. The findings of this study could inform the research and development of drugs.

Parallel implementation of 3D protein structure similarity searches using a GPU and the CUDA

Searching for similar 3D protein structures is one of the primary processes employed in the field of structural bioinformatics. However, the computational complexity of this process means that it is constantly necessary to search for new methods that can perform such a process faster and more efficiently. Finding molecular substructures that complex protein structures have in common is still a challenging task, especially when entire databases containing tens or even hundreds of thousands of protein structures must be scanned. Graphics processing units (GPUs) and general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) can perform many time-consuming and computationally demanding processes much more quickly than a classical CPU can. In this paper, we describe the GPU-based implementation of the CASSERT algorithm for 3D protein structure similarity searching. This algorithm is based on the two-phase alignment of protein structures when matching fragments of the compared proteins. The GPU (GeForce GTX 560Ti: 384 cores, 2GB RAM) implementation of CASSERT (“GPU-CASSERT”) parallelizes both alignment phases and yields an average 180-fold increase in speed over its CPU-based, single-core implementation on an Intel Xeon E5620 (2.40GHz, 4 cores). In this paper, we show that massive parallelization of the 3D structure similarity search process on many-core GPU devices can reduce the execution time of the process, allowing it to be performed in real time. GPU-CASSERT is available at: http://zti.polsl.pl/dmrozek/science/gpucassert/cassert.htm.