Text mining biomedical literature for constructing gene regulatory networks

Reliable plagiarism detection system based on deep learning approaches

The phenomenon of scientific burglary has seen a significant increase recently due to the technological development in software. Therefore, many types of research have been developed to address this phenomenon. However, detecting lexical, syntactic, and semantic text plagiarism remains to be a challenge. Thus, in this study, we have computed and recorded all the features that reflect different types of text similarities in a new database. The created database is proposed for intelligent learning to solve text plagiarism detection problems. Using the created database, a reliable plagiarism detection system is also proposed, which depends on intelligent deep learning. Different approaches to deep learning, such as convolution and recurrent neural network architectures, were considered during the construction of this system. A comparative study was implemented to evaluate the proposed intelligent system on the two benchmark datasets: PAN 2013 and PAN 2014 of the PAN Workshop series. The experimental results showed that the proposed system based on long short-term memory (LSTM) achieved the first rank compared to up-to-date ranking systems.

A Text Mining Protocol for Mining Biological Pathways and Regulatory Networks from Biomedical Literature

A biological pathway or regulatory network is a collection of molecular regulators which can activate the changes in cellular processes leading to an assembly of new molecules by series of actions among the molecules. There are three important pathways in system biology studies namely signaling pathways, metabolic pathways, and genetic pathways (or) gene regulatory networks. Recently, biological pathway construction from scientific literature is given much attention as the scientific literature contains a rich set of linguistic features to extract biological associations between genes and proteins. These associations can be united to construct biological networks. Here, we present a brief overview about various biological pathways, biomedical text resources/corpora for network construction and state-of-the-art existing methods for network construction followed by our hybrid text mining protocol for extracting pathways and regulatory networks from biomedical literature.

Crowdsourcing the nodulation gene network discovery environment

Background

The Legumes (Fabaceae) are an economically and ecologically important group of plant species with the conspicuous capacity for symbiotic nitrogen fixation in root nodules, specialized plant organs containing symbiotic microbes. With the aim of understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms leading to nodulation, many efforts are underway to identify nodulation-related genes and determine how these genes interact with each other. In order to accurately and efficiently reconstruct nodulation gene network, a crowdsourcing platform, CrowdNodNet, was created.

Results

The platform implements the jQuery and vis.js JavaScript libraries, so that users are able to interactively visualize and edit the gene network, and easily access the information about the network, e.g. gene lists, gene interactions and gene functional annotations. In addition, all the gene information is written on MediaWiki pages, enabling users to edit and contribute to the network curation.

Conclusions

Utilizing the continuously updated, collaboratively written, and community-reviewed Wikipedia model, the platform could, in a short time, become a comprehensive knowledge base of nodulation-related pathways. The platform could also be used for other biological processes, and thus has great potential for integrating and advancing our understanding of the functional genomics and systems biology of any process for any species. The platform is available at http://crowd.bioops.info/, and the source code can be openly accessed at https://github.com/bioops/crowdnodnet under MIT License.

Applying Monte Carlo Simulation to Biomedical Literature to Approximate Genetic Network

Biologists often need to know the set of genes associated with a given set of genes or a given disease. We propose in this paper a classifier system called Monte Carlo for Genetic Network (MCforGN) that can construct genetic networks, identify functionally related genes, and predict gene-disease associations. MCforGN identifies functionally related genes based on their co-occurrences in the abstracts of biomedical literature. For a given gene g , the system first extracts the set of genes found within the abstracts of biomedical literature associated with g. It then ranks these genes to determine the ones with high co-occurrences with g . It overcomes the limitations of current approaches that employ analytical deterministic algorithms by applying Monte Carlo Simulation to approximate genetic networks. It does so by conducting repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results and to optimize these results. Moreover, it analyzes results to obtain the probabilities of different genes' co-occurrences using series of statistical tests. MCforGN can detect gene-disease associations by employing a combination of centrality measures (to identify the central genes in disease-specific genetic networks) and Monte Carlo Simulation. MCforGN aims at enhancing state-of-the-art biological text mining by applying novel extraction techniques. We evaluated MCforGN by comparing it experimentally with nine approaches. Results showed marked improvement.

An integrated text mining framework for metabolic interaction network reconstruction

Text mining (TM) in the field of biology is fast becoming a routine analysis for the extraction and curation of biological entities (e.g., genes, proteins, simple chemicals) as well as their relationships. Due to the wide applicability of TM in situations involving complex relationships, it is valuable to apply TM to the extraction of metabolic interactions (i.e., enzyme and metabolite interactions) through metabolic events. Here we present an integrated TM framework containing two modules for the extraction of metabolic events (Metabolic Event Extraction module—MEE) and for the construction of a metabolic interaction network (Metabolic Interaction Network Reconstruction module—MINR). The proposed integrated TM framework performed well based on standard measures of recall, precision and F-score. Evaluation of the MEE module using the constructed Metabolic Entities (ME) corpus yielded F-scores of 59.15% and 48.59% for the detection of metabolic events for production and consumption, respectively. As for the testing of the entity tagger for Gene and Protein (GP) and metabolite with the test corpus, the obtained F-score was greater than 80% for the Superpathway of leucine, valine, and isoleucine biosynthesis. Mapping of enzyme and metabolite interactions through network reconstruction showed a fair performance for the MINR module on the test corpus with F-score >70%. Finally, an application of our integrated TM framework on a big-scale data (i.e., EcoCyc extraction data) for reconstructing a metabolic interaction network showed reasonable precisions at 69.93%, 70.63% and 46.71% for enzyme, metabolite and enzyme–metabolite interaction, respectively. This study presents the first open-source integrated TM framework for reconstructing a metabolic interaction network. This framework can be a powerful tool that helps biologists to extract metabolic events for further reconstruction of a metabolic interaction network. The ME corpus, test corpus, source code, and virtual machine image with pre-configured software are available at www.sbi.kmutt.ac.th/ preecha/metrecon.

Biblio-MetReS: a bibliometric network reconstruction application and server

Background

Reconstruction of genes and/or protein networks from automated analysis of the literature is one of the current targets of text mining in biomedical research. Some user-friendly tools already perform this analysis on precompiled databases of abstracts of scientific papers. Other tools allow expert users to elaborate and analyze the full content of a corpus of scientific documents. However, to our knowledge, no user friendly tool that simultaneously analyzes the latest set of scientific documents available on line and reconstructs the set of genes referenced in those documents is available.

Results

This article presents such a tool, Biblio-MetReS, and compares its functioning and results to those of other user-friendly applications (iHOP, STRING) that are widely used. Under similar conditions, Biblio-MetReS creates networks that are comparable to those of other user friendly tools. Furthermore, analysis of full text documents provides more complete reconstructions than those that result from using only the abstract of the document.

Conclusions

Literature-based automated network reconstruction is still far from providing complete reconstructions of molecular networks. However, its value as an auxiliary tool is high and it will increase as standards for reporting biological entities and relationships become more widely accepted and enforced. Biblio-MetReS is an application that can be downloaded from http://metres.udl.cat/. It provides an easy to use environment for researchers to reconstruct their networks of interest from an always up to date set of scientific documents.