Medical target prediction from genome sequence: combining different sequence analysis algorithms with expert knowledge and input from artificial intelligence approaches

DATA MINING APPROACHES FOR KIDNEY DIALYSIS TREATMENT

Data mining techniques has been used as a recent trend for achieving diagnostics results, especially in medical fields such as kidney dialysis, skin cancer and breast cancer detection, and also biological sequences classification. Due to its ability to discover the relationship and pattern of the medical database, early detection or prediction of pathological conditions through mining has become feasible. This paper discusses the data mining approach for parametric evaluation to improve the treatment of kidney dialysis patient. The experimental result shows that classification accuracy using Association mining between the ranges 50–97.7% is obtained based on the dialysis parameter combination. Such a decision-based approach helps the clinician to decide the level of dialysis required for individual patient.

Redox regulation: a new challenge for pharmacology

Redox signaling is evolving as a new field of biochemical and pharmacological research. Unlike oxidative stress which is characterized by a macroscopic shift in cellular redox potentials and usually accompanied by oxygen radical induced damage, redox regulation involves subtle and more chemically defined oxidations of short duration. Most important is the reductive component as a necessary part of a reversible regulatory process. Examples of redox regulation occur during early stages of the immune response, in hypoxia or in endothelial dysfunction. Persistent oxidative events together with a decline in the cellular reduction potential lead to oxidative stress as is seen in the pathophysiology of sepsis, reperfusion damage, atherosclerosis and diabetes. Oxidative signals involve superoxide and nitric oxide as the main players which form a system of oxidizing, nitrating or nitrosating species leading to posttranslational modifications of proteins. Modern techniques of immunohistochemistry and mass spectrometry allow a correlation of protein modification, e.g., disulfide, S-oxide, S-nitroso or nitrotyrosine formation, with enzyme activities and cellular responses. In this commentary, examples of the control of prostanoid synthesis by the NO/O2- system are described. Redox regulation represents an interesting challenge for the development of drugs that modulate the oxidative trigger mechanisms or enforce the reductive pathways.

Comparative genome analysis and pathway reconstruction

Pathway reconstruction builds on genome and biochemical data with the aim of reconstructing higher level interactions between identified enzymes in a specific genome, in particular the different enzyme pathways (species or individual/patient). Metabolite flow in a pathway is analyzed by different tools, such as elementary mode analysis. This reveals key enzymes and pharmacological targets in the enzyme network. An overview of bioinformatic tools and algorithms for these tasks, application examples and recent results from these techniques are presented. Target selection, drug development and optimization can all be sped up using these approaches.