Related papers: Graph Neural Networks for Microbial Genome Recover…
Mixed communities of organisms are found in many environments (from the human gut to marine ecosystems) and can have profound impact on human health and the environment. Metagenomics studies the genomic material of such communities through…
Metagenomics enables the reconstruction of microbial genomes in complex microbial communities without the need for culturing. Since assembly typically results in fragmented genomes the grouping of genome fragments (contigs) belonging to the…
The gut microbiome, crucial for human health, presents challenges in analyzing its complex metaomic data due to high dimensionality and sparsity. Traditional methods struggle to capture its intricate relationships. We investigate graph…
Motivation: Bacteriophages (aka phages), which mainly infect bacteria, play key roles in the biology of microbes. As the most abundant biological entities on the planet, the number of discovered phages is only the tip of the iceberg.…
A major hindrance to studies of microbial diversity has been that the vast majority of microbes cannot be cultured in the laboratory and thus are not amenable to traditional methods of characterization. Environmental shotgun sequencing…
Background: In the metagenome assembly of a microbiome community, we may think abundant species would be easier to assemble due to their deeper coverage. However, this conjucture is rarely tested. We often do not know how many abundant…
Metagenomic binning aims to cluster DNA fragments from mixed microbial samples into their respective genomes, a critical step for downstream analyses of microbial communities. Existing methods rely on deterministic representations, such as…
Repetitive DNA (repeats) poses significant challenges for accurate and efficient genome assembly and sequence alignment. This is particularly true for metagenomic data, where genome dynamics such as horizontal gene transfer, gene…
Microbes are essentially yet convolutedly linked with human lives on the earth. They critically interfere in different physiological processes and thus influence overall health status. Studying microbial species is used to be constrained to…
Graph-based neural network models are gaining traction in the field of representation learning due to their ability to uncover latent topological relationships between entities that are otherwise challenging to identify. These models have…
Obtaining effective representations of DNA sequences is crucial for genome analysis. Metagenomic binning, for instance, relies on genome representations to cluster complex mixtures of DNA fragments from biological samples with the aim of…
Metagenomics is an approach for characterizing environmental microbial communities in situ, it allows their functional and taxonomic characterization and to recover sequences from uncultured taxa. For communities of up to medium diversity,…
Sequence differences between the strains of bacteria comprising host-associated and environmental microbiota may play a role in community assembly and influence the resilience of microbial communities to disturbances. Tools for…
Microbiome functions are encoded within the genes of the community-wide metagenome. A natural question is whether properties of a microbial community can be predicted just from knowing the raw DNA sequences of its members. In this work, we…
The human gut microbiome is associated with a large number of disease etiologies. As such, it is a natural candidate for machine learning based biomarker development for multiple diseases and conditions. The microbiome is often analyzed…
The reconstruction of microbial genomes from large metagenomic datasets is a critical procedure for finding uncultivated microbial populations and defining their microbial functional roles. To achieve that, we need to perform metagenomic…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are usually used as a backbone to design methods in biomedical image segmentation. However, the limitation of receptive field and large number of parameters limit the performance of these methods. In…
Contig assembly is the first stage that most assemblers solve when reconstructing a genome from a set of reads. Its output consists of contigs -- a set of strings that are promised to appear in any genome that could have generated the…
Combining different modalities of data from human tissues has been critical in advancing biomedical research and personalised medical care. In this study, we leverage a graph embedding model (i.e VGAE) to perform link prediction on…
Metagenomics characterizes the taxonomic diversity of microbial communities by sequencing DNA directly from an environmental sample. One of the main challenges in metagenomics data analysis is the binning step, where each sequenced read is…