Life Sciences Commons^™

What Google Maps Can Do For Biomedical Data Dissemination: Examples And A Design Study, Radu Jianu, David H. Laidlaw

School of Computing and Information Sciences

Background: Biologists often need to assess whether unfamiliar datasets warrant the time investment required for more detailed exploration. Basing such assessments on brief descriptions provided by data publishers is unwieldy for large datasets that contain insights dependent on specific scientific questions. Alternatively, using complex software systems for a preliminary analysis may be deemed as too time consuming in itself, especially for unfamiliar data types and formats. This may lead to wasted analysis time and discarding of potentially useful data. Results: We present an exploration of design opportunities that the Google Maps interface offers to biomedical data visualization. In particular, we …

Identification Of Conserved Splicing Motifs In Mutually Exclusive Exons Of 15 Insect Species, Patricia Buendia, John Tyree, Robert Laredo, Shu-Ning Hsu

School of Computing and Information Sciences

Background: During alternative splicing, the inclusion of an exon in the final mRNA molecule is determined by nuclear proteins that bind cis-regulatory sequences in a target pre-mRNA molecule. A recent study suggested that the regulatory codes of individual RNA-binding proteins may be nearly immutable between very diverse species such as mammals and insects. The model system Drosophila melanogaster therefore presents an excellent opportunity for the study of alternative splicing due to the availability of quality EST annotations in FlyBase.

Methods: In this paper, we describe an in silico analysis pipeline to extract putative exonic splicing regulatory sequences from a multiple …