Solving problems in bioinformatics often needs extensive computational power. Current trends in processor architecture, especially massive multi-core processors for graphic cards, combine a large number of cores into a single chip to improve the overall performance. The Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) provides programming interfaces to make full use of the computing power of graphics processing units. We present a way to use CUDA for substantial performance improvement of methods based on multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). The suitability of the CUDA architecture as a high-performance computing platform is studied by adapting a MDS algorithm on specific hardware properties. We show how typical bioinformatics problems related to dimension reduction and network layout benefit from the multi-core implementation of the MDS algorithm. CUDA-based methods are introduced and compared to standard solutions, demonstrating 50-fold acceleration and above.
Standards shape our everyday life. From nuts and bolts to electronic devices and technological processes, standardised products and processes are all around us. Standards have technological and economic benefits, such as making information exchange, production, and services more efficient. However, novel, innovative areas often either lack proper standards, or documents about standards in these areas are not available from a centralised platform or formal body (such as the International Standardisation Organisation). Systems and synthetic biology is a relatively novel area, and it is only in the last decade that the standardisation of data, information, and models related to systems and synthetic biology has become a community-wide effort. Several open standards have been established and are under continuous development as a community initiative. COMBINE, the ‘COmputational Modeling in BIology’ NEtwork has been established as an umbrella initiative to coordinate and promote the development of the various community standards and formats for computational models. There are yearly two meeting, HARMONY (Hackathons on Resources for Modeling in Biology), Hackathon-type meetings with a focus on development of the support for standards, and COMBINE forums, workshop-style events with oral presentations, discussion, poster, and breakout sessions for further developing the standards. For more information see http://co.mbine.org/. So far the different standards were published and made accessible through the standards’ web- pages or preprint services. The aim of this special issue is to provide a single, easily accessible and citable platform for the publication of standards in systems and synthetic biology. This special issue is intended to serve as a central access point to standards and related initiatives in systems and synthetic biology, it will be published annually to provide an opportunity for standard development groups to communicate updated specifications.
The recently proposed Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN) provides a standard for the visual representation of biochemical and cellular processes. SBGN helps to communicate biological knowledge more efficient and accurate between different research communities in the life sciences. However, to support SBGN, methods and tools for editing, validating, and translating of SBGN maps are necessary.We present methods for these tasks, the tool SBGN-ED, and an application example. SBGN-ED allows to create all three types of SBGN maps from scratch, to validate these maps for syntactical and semantical correctness, to translate maps from the KEGG and MetaCrop databases into SBGN, and to export SBGN maps into several file and image formats.
1 Summary We propose a method for visualizing a set of related metabolic pathways across organisms using 21/2 dimensional graph visualization. Interdependent, twodimensional layouts of each pathway are stacked on top of each other so that biologists get a full picture of subtle and significant dierences among the pathways. The (dis)similarities between pathways are expressed by the Hamming distances of the underlying graphs which are used to compute a stacking order for the pathways. Layouts are determined by a global layout of the union of all pathway graphs using a variant of the proven Sugiyama approach for layered graph drawing. Our variant layout approach allows edges to cross if they appear in dierent graphs.
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