BBC reports on another interesting article in Nature today.  However, I can’t seem to find it in today’s issue of Nature.  Scientists from McGill University have found a way to increase the immune system response of mice.  The work comes from the lab of Prof. Sonenberg.  From the BBC article, the researchers turned off 2 genes responsible for repressing interferon production in mice cells and thereby boosted the immune response of the mice.  However, they say that the method cannot be used in human cells for now.

Another SVMs applied to DNA microarray data project.  Looks like it’s from a collaboration called MLExAI between the University of Hartford and Central Connecticut State University that is an information exchange on teaching machine learning and AI material.

A paper published in PNAS on using SVMs to analyze DNA microarray data:

“We introduce a method of functionally classifying genes by using gene expression data from DNA microarray hybridization experiments. The method is based on the theory of support vector machines (SVMs). SVMs are considered a supervised computer learning method because they exploit prior knowledge of gene function to identify unknown genes of similar function from expression data. SVMs avoid several problems associated with unsupervised clustering methods, such as hierarchical clustering and self-organizing maps. SVMs have many mathematical features that make them attractive for gene expression analysis, including their flexibility in choosing a similarity function, sparseness of solution when dealing with large data sets, the ability to handle large feature spaces, and the ability to identify outliers. We test several SVMs that use different similarity metrics, as well as some other supervised learning methods, and find that the SVMs best identify sets of genes with a common function using expression data. Finally, we use SVMs to predict functional roles for uncharacterized yeast ORFs based on their expression data.”

Cool article from The MIT Tech Review on how University of Chicago researchers have shed light on the mechanism by which evolution keeps genetic recombination in check:

“It’s important to increase diversity, but if it goes unchecked, it’s likely to lead to instability in the genome that could be dangerous,” says Stefansson. “If you have the same sequence variant influencing recombination in one direction in men and the other direction in women, you have put together a mechanism to keep recombination rates within certain limits.”