Search

With tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS), spectra can be generated by various fragmentation techniques including collision-induced dissociation (CID), higher-energy collisional dissociation (HCD), electron capture dissociation (ECD), electron transfer dissociation (ETD) and so on. At the same time, de novo sequencing using multiple spectra from the same peptide generated by different fragmentation techniques is becoming popular in proteomics studies. The focus of this study is the use of paired spectra from CID (or HCD) and ECD (or ETD) fragmentation because of the complementarity between them. We present a de novo peptide sequencing framework for multiple tandem mass spectra, and apply it to paired spectra sequencing problem. The performance of the framework on paired spectra is compared to another successful method named pNovo+. The results show that our proposed method outperforms pNovo+ in terms of full length peptide sequencing accuracy on three pairs of experimental datasets, with the accuracy increasing up to 13.6% compared to pNovo+.

Cellular processes are typically carried out by protein complexes and functional modules. Identifying them plays an important role for our attempt to reveal principles of cellular organizations and functions. In this article, we review computational algorithms for identifying protein complexes and/or functional modules from protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. We first describe issues and pitfalls when interpreting PPI networks. Then based on types of data used and main ideas involved, we briefly describe protein complex and/or functional module identification algorithms in four categories: (i) those based on topological structures of unweighted PPI networks; (ii) those based on characters of weighted PPI networks; (iii) those based on multiple data integrations; and (iv) those based on dynamic PPI networks. The PPI networks are modelled increasingly precise when integrating more types of data, and the study of protein complexes would benefit by shifting from static to dynamic PPI networks.

The study of stability is essential for designing or controlling genetic regulatory networks. This paper addresses global and robust stability of genetic regulatory networks with time delays and parameter uncertainties. Most existing results on this issue are based on the linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) approach, which results in checking the existence of a feasible solution to high dimensional LMIs. Based on M-matrix theory, we will present several novel global stability conditions for genetic regulatory networks with time-varying and time-invariant delays. All of these stability conditions are given in terms of M-matrices, for which there are many and very easy ways to be verified. Then, we extend these results to genetic regulatory networks with time delays and parameter uncertainties. To illustrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results, several genetic regulatory networks are analyzed. Compared with existing results in the literature, we also show that our results are less conservative than existing ones with these illustrative genetic regulatory networks.