Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, the Extended Kalman filtering (EKF) approach has been used to infer gene regulatory networks using time-series gene expression data. Gene expression values are considered stochastic processes and the gene regulatory network, a dynamical nonlinear stochastic model. Using these values and a modified Kalman filtering approach, the model's parameters and consequently the interactions amongst genes are predicted. In this paper, each gene-gene interaction is modeled using a linear term, a nonlinear one, and a constant term. The linear and nonlinear term coefficients are included in the state vector together with the gene expressions' true values. Through the extended Kalman... 

The acidity and stability constants of M-Met (M: M2+; Met 1: L-methionine) complexes, determined by potentiometric pH titrations, were used to make a comparative investigation with L-cysteine (Cys). It is shown that regarding to M ion - binding properties vital differences on complex bilding were considered. It is demonstrated, that in M-Met complexes, M ion is coordinated to the carboxyl group, M ion is also able to build macrochelate over amine group. The upmentioned results demonstrate that for M-Met complex the stability constants is also largly determined by the affinity of Cu2+ for amino group but in opposite to Met, some metal ions such as Co2+, Cu2+, and Zn2+ build with Cys 2... 

In this research, a web-based simulator is developed, which can be used for generating image sequences of moving spermatozoa cells. It can be used for assessment of multiple object tracking algorithms, especially Computer Aided Sperm Analysis (CASA) systems. The developed software has many useful parameters such as blurring images or adding noise and it also gives full control of sperm counts and types. To illustrate performance of the developed simulator, three parameters (spermatozoa population, standard deviation of Gaussian blur filter and noise intensity) have been swept and the results of three different multiple object tracking algorithms were compared as an application of this... 

Experimental data of the DNA cyclization (J-factor) at short length scales exceed the theoretical expectation based on the wormlike chain (WLC) model by several orders of magnitude. Here, we propose that asymmetric bending rigidity of the double helix in the groove direction can be responsible for extreme bendability of DNA at short length scales and it also facilitates DNA loop formation at these lengths. To account for the bending asymmetry, we consider the asymmetric elastic rod (AER) model which has been introduced and parametrized in an earlier study [B. Eslami-Mossallam and M. R. Ejtehadi, Phys. Rev. E 80, 011919 (2009)]. Exploiting a coarse grained representation of the DNA molecule... 

This paper presents a multi agent system which can help type 2 diabetic patients. Because of diabetes nature, medical care and lifestyle can both prevent the complications of this illness, so self-managing is very crucial for these patients. Therefore, each effective factor of controlling diabetes and increasing patients' knowledge including: suitable diet and monitoring blood glucose level, is assigned to be an agent which works independently whilst coordinates and cooperates with other agents. The proposed architecture of this multi agent system organizes all the various agents of this system in a way that not only each of them can accomplish their responsibility, but also they can have... 

DNA supercoiling is a widespread phenomenon in biology. Here we introduce a coarse-grained DNA model and study supercoiled DNA rings via a rigid body molecular dynamics simulation. Our model allows us to investigate these structures in more detail than previously. The simulations are performed on rings of one to six kilobase pairs length and are compared to available experimental data and former simulation studies. The current study provides new additional information about some of the geometrical parameters of the supercoiled DNA rings. It also shows how enforcing a supercoiled DNA ring to two-dimensional space changes its geometrical parameters. Finally, our molecular dynamics method... 

Removal or suppression of key proteins in an essential pathway of a pathogen is expected to disrupt the pathway and prohibit the pathogen from performing a vital function. Thus disconnecting multiple essential pathways should disrupt the survival of a pathogen even when it has multiple pathways to drug resistance. We consider a scenario where the drug-resistance pathways are unknown. To disrupt these pathways, we consider a cut set S of G, where G is a connected simple graph representing the protein interaction network of the pathogen, so that G-S splits to two partitions such that the endpoints of each pathway are in different partitions. If the difference between the sizes of the two... 

Waste water from ore plant layout central Alborz's coal has been investigated and analyzed. Studies showed that because of acidic character, the waste water contains heavy metals including Cu, Cr, Ba, Zn, V, Sr, Pb, Ni. Considering the importance of this topic for outgoing acidic waste waters which is hazardous for the environment, i.e. heavy metals, the same should not be transferred into the environment. Since their waste water is transferred into nearby agricultural ground, it was developed a method, so that waste water is primarily directed into a slug pond for sedimentation. In the second stage in another pond, the outflow of waste water was treated with chemicals. Also the pH was... 

Using analytical approach and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, we study the elastic behavior of the intrinsically twisted elastic ribbons with bending anisotropy, such as double-stranded DNA (dsDNA), in two-dimensional (2D) confinement. We show that, due to the bending anisotropy, the persistence length of dsDNA in 2D conformations is always greater than three-dimensional (3D) conformations. This result is in consistence with the measured values for DNA persistence length in 2D and 3D in equal biological conditions. We also show that in two dimensions, an anisotropic, intrinsically twisted polymer exhibits an implicit twist-bend coupling, which leads to the transient curvature increasing with a... 

The Lab On a CD (LOCD), also known as Centrifugal Microfluidics, has evolved into a sophisticated platform for performing biomedical assays due to its marvelous miniaturization and accurate simulation of biological reactions. Among the numerous applications of the LOCD is fluid mixing. In this paper a centrifugal, serpentine micromixer is simulated and reformed toward better mixing performance. The micromixer was chosen to be curved as a curved design was found to be thrice as functional and compact as a rectilinear design, mixing-wise. The two angular velocity and opening radius parameters were originally hypothesized to affect mixing performance. Effect of angular velocity was studied over... 

The gas chromatography retention indices of 168 pesticides were used to construct a robust quantitative structure - retention relationship (QSRR) model. After outlier detection by Cook's influence measurement, the remaining compounds were subjected to two different modeling strategies. The first one was stepwise multiple linear regression (stepwise-MLR). Results of this method revealed that 81.7 percent of variances of the response could be explained by the model. The other strategy was kernel orthogonal projection to latent structure (KOPLS). R2 and RMSE values for the prediction set established by Monte Carlo cross validation of the KOPLS were 0.906 and 0.093, respectively. Y-randomization... 

Applying engineering approaches to non-engineering systems such as biological systems has brought a new research filed to the surface. The sole purpose of this research is mathematical modeling the cell cycle control system in the fissionyeast cell using Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE).This paper, in fact, introduces the capabilities of engineering knowledge and engineering of control, in particular, in this field. ©2009 IEEE  

Disease association study is of great importance among various fields of study in bioinformatics. Computational methods happen to be advantageous specifically when experimental approaches fail to obtain accurate results. Haplotypes are believed to be the most responsible biological data for genetic diseases. In this paper, the problem of reconstructing haplotypes from error-containing SNP fragments is discussed For this purpose, two new methods have been proposed by a combination of k-means clustering and particle swarm optimization algorithm. The methods and their implementation results on real biological and simulation datasets are represented which shows that they outperform the methods... 

Association mapping of genetic diseases has attracted extensive research interest during the recent years. However, most of the methodologies introduced so far suffer from spurious inference of the associated sites due to population inhomogeneities. In this paper, we introduce a statistical framework to compensate for this shortcoming by equipping the current methodologies with a state-of-the-art clustering algorithm being widely used in population genetics applications. The proposed framework jointly infers the disease-associated factors and the hidden population structures. In this regard, a Markov Chain-Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure has been employed to assess the posterior probability... 

Calcium is a highly widespread and versatile intracellular ion that can control a wide range of temporal dynamics in the brain such as synaptic plasticity. This brief presents a novel and efficient digital circuit for implementing a calcium-based plasticity model aimed at reproducing relevant biological dynamics. Accordingly, we investigate the feasibility of the proposed model in a minimal neural network stressing on the effect of calcium oscillations on synaptic plasticity with various neuronal stimulation protocols. MATLAB simulations and physical implementations on field-programmable gate array confirm that the proposed model, with considerably low hardware overhead, can fairly mimic the... 

The Lab On a CD (LOCD), also known as Centrifugal Microfluidics, has evolved into a sophisticated platform for performing biomedical assays due to its marvelous miniaturization and accurate simulation of biological reactions. Among the numerous applications of the LOCD is fluid mixing. In this paper a centrifugal, serpentine micromixer is simulated and reformed toward better mixing performance. The micromixer was chosen to be curved as a curved design was found to be thrice as functional and compact as a rectilinear design, mixing-wise. The two angular velocity and opening radius parameters were originally hypothesized to affect mixing performance. Effect of angular velocity was studied over... 

We introduce a theoretical method for simultaneous measurement of refractive index and thickness of multilayer systems using Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) without any auxiliary arrangement. The input data to the formalism are the FD-OCT measured optical path lengths (OPLs) and properly selected spectral components of FD-OCT interference spectrum. The outputs of the formalism can be affected significantly by uncertainty in measuring the OPLs. An optimization method is introduced to deal with the relatively large amount of uncertainty in measured OPLs and enhance the final results. Simulation result shows that by using the optimization method, indices can be extracted... 

In electronic computers, extensive amount of computations required for searching biological sequences in big databases leads to vast amount of energy consumption for electrical processing and cooling. On the other hand, optical processing is much faster than electrical counterpart, due to its parallel processing capability, at a fraction of energy consumption level and cost. In this regard, this paper proposes a correlation-based optical algorithm using metamaterial, taking advantages of optical parallel processing, to efficiently locate the edits as a means of DNA sequence comparison. Specifically, the proposed algorithm partitions the read DNA sequence into multiple overlapping intervals,... 

In this research, a new metaheuristic optimization algorithm, inspired by biological nervous systems and artificial neural networks (ANNs) is proposed for solving complex optimization problems. The proposed method, named as neural network algorithm (NNA), is developed based on the unique structure of ANNs. The NNA benefits from complicated structure of the ANNs and its operators in order to generate new candidate solutions. In terms of convergence proof, the relationship between improvised exploitation and each parameter under asymmetric interval is derived and an iterative convergence of NNA is proved theoretically. In this paper, the NNA with its interconnected computing unit is examined... 

One of the main challenges in elimination of oil contamination from polluted environments is improvement of biodegradation by highly efficient microorganisms. Bacillus subtilis MJ01 has been evaluated as a new resource for producing biosurfactant compounds. This bacterium, which produces surfactin, is able to enhance bio-accessibility to oil hydrocarbons in contaminated soils. The genome of B. subtilis MJ01 was sequenced and assembled by PacBio RS sequencing technology. One big contig with a length of 4,108,293 bp without any gap was assembled. Genome annotation and prediction of gene showed that MJ01 genome is very similar to B. subtilis spizizenii TU-B-10 (95% similarity). The comparison...