Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2017

Background: Myristoylation is an important hydrophobic post-translational modification that is covalently bound to the amino group of Gly residues on the N-terminus of proteins. The many diverse functions of myristoylation on proteins, such as membrane targeting, signal pathway regulation and apoptosis, are largely due to the lipid modification, whereas abnormal or irregular myristoylation on proteins can lead to several pat Read More

Aim and Objective: The disturbance of consciousness is one of the most common symptoms of those have alcoholism and may cause disability and mortality. Previous studies indicated that several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) increase the susceptibility of alcoholism. In this study, we utilized the Ensemble Bayesian Network (EBN) method to identify causal SNPs of alcoholism based on the verified GAW14 data. Material Read More

Aim and Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the association between folate level and the risk of schizophrenia and to identify possible biomarker for schizophrenia. Materials and Methods: Data about folate were extracted from 16 high quality studies. The association of folate level in blood and schizophrenia was evaluated using standardized mean difference (SMD) and 95% confidence interval (CI). Results: Totally 1 Read More

Background: Accurate diagnosis of chronic Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection related diseases is crucial to guide the therapy and to understand the mechanisms of disease progression. Plasma microRNAs, as stable biomarkers, have drawn significant attentions for distinguishing HBVrelated diseases. Methods: In this study, a new HBV-related disease identification method based on a two-layer logistic regression model was pr Read More

Background: Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma (ESCC) is a common malignant tumor in China, which causes about 200,000 deaths each year. Sensitive biomarkers are helpful to diagnose the disease in early stage. Methods: To identify biomarkers of ESCC and elucidate underlying mechanism of the disease, a targeted metabolomics strategy based on liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LCMS/ MS) Read More

Background: The study of metabolic pathway is one of the most important fields in biochemistry. Good comprehension of the metabolic pathway system is helpful to uncover the mechanism of some fundamental biological processes. Because chemicals are part of the main components of the metabolic pathway, correct identification of which metabolic pathways a given chemical can participate in is an important step for unde Read More

Aim and Objective: Mosquitoes can transmit many types of viruses such as West Nile virus and Zika virus and are responsible for a number of virus-causing diseases including malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, lymphatic filariasis, and Japanese B encephalitis. On January 19, 2016, the first case of Zika virus infection was identified in Taiwan, which presents the need for studying the mosquito species in the Taiwan Strait and evalu Read More

Aim and Objective: Protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) are responsible for protein phosphorylation. Because the level of protein phosphorylation is correlated with tumor transformation, PTPs have been considered as candidate transformation suppressors. In this study, we developed a novel PTP site prediction model, DephosSitePred, based on bi-profile sequence features. Materials and Method: A dataset which contains 63-, Read More

Aim and Objective: Gene selection method as an important data preprocessing work has been followed. The criteria Maximum relevance and minimum redundancy (MRMR) has been commonly used for gene selection, which has a satisfactory performance in evaluating the correlation between two genes. However, for viewing genes in isolation, it ignores the influence of other genes. Methods: In this study, we propose Read More

Background: As one of essential post-translational modifications (PTMs), the citrullination or deimination on an arginine residue would change the molecular weight and electrostatic charge of its side-chain. And it has been found that the citrullination in protein sequences was catalyzed by a type of Ca2+-dependent enzyme family called peptidylarginine deiminase (PAD), which include five isotypes: PAD1, 2, 3, 4/5, and 6. Citru Read More

Aim and Objective: Gastric cancer is one of the most common cancers and has very high incidence and mortality rate in Asian population. To tackle the problems of infiltration and heterogeneity, more accurate biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis as well as effective targets for treatment are needed to achieve better outcomes of gastric cancer patients. Recently, methods and algorithms for analyzing high-throughput sequenc Read More