The degree to which an amino acid site is free to vary is strongly dependent on its structural and functional importance. An amino acid that plays an essential role is unlikely to change over evolutionary time. Hence, the evolutionary rate at an amino acid site is indicative of how conserved this site is and, in turn, allows evaluation of its importance in maintaining the structure/function of ...

MOTIVATION MHC:peptide binding plays a central role in activating the immune surveillance. Computational approaches to determine T-cell epitopes restricted to any given major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecule are of special practical value in the development of for instance vaccines with broad population coverage against emerging pathogens. Methods have recently been published that are ...

A supervised pixel-based classifier for identifying the presence of a given set of texture patterns of interest in a complex textured image is described. The proposed technique integrates the outcome of multiple texture feature extraction methods belonging to different families. In this way, it yields lower classification rates than previous texture classifiers based on specific families of tex...

Genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) are increasingly applied to investigate the physiology not only of simple prokaryotes, but also eukaryotes, such as plants, characterized with compartmentalized cells of multiple types. While genome-scale models aim at including the entirety of known metabolic reactions, mounting evidence has indicated that only a subset of these reactions is active in a giv...

The identification and classification of weeds are of major technical and economical importance in the agricultural industry. To automate these activities, like in shape, color and texture, weed control system is feasible. The goal of this paper is to build a real-time, machine vision weed control system that can detect weed locations. In order to accomplish this objective, a real-time robotic ...

Analytics is the future of big data because only transforming data into information gives them value and can turn data in business in competitive advantage. Large data volumes, their variety and the increasing speed their growth, stretch the boundaries of traditional data warehouses and ETL tools. This paper investigates the benefits of Big Data technology and main methods of analysis that can ...

This review intends to present an overview of methods currently under development for the specific and sensitive detection of pathogenic bacteria that exist in a variety of human environments. Bacteria continue to be a major health threat in general, and much effort is being deployed to counteract this problem. In a first instance, current and efficient techniques in use for the detection of ba...

The ASSIST recommends program has actively promoted application-specific methods for testing and evaluating LED lighting technology to allow for easy comparison with traditional lighting. Recent work has produced alternative methods for evaluating outdoor lighting, including parking lot luminaires and the visual effectiveness of lighting.

The problem of mapping tasks and communications onto multiple machines and networks in a heterogeneous computing environment has been shown to be NP complete. Therefore, the development of heuristic techniques to find near-optimal solutions is required. Many different types of mapping heuristics have been developed in recent years. However, selecting the best heuristic to use in any given scena...

BACKGROUND Lithium is a benchmark treatment for bipolar illness in adults. However, there has been relatively little methodologically stringent research regarding the use of lithium in youth suffering from bipolarity. METHODS Under the auspices of the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA), a Written Request (WR) pertaining to the study of lithium in pediatric mania was issued by the Un...