Affichage des résultats 1241 à 1260 sur 1470 au total
Thèse de Vérane Berger le mardi 8 décembre 2015 à 14 h - salle de conférence BU (La Doua)
Sequencing by nanopore is a promising technology that makes it possible to determine the sequence of a DNA fragment without amplification and without synthesizing a DNA strand. Available since 2014 the Oxford Nanopore sequencer, named MinION, is a portable device that enables the sequencing of complex genomes at low cost. Nowadays, the MinION can deliver several gigabases of data and is able to sequence DNA fragments up to 1Mb. The presentation will provide an overview of how the device has evolved over the last two years and what are the main applications today. Next we'll end up with the presentation of the PromethION, the high-throughput platform that promise to lower the cost of sequencing a human genome to <1000$.
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When humans reason about functional structures of RNA, they speak of long hairpins with miRNA precursors, of clover leaf structures with tRNA, of neighouring hairpins with attenuators, and so on. Most of the time, we do not care about individual base pairs or helix sizes, while the overall arrangment of helices and loops really matters.RNA folding programs, however, used to be ignorant of abstraction in RNA, deceiving us with a single, minimum free energy structure, or overwhelming us with a plethora of near-optimal structures, most of which are quite similar and therefore redundant.RNA shape abstraction alleviates this situation. RNA shapes are abstract structure images, retaining adjacency and nesting of structural features, but disregarding size information. Shape abstraction integrates well with dynamic programming algorithms, and hence it can be applied during structure prediction rather than afterwards. This avoids exponential explosion in the near-optimal folding space, and provides a non-heuristic and complete account of an RNA molecule's structural inclinations. Quite magically, some long-studied problems become easy.In the presentation, I will shortly review the notion of abstract shapes. I will then discuss several applications of this concept, including a highly effective filtering method when working with structural classes of RNA described by covariance models, such as provided by the Rfam data base.
Thèse de Stéphanie Periquet - Jeudi 10 juillet 2014 - 14:30 - Salle de conférence de la Bibliothèque - La Doua
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Among biologist as well as linguists, it is now widely accepted that there are many striking parallels between the evolution of life forms and the history of languages. Starting from the rise of language studies as a scientific discipline in the early 19th century, up to today's recent "quantitative turn" in historical linguistics, scholars from both disciplines have repeatedly pointed to similarities between the respective research objects in biology and linguistics. During the last two decades, this has lead to a new school of ''quantitative historical linguistics''. Based on the key assumption that the characteristic processes of language change and biological evolution are so similar that the methods designed for one discipline may also be used in the other one, methods which were originally designed to study biological evolution (methods for phylogenetic reconstruction, sequence alignment, or biological network analysis) have now repeatedly been applied to linguistic data.Unfortunately, not all analogies which have been made between evolutionary processes in linguistics and biology reflect true similarities in the processes. Striking differences between the research objects of both disciplines are often ignored. In the talk, I will review proposed similarities between evolutionary processes in the two disciplines and discuss their methodological implications.
Living organisms are complex systems, and stressing them with toxicants only increases the complexity. In ecotoxicology, the common strategy for addressing toxic effects is to accept this complexity and provide descriptions of parts of the response of the system. Such descriptions will not advance our understanding and cannot address the problems of environmental risk assessment. Complexity is of course not unique for ecotoxicology. In related disciplines such as environmental chemistry, the common approach is to simplify the system to its bare essence and study the behaviour of the simplification. Something similar does exist for toxic effects, which can be placed under the designation "toxicokinetic-toxicodynamic" (TKTD) modelling. Toxicokinetics deals with the uptake of chemicals into the organism, whereas toxicodynamics addresses the relationship between internal concentrations and effects over time. In this presentation, I will focus on toxicodynamic models, and discuss how biology can be radically simplified to suit our purpose. Furthermore, I demonstrate how experimental data can be analysed, and discuss the statistical problems associated with fitting the models to data.