Gene regulatory activity prediction problem is one of the important steps to understand the significant factors for gene regulation in biology. The advents of recent sequencing technologies allow us ...to deal with this task efficiently. Amongst these, Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been applied successfully up to more than 80% accuracy in the case of predicting gene regulatory activity in Drosophila embryonic development. In this paper, we introduce a metaheuristic based on genetic algorithm (GA) to select the best parameters for regulatory prediction from transcriptional factor binding profiles. Our approach helps to improve more than 10% accuracy compared to the traditional grid search. The improvements are also significantly supported by biological experimental data. Thus, the proposed method helps boosting not only the prediction performance but also the potentially biological insights.
The objective of this study was to quantitate and characterize the variants of bombesin-like immunoreactivity in the alimentary canal of the rat, rabbit, hawk, owl, dog, monkey and human. ...Bombesin-like immunoreactivity was found throughout the entire gastrointestinal tract of all species studied. In the rat, the highest concentration of bombesin-like immunoreactivity was found in the colon. Gel chromatography showed that bombesin-like immunoreactivity corresponded to gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP-27) and GRP-10. In the dog, the greatest concentration of bombesin-like immunoreactivity was observed in the mucosal layer of the fundus, whereas the concentration of bombesin-like immunoreactivity in the muscle layer of the dog did not vary significantly from region to region. Gel chromatography showed that bombesin-like immunoreactivity in the dog corresponded to GRP-27, bombesin, GRP-10, and a smaller fragment. In the human, the concentration of bombesin-like immunoreactivity did not vary significantly from region to region in the mucosal and muscular layers. Gel chromatography of human fundal mucosa showed that bombesin-like immunoreactivity peaks occur in the regions of GRP-27, bombesin and GRP-10. These findings substantiate the observation that bombesin-like peptides play a variety of roles in the regulation of gut function.
