Open Access Published by De Gruyter

Volume 20 Issue 1

March 2023

Issue of Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics

Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available March 31, 2023

Frontmatter

Page range: i-ii

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Special Section: Standards in Systems and Synthetic Biology; Guest Editors: Matthias König, Padraig Gleeson, Martin Golebiewski, Thomas E. Gorochowski, Michael Hucka, Sarah M. Keating, Chris J. Myers, David P. Nickerson, Bjorn Sommer, Dagmar Waltemath, Falk Schreiber

Open Access March 29, 2023

Specifications of standards in systems and synthetic biology: status and developments in 2022 and the COMBINE meeting 2022

Matthias König, Padraig Gleeson, Martin Golebiewski, Thomas E. Gorochowski, Michael Hucka, Sarah M. Keating, Chris J. Myers, David P. Nickerson, Björn Sommer, Dagmar Waltemath, Falk Schreiber

Article number: 20230004

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Abstract

This special issue of the Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics contains updated specifications of COMBINE standards in systems and synthetic biology. The 2022 special issue presents three updates to the standards: CellML 2.0.1, SBML Level 3 Package: Spatial Processes, Version 1, Release 1, and Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) Version 3.1.0. This document can also be used to identify the latest specifications for all COMBINE standards. In addition, this editorial provides a brief overview of the COMBINE 2022 meeting in Berlin.

Open Access March 17, 2023

CellML 2.0.1

Michael Clerx, Michael T. Cooling, Jonathan Cooper, Alan Garny, Keri Moyle, David P. Nickerson, Poul M. F. Nielsen, Hugh Sorby

Article number: 20230003

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Abstract

We present here CellML 2.0.1, an XML-based language for describing and exchanging mathematical models of physiological systems. MathML embedded in CellML documents is used to define the underlying mathematics of models. Models consist of a network of reusable components, each with variables and equations giving relationships between those variables. Models may import other models to create systems of increasing complexity. CellML 2.0.1 is defined by the normative specification presented here, prescribing the CellML syntax and the rules by which it should be used. The normative specification is intended primarily for the developers of software tools which directly consume CellML syntax. Users of CellML models may prefer to browse the informative rendering of the specification (https://cellml.org/specifications/cellml_2.0/) which extends the normative specification with explanations of the rules combined with examples of their usage. This version improves the identification of rule statements and corrects errata present in the CellML 2.0 specification.

Open Access March 10, 2023

SBML level 3 package: spatial processes, version 1, release 1

James C. Schaff, Anuradha Lakshminarayana, Robert F. Murphy, Frank T. Bergmann, Akira Funahashi, Devin P. Sullivan, Lucian P. Smith

Article number: 20220054

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Abstract

While many biological processes can be modeled by abstracting away the space in which those processes occur, some modeling (particularly at the cellular level) requires space itself to be modeled, with processes happening not in well-mixed compartments, but spatially-defined compartments. The SBML Level 3 Core specification does not include an explicit mechanism to encode geometries and spatial processes in a model, but it does provide a mechanism for SBML packages to extend the Core specification and add additional syntactic constructs. The SBML Spatial Processes package for SBML Level 3 adds the necessary features to allow models to encode geometries and other spatial information about the elements and processes it describes.

Open Access March 13, 2023

Synthetic biology open language (SBOL) version 3.1.0

Lukas Buecherl, Thomas Mitchell, James Scott-Brown, Prashant Vaidyanathan, Gonzalo Vidal, Hasan Baig, Bryan Bartley, Jacob Beal, Matthew Crowther, Pedro Fontanarrosa, Thomas Gorochowski, Raik Grünberg, Vishwesh Kulkarni, James McLaughlin, Göksel Mısırlı, Ernst Oberortner, Anil Wipat, Chris Myers

Article number: 20220058

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Abstract

Synthetic biology builds upon genetics, molecular biology, and metabolic engineering by applying engineering principles to the design of biological systems. When designing a synthetic system, synthetic biologists need to exchange information about multiple types of molecules, the intended behavior of the system, and actual experimental measurements. The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) has been developed as a standard to support the specification and exchange of biological design information in synthetic biology, following an open community process involving both bench scientists and scientific modelers and software developers, across academia, industry, and other institutions. This document describes SBOL 3.1.0, which improves on version 3.0.0 by including a number of corrections and clarifications as well as several other updates and enhancements. First, this version includes a complete set of validation rules for checking whether documents are valid SBOL 3. Second, the best practices section has been moved to an online repository that allows for more rapid and interactive of sharing these conventions. Third, it includes updates based upon six community approved enhancement proposals. Two enhancement proposals are related to the representation of an object’s namespace. In particular, the Namespace class has been removed and replaced with a namespace property on each class. Another enhancement is the generalization of the CombinatorialDeriviation class to allow direct use of Features and Measures . Next, the Participation class now allow Interactions to be participants to describe higher-order interactions. Another change is the use of Sequence Ontology terms for Feature orientation . Finally, this version of SBOL has generalized from using Unique Reference Identifiers (URIs) to Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) to support international character sets.

Regular Contributions

Open Access October 4, 2022

Co-creation environment with cloud virtual reality and real-time artificial intelligence toward the design of molecular robots

Akihiko Konagaya, Gregory Gutmann, Yuhui Zhang

Article number: 20220017

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Abstract

This paper describes the design philosophy for our cloud-based virtual reality (VR) co-creation environment (CCE) for molecular modeling. Using interactive VR simulation can provide enhanced perspectives in molecular modeling for intuitive live demonstration and experimentation in the CCE. Then the use of the CCE can enhance knowledge creation by bringing people together to share and create ideas or knowledge that may not emerge otherwise. Our prototype CCE discussed here, which was developed to demonstrate our design philosophy, has already enabled multiple members to log in and touch virtual molecules running on a cloud server with no noticeable network latency via real-time artificial intelligence techniques. The CCE plays an essential role in the rational design of molecular robot parts, which consist of bio-molecules such as DNA and protein molecules.

Open Access February 23, 2023

Community-wide collaboration is a must to reinstall trust in bioinformatics solutions and biomedical interpretation

Savaş Takan, Jens Allmer

Article number: 20220028

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Abstract

Science has become a highly competitive undertaking concerning, for example, resources, positions, students, and publications. At the same time, the number of journals presenting scientific findings skyrockets while the knowledge increase per manuscript seems to be diminishing. Science has also become ever more dependent on computational analyses. For example, virtually all biomedical applications involve computational data analysis. The science community develops many computational tools, and there are numerous alternatives for many computational tasks. The same is true for workflow management systems, leading to a tremendous duplication of efforts. Software quality is often of low concern, and typically, a small dataset is used as a proof of principle to support rapid publication. Installation and usage of such tools are complicated, so virtual machine images, containers, and package managers are employed more frequently. These simplify installation and ease of use but do not solve the software quality issue and duplication of effort. We believe that a community-wide collaboration is needed to (a) ensure software quality, (b) increase reuse of code, (c) force proper software review, (c) increase testing, and (d) make interoperability more seamless. Such a science software ecosystem will overcome current issues and increase trust in current data analyses.

Open Access February 23, 2023

Diabetes disease prediction system using HNB classifier based on discretization method

Bassam Abdo Al-Hameli, AbdulRahman A. Alsewari, Shadi S. Basurra, Jagdev Bhogal, Mohammed A. H. Ali

Article number: 20210037

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Abstract

Diagnosing diabetes early is critical as it helps patients live with the disease in a healthy way – through healthy eating, taking appropriate medical doses, and making patients more vigilant in their movements/activities to avoid wounds that are difficult to heal for diabetic patients. Data mining techniques are typically used to detect diabetes with high confidence to avoid misdiagnoses with other chronic diseases whose symptoms are similar to diabetes. Hidden Naïve Bayes is one of the algorithms for classification, which works under a data-mining model based on the assumption of conditional independence of the traditional Naïve Bayes. The results from this research study, which was conducted on the Pima Indian Diabetes (PID) dataset collection, show that the prediction accuracy of the HNB classifier achieved 82%. As a result, the discretization method increases the performance and accuracy of the HNB classifier.

About this journal

Objective
Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics (JIB) is an international open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in all aspects of integrative bioinformatics.

Molecular biology produces huge amounts of data in the post-genomic era. This includes data describing metabolic mechanisms and pathways, structural genomic organization, patterns of regulatory regions; proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. On the one hand, analysis of this data uses essentially the methods and concepts of computer science; on the other hand, the range of biological tasks solved by researchers determines the range and scope of the data. Currently, there are about 1,000 database systems and various analytical tools available via the Internet which are directed at solving various biological tasks.

The challenge we have is to integrate these list-parts and relationships from genomics and proteomics at novel levels of understanding. Integrative Bioinformatics is a new area of research using the tools of computer science and electronic infrastructure applied to Biotechnology. These tools will also represent the backbone of the concept of a virtual cell.

Topics

Software applications/tools and databases covering the following topics:

Molecular Databases, Information Systems and Data Warehouses
Integration of Data, Methods and Tools
Metabolic and Regulatory Network Modeling and Simulation
Signal Pathways and Cell Control
Network Analysis
Medical Informatics, Biomedicine and Biotechnology
Integrative Approaches for Drug Design
Integrative Data and Text Mining Approaches
Integrative, whole cell and molecular modeling
Visualization and animation

Review papers are also welcome with regard to JIB.tools.

Article formats
Research articles, Review papers, Workshop contributions (if peer-reviewed)

Article processing charges (APCs)
Each unsolicited article, which is accepted for publication in the Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics is subject to an Article Processing Charge of 1,000€.
The Open Access publication of invited articles for Special Issues is sponsored by the editors.

Inquiries concerning APCs should be addressed to the Editorial Office at De Gruyter (see contact details below).