NucleotideNucleotides are organic molecules composed of a nitrogenous base, a pentose sugar and a phosphate. They serve as monomeric units of the nucleic acid polymers – deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA), both of which are essential biomolecules within all life-forms on Earth. Nucleotides are obtained in the diet and are also synthesized from common nutrients by the liver. Nucleotides are composed of three subunit molecules: a nucleobase, a five-carbon sugar (ribose or deoxyribose), and a phosphate group consisting of one to three phosphates.
Convolutional neural networkConvolutional neural network (CNN) is a regularized type of feed-forward neural network that learns feature engineering by itself via filters (or kernel) optimization. Vanishing gradients and exploding gradients, seen during backpropagation in earlier neural networks, are prevented by using regularized weights over fewer connections. For example, for each neuron in the fully-connected layer 10,000 weights would be required for processing an image sized 100 × 100 pixels.
Serial analysis of gene expressionSerial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) is a transcriptomic technique used by molecular biologists to produce a snapshot of the messenger RNA population in a sample of interest in the form of small tags that correspond to fragments of those transcripts. Several variants have been developed since, most notably a more robust version, LongSAGE, RL-SAGE and the most recent SuperSAGE. Many of these have improved the technique with the capture of longer tags, enabling more confident identification of a source gene.
Enhancer (genetics)In genetics, an enhancer is a short (50–1500 bp) region of DNA that can be bound by proteins (activators) to increase the likelihood that transcription of a particular gene will occur. These proteins are usually referred to as transcription factors. Enhancers are cis-acting. They can be located up to 1 Mbp (1,000,000 bp) away from the gene, upstream or downstream from the start site. There are hundreds of thousands of enhancers in the human genome. They are found in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
Highway networkIn machine learning, the Highway Network was the first working very deep feedforward neural network with hundreds of layers, much deeper than previous artificial neural networks. It uses skip connections modulated by learned gating mechanisms to regulate information flow, inspired by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks. The advantage of a Highway Network over the common deep neural networks is that it solves or partially prevents the vanishing gradient problem, thus leading to easier to optimize neural networks.
De novo gene birthDe novo gene birth is the process by which new genes evolve from DNA sequences that were ancestrally non-genic. De novo genes represent a subset of novel genes, and may be protein-coding or instead act as RNA genes. The processes that govern de novo gene birth are not well understood, although several models exist that describe possible mechanisms by which de novo gene birth may occur. Although de novo gene birth may have occurred at any point in an organism's evolutionary history, ancient de novo gene birth events are difficult to detect.
Gene expression programmingIn computer programming, gene expression programming (GEP) is an evolutionary algorithm that creates computer programs or models. These computer programs are complex tree structures that learn and adapt by changing their sizes, shapes, and composition, much like a living organism. And like living organisms, the computer programs of GEP are also encoded in simple linear chromosomes of fixed length. Thus, GEP is a genotype–phenotype system, benefiting from a simple genome to keep and transmit the genetic information and a complex phenotype to explore the environment and adapt to it.
Attention (machine learning)Machine learning-based attention is a mechanism mimicking cognitive attention. It calculates "soft" weights for each word, more precisely for its embedding, in the context window. It can do it either in parallel (such as in transformers) or sequentially (such as recursive neural networks). "Soft" weights can change during each runtime, in contrast to "hard" weights, which are (pre-)trained and fine-tuned and remain frozen afterwards. Multiple attention heads are used in transformer-based large language models.
Computer stereo visionComputer stereo vision is the extraction of 3D information from digital images, such as those obtained by a CCD camera. By comparing information about a scene from two vantage points, 3D information can be extracted by examining the relative positions of objects in the two panels. This is similar to the biological process of stereopsis. In traditional stereo vision, two cameras, displaced horizontally from one another, are used to obtain two differing views on a scene, in a manner similar to human binocular vision.
DNADeoxyribonucleic acid (diːˈɒksᵻˌraɪboʊnjuːˌkliːᵻk,_-ˌkleɪ-; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of all known organisms and many viruses. DNA and ribonucleic acid (RNA) are nucleic acids. Alongside proteins, lipids and complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides), nucleic acids are one of the four major types of macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life.
Gene regulatory networkA gene (or genetic) regulatory network (GRN) is a collection of molecular regulators that interact with each other and with other substances in the cell to govern the gene expression levels of mRNA and proteins which, in turn, determine the function of the cell. GRN also play a central role in morphogenesis, the creation of body structures, which in turn is central to evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo).
Deep reinforcement learningDeep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is a subfield of machine learning that combines reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning. RL considers the problem of a computational agent learning to make decisions by trial and error. Deep RL incorporates deep learning into the solution, allowing agents to make decisions from unstructured input data without manual engineering of the state space. Deep RL algorithms are able to take in very large inputs (e.g.