Faster than the Speed of Life: Accelerating Developmental Biology Simulations with GPUs and FPGAs

Life scientists are faced with the tough challenge of developing high-performance computer simulations of their increasingly complex models. BioDynaMo is an open-source biological simulation platform that aims to alleviate them from the intricacies that go into development. Life scientists are able to base their models on top of BioDynaMo’s...

Visual analysis of mass cytometry data by hierarchical stochastic neighbour embedding reveals rare cell types

Mass cytometry allows high-resolution dissection of the cellular composition of the immune system. However, the high-dimensionality, large size, and non-linear structure of the data poses considerable challenges for the data analysis. In particular, dimensionality reduction-based techniques like t-SNE offer single-cell resolution but are...

Constructing a Consensus Phylogeny from a Leaf-Removal Distance: (Extended Abstract)

A novel independence test for somatic alterations in cancer shows that biology drives mutual exclusivity but chance explains most co-occurrence

In cancer, mutually exclusive or co-occurring somatic alterations across genes can suggest functional interactions. Existing tests for such patterns make the unrealistic assumption of identical gene alteration probabilities across tumors. We present Discrete Independence Statistic Controlling for Observations with Varying Event Rates (DISCOVER),...

Computational epigenomics in gene regulation and cancer research

DNA is packaged together with proteins, such as histones, in the nucleus of a cell to form a fiber called chromatin. The nature of this packaging, the "chromatin structure", is essential for proper cell functioning. This is illustrated by the fact that perturbating chromatin can be associated with many diseases. Hence, artificial perturbation of...

Computational Biology in Clinical Proteomics and Chromatin Genomics

The work in this thesis is concerned with two very distinct biological fields. The first part pertains to the development of techniques to aid in the search for clinical biomarkers for use in the early detection of cancer. The second part aims to elucidate in what way a genome is organised in a cell nucleus and the functional consequences of...

Finding cancer genes in copy number data and insertional mutagenesis data

Cancer is a genetic disease. Step-wise alteration of genes that have a normal function in the cell can lead to the transformation of a healthy cell into a malignant cancer cell. Cancer genes provide several traits to the cell that allow it to become malignant. These traits have been researched for many years, and currently one knows quite well...

Agent-oriented modeling of the dynamics of biological organisms