BackgroundProtein-coding gene detection in prokaryotic genomes is considered a much simpler problem than in intron-containing eukaryotic genomes. However there have been reports that prokaryotic gene finder programs have problems with small genes (either over-predicting or under-predicting). Therefore the question arises as to whether current genome annotations have systematically missing, small genes.ResultsWe have developed a high-performance computing methodology to investigate this problem. In this methodology we compare all ORFs larger than or equal to 33 aa from all fully-sequenced prokaryotic replicons. Based on that comparison, and using conservative criteria requiring a minimum taxonomic diversity between conserved ORFs in different genomes, we have discovered 1,153 candidate genes that are missing from current genome annotations. These missing genes are similar only to each other and do not have any strong similarity to gene sequences in public databases, with the implication that these ORFs belong to missing gene families. We also uncovered 38,895 intergenic ORFs, readily identified as putative genes by similarity to currently annotated genes (we call these absent annotations). The vast majority of the missing genes found are small (less than 100 aa). A comparison of select examples with GeneMark, EasyGene and Glimmer predictions yields evidence that some of these genes are escaping detection by these programs.ConclusionsProkaryotic gene finders and prokaryotic genome annotations require improvement for accurate prediction of small genes. The number of missing gene families found is likely a lower bound on the actual number, due to the conservative criteria used to determine whether an ORF corresponds to a real gene.
Through the algorthmic design patterns of data parallelism and task parallelism, the graphics processing unit (GPU) offers the potential to vastly accelerate discovery and innovation across a multitude of disciplines. For example, the exponential growth in data volume now presents an obstacle for high-throughput data mining in fields such as neuroinformatics and bioinformatics. As such, we present a characterization of a MapReduce-based datamining application on a general-purpose GPU (GPGPU). Using neuroscience as the application vehicle, the results of our multi-dimensional performance evaluation show that a "one-size-fits-all" approach maps poorly across different GPGPU cards. Rather, a high-performance implementation on the GPGPU should factor in the 1) problem size, 2) type of GPU, 3) type of algorithm, and 4) data-access method when determining the type and level of parallelism. To guide the GPGPU programmer towards optimal performance within such a broad design space, we provide eight general performance characterizations of our data-mining application.
BLAST is a widely used software toolkit for genomic sequence search. mpiBLAST is a freely available, open-source parallelization of BLAST that uses database segmentation to allow different worker processes to search (in parallel) unique segments of the database. After searching, the workers write their output to a filesystem. While mpiBLAST has been shown to achieve high performance in clusters with fast local filesystems, its I/O processing remains a concern for scalability, especially in systems having limited I/O capabilities such as distributed filesystems spread across a wide-area network. Thus, we present ParaMEDIC-a novel environment that uses applicationspecific semantic information to compress I/O data and improve performance in distributed environments. Specifically, for mpiBLAST, ParaMEDIC partitions worker processes into compute and I/O workers. Compute workers, instead of directly writing the output to the filesystem, the workers process the output using semantic knowledge about the application to generate metadata and write the metadata to the filesystem. I/O workers, which physically reside closer to the actual storage, then process this metadata to re-create the actual output and write it to the filesystem. This approach allows ParaMEDIC to reduce I/O time, thus accelerating mpiBLAST by as much as 25-fold.
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