抗原变异可使得多种致病微生物易于逃避宿主免疫应答。表达在感染红细胞表面的恶性疟原虫红细胞表面蛋白1（PfPMP1）与感染红细胞、内皮细胞、树突状细胞以及胎盘的单个或多个受体作用，在黏附及免疫逃避中起关键的作用。每个单倍体基因组var基因家族编码约60种成员，通过启动转录不同的var基因变异体为抗原变异提供了分子基础。

疟原虫var基因转换速率变化导致抗原变异[英]／Paul H, Robert P, Christodoulou Z, et al//Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

BackgroundExperimental and clinical data suggest that reducing inflammation without affecting lipid levels may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Yet, the inflammatory hypothesis of atherothrombosis has remained unproved. MethodsWe conducted a randomized, double-blind trial of canakinumab, a therapeutic monoclonal antibody targeting interleukin-1β, involving 10,061 patients with previous myocardial infarction and a high-sensitivity C-reactive protein level of 2 mg or more per liter. The trial compared three doses of canakinumab (50 mg, 150 mg, and 300 mg, administered subcutaneously every 3 months) with placebo. The primary efficacy end point was nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, or cardiovascular death. ResultsAt 48 months, the median reduction from baseline in the high-sensitivity C-reactive protein level was 26 percentage points greater in the group that received the 50-mg dose of canakinumab, 37 percentage points greater in the 150-mg group, and 41 percentage points greater in t...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1707914

Antiinflammatory Therapy with Canakinumab for Atherosclerotic Disease

“Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks”の学習報告

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation involving the posterior density. In this article, we review variational inference (VI), a method from machine learning that approximates probability densities through optimization. VI has been used in many applications and tends to be faster than classical methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. The idea behind VI is to first posit a family of densities and then to find a member of that family which is close to the target density. Closeness is measured by Kullback–Leibler divergence. We review the ideas behind mean-field variational inference, discuss the special case of VI applied to exponential family models, present a full example with a Bayesian mixture of Gaussians, and derive a variant that uses stochastic optimization to scale up to massive data...

Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians

Macrophages, the most plastic cells of the haematopoietic system, are found in all tissues and show great functional diversity. They have roles in development, homeostasis, tissue repair and immunity. Although tissue macrophages are anatomically distinct from one another, and have different transcriptional profiles and functional capabilities, they are all required for the maintenance of homeostasis. However, these reparative and homeostatic functions can be subverted by chronic insults, resulting in a causal association of macrophages with disease states. In this Review, we discuss how macrophages regulate normal physiology and development, and provide several examples of their pathophysiological roles in disease. We define the 'hallmarks' of macrophages according to the states that they adopt during the performance of their various roles, taking into account new insights into the diversity of their lineages, identities and regulation. It is essential to understand this diversity because macrophages have emerged as important therapeutic targets in many human diseases.

/pdf/macrophage-biology-in-development-homeostasis-and-disease-2nq2u94n8n.pdf

Macrophage biology in development, homeostasis and disease

Haplotypes, the global patterns of DNA sequence variation, have important implications for identifying complex traits. Recently, blocks of limited haplotype diversity have been discovered in human chromosomes, intensifying the research on modelling the block structure as well as the transitions or co-occurrence of the alleles in these blocks as a way to compress the variability and infer the associations more robustly. The haplotype block structure analysis is typically complicated by the fact that the phase information for each SNP is missing, i.e., the observed allele pairs are not given in a consistent order across the sequence. The techniques for circumventing this require additional information, such as family data, or a more complex sequencing procedure. In this paper we present a hierarchical statistical model and the associated learning and inference algorithms that simultaneously deal with the allele ambiguity per locus, missing data, block estimation, and the complex trait association. While the block structure may differ from the structures inferred by other methods, which use the pedigree information or previously known alleles, the parameters we estimate, including the learned block structure and the estimated block transitions per locus, define a good model of variability in the set. The method is completely data-driven and can detect Chron's disease from the SNP data taken from the human chromosome 5q31 with the detection rate of 80% and a small error variance.

Joint discovery of haplotype blocks and complex trait associations from SNP sequences

Isotopic labeling with deuterium oxide (D2O) is a common technique for estimating in vivo protein turnover, but its use has been limited by two long-standing problems: (1) identifying non-monoisotopic peptides; and (2) estimating protein turnover rates in the presence of dynamic amino acid enrichment. In this paper, we present a novel experimental and analytical framework for solving these two problems. Peptides with high probabilities of labeling in many amino acids present fragmentation spectra that frequently do not match the theoretical spectra used in standard identification algorithms. We resolve this difficulty using a modified search algorithm we call Conditional Ion Distribution Search (CIDS). Increased identifications from CIDS along with direct measurement of amino acid enrichment and statistical modeling that accounts for heterogeneous information across peptides, dramatically improves the accuracy and precision of half-life estimates. We benchmark the approach in cells, where near-complete labeling is possible, and conduct an in vivo experiment revealing, for the first time, differences in protein turnover between mice and naked mole-rats commensurate with their disparate longevity.

/pdf/precise-estimation-of-in-vivo-protein-turnover-rates-1gn13fcqi1.pdf

Precise Estimation of In Vivo Protein Turnover Rates

Systems that facilitate immunogen design are described herein. An optimization component is provided to determine an immunogen according to at least one criterion. The immunogen comprises a set of overlapping sequences comprising sequences that are known to be and/or are likely to be immunogenic. At least one of the sequences that are likely to be immunogenic can be determined by analyzing associations between a host and a pathogen at a population level. Methods of determining an epitome are described herein. A plurality of sequences are received. At least one of the sequences is predicted to be an epitope based on a relationship between a diverse trait of a population and a mutation of a pathogen. A collection of the plurality of sequences is optimized according to one or more criteria to determine the epitome. Epitomes and immunogens determined by the systems and methods described herein are also contemplated.

Association-based epitome design

RNA-seq technology enables large-scale studies of allele-specific expression ASE, or the expression difference between maternal and paternal alleles. Here, we study ASE in animals for which parental RNA-seq data are available. While most methods for determining ASE rely on read alignment, read alignment either leads to reference bias or requires knowledge of genomic variants in each parental strain. When RNA-seq data are available for both parental strains of a hybrid animal, it is possible to infer ASE with minimal reference bias and without knowledge of parental genomic variants. Our approach first uses parental RNA-seq reads to discover maternal and paternal versions of transcript sequences. Using these alternative transcript sequences as features, we estimate abundance levels of transcripts in the hybrid animal using a modified lasso linear regression model.

We tested our methods on synthetic data from the mouse transcriptome and compared our results with those of Trinity, a state-of-the-art de novo RNA-seq assembler. Our methods achieved high sensitivity and specificity in both identifying expressed transcripts and transcripts exhibiting ASE. We also ran our methods on real RNA-seq mouse data from two F1 samples with wild-derived parental strains and were able to validate known genes exhibiting ASE, as well as confirm the expected maternal contribution ratios in all genes and genes on the X chromosome.

/pdf/an-alignment-free-regression-approach-for-estimating-allele-c0dtbxdtx0.pdf

An Alignment-Free Regression Approach for Estimating Allele-Specific Expression Using RNA-Seq Data

We introduce a new model of genetic diversity which summarizes a large input dataset into an epitome, a short sequence or a small set of short sequences of probability distributions capturing many overlapping subsequences from the dataset. The epitome as a representation has already been used in modeling real-valued signals, such as images and audio. The discrete sequence model we introduce in this paper targets applications in genetics, from multiple alignment to recombination and mutation inference. In our experiments, we concentrate on modeling the diversity of HIV where the epitome emerges as a natural model for producing relatively small vaccines covering a large number of immune system targets known as epitopes. Our experiments show that the epitome includes more epitopes than other vaccine designs of similar length, including cocktails of consensus strains, phylogenetic tree centers, and observed strains. We also discuss epitome designs that take into account uncertainty about Tcell cross reactivity and epitope presentation. In our experiments, we find that vaccine optimization is fairly robust to these uncertainties.

/pdf/using-epitomes-to-model-genetic-diversity-rational-design-of-4f8rkftdrq.pdf

Vladimir Jojic

Papers

Joint discovery of haplotype blocks and complex trait associations from SNP sequences

Precise Estimation of In Vivo Protein Turnover Rates

Association-based epitome design

An Alignment-Free Regression Approach for Estimating Allele-Specific Expression Using RNA-Seq Data

Using Epitomes To Model Genetic Diversity: Rational Design Of HIV Vaccines