About Y. Cun

Computational biologist

Inferring tumour evolution 1 – The intra-tumour phylogeny problem

Posted on 09/06/2014 by Y. Cun

“Cancer evolves dynamically as clonal expansions supersede one another driven by shifting selective pressures, mutational processes, and disrupted cancer genes. These processes mark the genome, such that a cancer’s life history is encrypted in the somatic mutations present,”

write Nik-Zainal et al in the abstract of their 2012 Cell paper `The life history of 21 breast cancers‘. The key figure of their paper shows a phylogenetic tree of tumor development in a patient. The paper contains lots of computational work on analyzing and interpreting mutations based on deep-sequencing data, but –a big surprised but— the very last step of putting together the tree was done manually. Half the paper is describing the reasoning that Peter Campbell and his group used to condense all the evidence they had gathered from genomic data into the tree – but there is no algorithm.

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A practical guideline for writing research paper

Posted on 31/01/2014 by Y. Cun

Ten Simple Rules for Writing Research Papers

Weixiong Zhang

The importance of writing well can never be overstated for a successful professional career, and the ability to write solid papers is an essential trait of a productive researcher. Writing and publishing a paper has its own life cycle; properly following a course of action and avoiding missteps can be vital to the overall success not only of a paper but of the underlying research as well. Here, we offer ten simple rules for writing and publishing research papers.

As a caveat, this essay is not about the mechanics of composing a paper, much of which has been covered elsewhere, e.g., [1], [2]. Rather, it is about the principles and attitude that can help guide the process of writing in particular and research in general. In this regard, some of the discussion will complement, extend, and refine some advice given in early articles of this Ten Simple Rules series of PLOS Computational Biology [3]–[8].

A new R package for network-based biomarker discovery released

Posted on 24/05/2013 by Y. Cun

A new R package, netClass, has been release. netClass integrate network information, such as protein-protein interaction network or KEGG, to mRNA classification, but also incorporate miRNA to mRNA with mi-mRNA interaction network for biomarker discovery. This methods we called stSVM and already published in PloS ONE (Cun et al 2013). Apart from stSVM, we also implement the flowing methods in netClass:

AEP (average gene expression of pathway), Guo et al., BMC Bioinformatics 2005, 6:58.
PAC (pathway activitive classification), Lee E, et al., PLoS Comput Biol 4(11): e1000217.
hubc (Hub nodes classification), Taylor et al.(2009) Nat. Biotech.: doi: 10.1038/nbt.152
frSVM (filter via top ranked genes), Cun et al. arXiv:1212.3214 ; Winter etal., PLoS Comput Biol 8(5): e1002511.
stSVM (network smoothed t-statistic) , Cun et al., PloS One,.

NetClass can be download from souceforg ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/netclassr/) or , CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/netClass/ ). For more detail of netClass, you can refer these four papers:

Yupeng Cun, Holger Fröhlich (2014) netClass: An R-package for network based, integrative biomarker signature discovery. Bioinformatics; doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu025
Yupeng Cun, Holger Fröhlich (2013) Network and Data Integration for Biomarker Signature Discovery via Network Smoothed T-Statistics, PLoS ONE 8(9): e73074. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073074.
Yupeng Cun, Holger Fröhlich (2012) Integrating Prior Knowledge Into Prognostic Biomarker Discovery Based on Network Structure. arXiv:1212.3214 ( Link for R codes and Supplemental meterials)
Yupeng Cun, Holger Fröhlich (2012) Prognostic Gene Signatures for Patient Stratification in Breast Cancer – Accuracy, Stability and Interpretability of Gene Selection Approaches Using Prior Knowledge on Protein-Protein Interactions. BMC Bioinformatics, 13:69

计算基因组学研究组

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