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Big Data Analytics in Chemoinformatics and Bioinformatics: With
Applications to Computer-Aided Drug Design, Cancer Biology,
Emerging Pathogens and Computational Toxicology provides an
up-to-date presentation of big data analytics methods and their
applications in diverse fields. The proper management of big data
for decision-making in scientific and social issues is of paramount
importance. This book gives researchers the tools they need to
solve big data problems in these fields. It begins with a section
on general topics that all readers will find useful and continues
with specific sections covering a range of interdisciplinary
applications. Here, an international team of leading experts review
their respective fields and present their latest research findings,
with case studies used throughout to analyze and present key
information.
The bubonic plague, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and influenza are
some of the worst epidemics/pandemics that afflicted human beings
from antiquity to modern times, killing millions of people. The
mosquito-borne human-infecting viruses, rotavirus, and the seasonal
influenza regularly affect lives across continents in the millions.
Currently, we are facing various disease-inducing organisms of the
Flavivirus family the Yellow fever virus (YFV), West Nile virus
(WNV), Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), Tick-borne encephalitis
virus (TBEV), Dengue virus (DENV) and Zika virus (ZIKV). Zika virus
was first isolated from a febrile rhesus monkey in the Zika forest
of Uganda in 1947. It drew out heightened attention following the
large number of microcephaly in newborn babies in Latin America in
2015. On 1 February 2016, WHO declared that the association of Zika
infection with clusters of microcephaly and other neurological
disorders constituted a Public Health Emergency of International
Concern. Although the severity and number of ZIKV afflicted cases
have gone down lately, the public health community worldwide is
keeping a watchful eye on it. ZIKV is an enveloped virus with a
positive-sense RNA genome that translates into a single
polypeptide, which then gets cleaved into three structural and
seven nonstructural viral proteins. As compared to the earlier
centuries, we have an expanding repertoire of diverse and fast
acting technologies available at our hand to manage and mitigate
emerging diseases. Completion of the Human Genome Project has given
rise to sequencing methods which can quickly determine the genetic
sequence of an alarming pathogen. Following Moores law, the power
of computers, essential for data analysis and visualization, has
grown substantially with time. The combination of genomic data of
pathogens, computational modeling methods, and data driven
methodologies can lead to a generic approach of surveillance,
mitigation, vaccine design as well as new drug discovery for
emerging pathogens. The four pillars of this may consist of: a)
Epidemiological approaches for the characterization of carriers of
next possible emerging pathogens; b) Fast computational sequence
comparison methods for the characterization of emerging pathogens
to understand how novel or severe they could be; c) Once the
sequences of the pathogen have been determined, computer-aided
vaccine design (CAVD) methods can be used to suggest a set of
probable vaccine candidates for quick synthesis and testing in the
laboratory; and d) Computer-assisted design of novel therapeutics
and their laboratory testing as well as repurposing of already
existing FDA-approved drugs. A combination of different classes of
methods in vivo, in vitro and in silico will be needed to tackle
suddenly emerging viruses like the Zika virus. As in many other
fields of biomedical research, high throughput and low cost in
silico technologies may provide the first line of defense against
such emerging pathogens providing decision support systems for the
judicious applications of medium throughput in vitro methods and
low throughput as well as costly in vivo techniques. An emerging
trend in many scientific disciplines is a strong tendency of being
transformed into some form of information science. The editors of
this book sincerely hope that the four-pronged computer-assisted
approach described in this book will help in managing and
mitigating emerging infectious diseases like Zika.
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