The world is full of fascinating questions, many of which have gone unanswered.
A University of Waterloo researcher has led the development of a software tool that can provide conclusive answers to questions like how many species actually exist on planet earth or what the bacterial origins of human mitochondrial DNA are.
This tool uses supervised machine learning and digital signal processing (ML-DSP), a software tool that works by transforming a DNA sequence into a digital (numerical) signal, and uses digital signal processing methods to process and distinguish these different signals from one another
“With this method even if we only have small fragments of DNA we can still classify DNA sequences, regardless of their origin, or whether they are natural, synthetic, or computer-generated,” said Lila Kari, a professor in Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics. “Another important potential application of this tool is in the healthcare sector, as in this era of personalized medicine we can classify viruses and customize the treatment of a particular patient depending on the specific strain of the virus that affects them.”
In their study, the researchers were able to perform a comparison with other state-of-the-art classification tools, and it showed that the results from the ML-DSP tool overwhelmingly outperformed the other software in terms of processing time and classification accuracy.
A paper detailing the new software tool, titled ML-DSP: Machine Learning with Digital Signal Processing for ultrafast, accurate, and scalable genome classification at all taxonomic levels, which was authored by Kari together with Western University PhD candidate Gurjit Randhawa and Dr Kathleen Hill, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at Western University, was recently published in the journal BMC Genomics.