A University of Waterloo researcher has spearheaded the development of a software tool that can provide conclusive answers to some of the world’s most fascinating questions.
A University of Waterloo researcher has spearheaded the development of a software tool that can provide conclusive answers to some of the world’s most fascinating questions.
The tool, which combines supervised machine learning with digital signal processing (ML-DSP), could for the first time make it possible to definitively answer questions such as how many different species exist on Earth and in the oceans. How are existing, newly-discovered, and extinct species related to each other? What are the bacterial origins of human mitochondrial DNA? Do the DNA of a parasite and its host have a similar genomic signature?
The tool also has the potential to positively impact the personalized medicine industry by identifying the specific strain of a virus and thus allowing for precise drugs to be developed and prescribed to treat it.
ML-DSP is an alignment-free software tool which works by transforming a DNA sequence into a digital (numerical) signal, and uses digital signal processing methods to process and distinguish these signals from each other.
Read more at University of Waterloo
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