Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!ig!daemon From: GOAD.DAVISON@BIONET-20.ARPA Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.evolution Subject: [Jack Kramer : Re: Statistical significance of "PERCENT" homology.] Message-ID: <5790@ig.ig.com> Date: 7 Apr 88 11:01:22 GMT Sender: news@presto.ig.com Lines: 39 From: Dan Davison Mail-From: CMATHEWS.KRAMER created at 31-Mar-88 17:54:09 Date: Thu 31 Mar 88 17:54:09-PST From: Jack Kramer Subject: Re: Statistical significance of "PERCENT" homology. To: GOAD.DAVISON@BIONET-20.ARPA In-Reply-To: <12386835730.28.GOAD.DAVISON@BIONET-20.ARPA> Message-ID: <12386849069.45.CMATHEWS.KRAMER@BIONET-20.ARPA> Dan, I strongly second your "not well understood". A significant reason for this, in my opinion, is the use of the scalar alphabet used as the basis for almost all studies. I am very interested in the assignment multiple coefficient atribute vectors to the alphabet and "words" and the application of neural net semantic pattern recognition AI techniques to this problem. Some very rudementary work has been done along these lines has been done by Stormo and Wold et al. The great flurry of current activity in massively parallel fine grained hardware and software architectures will eventually percolate into the molecular biology arena. Most of the advances now being made along these lines in speech recognition will directly apply. Illucidation of the syntactic and semantic patterns in biomacromolecules should be a direct fallout from this work and if combined with cladistic clustering will finally allow the detection of evolutionary relationships objectively. (my opinions - and I love to argue, especially about mol evol). I think it would be very interesting to participate in electronic debate ala Farris/Felsenstein through this media. Anybody out there want to start stiring things up? Jack Kramer Center for Gene Research Oregon State University ------- -------