Exploring Genomes with the Self-Organizing Map

The use of pattern recognition software is not new in the field of bioinformatics, but is perhaps not as developed as it should be. With the growing amounts of data that are being produced by various micro-array technologies and other devices on the one hand, and an appreciation of the fact that there is more to the vast amount of 'non-coding' DNA than meets the eye certainly for H. sapiens on the other, an ability to apply unsupervised algorithms to winnow down the enormous variety of parameter space to a sub-domain that is contextually meaningful is becoming more and more relevant. At the National Centre for Biomedical Engineering Science, National University of Ireland, Galway researchers have been exploring the capabilities of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm to this end.