As healthcare moves towards the implementation of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), Critically Appraised Topics (CATs) become useful in helping physicians to make clinical decisions. A number of academic and healthcare organizations have set up web-based CAT libraries. The primary objective of the presented work is to provide a one-stop search and download site that allows access to multiple CAT libraries. A web-based application, namely the CAT Crawler, was developed to serve physicians with an adequate access to available appraised topics on the Internet.

We present an algorithm to detect protein sub-structural motifs from primary sequence. The input to the algorithm is a set of aligned multiple protein sequences. It uses wavelet transforms to decompose protein sequences represented numerically by different indices (such as polarity, accessible surface area or electron-ion integration potentials of the amino acids). The numerical representation of a protein sequence has significant correlation with its biological activity, thus common motifs are expected to be observable from the wavelet spectrum.

Computer simulations are used to investigate two features of proteins: ligand binding and ligand entry/exit. Both reveal surprising new insights into the physics of such complex systems and suggest at possible interpretations that depart from the usual paradigms.

Alternative splicing of mRNA allows many gene products with different functions to be produced from a single coding sequence. Exon skipping is the most commonly known alternative splicing mechanism. A comprehensive database of alternative splicing by exon skipping is made available for the human genome data. 1,229 human genes are identified to exhibit alternative splicing by exon skipping.

Tabu search is a meta-heuristic approach that is proven to be useful in solving combinatorial optimization problems. We implement the adaptive memory features of tabu search to refine a multiple sequence alignment. Adaptive memory helps the search process to avoid local optima and explores the solution space economically and effectively without getting trapped into cycles. The algorithm is further enhanced by introducing extended tabu search features such as intensification and diversification.