Artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with promising machine learning (ML) techniques well known from computer science is broadly affecting many aspects of various fields including science and technology, industry, and even our day-to-day life. The ML techniques have been developed to analyze high-throughput data with a view to obtaining useful insights, categorizing, predicting, and making evidence-based decisions in novel ways, which will promote the growth of novel applications and fuel the sustainable booming of AI. This paper undertakes a comprehensive survey on the development and application of AI in different aspects of fundamental sciences, including information science, mathematics, medical science, materials science, geoscience, life science, physics, and chemistry. The challenges that each discipline of science meets, and the potentials of AI techniques to handle these challenges, are discussed in detail. Moreover, we shed light on new research trends entailing the integration of AI into each scientific discipline. The aim of this paper is to provide a broad research guideline on fundamental sciences with potential infusion of AI, to help motivate researchers to deeply understand the state-of-the-art applications of AI-based fundamental sciences, and thereby to help promote the continuous development of these fundamental sciences.

Identifying essential genes in a given organism is important for research on their fundamental roles in organism survival. Furthermore, if possible, uncovering the links between core functions or pathways with these essential genes will further help us obtain deep insight into the key roles of these genes. In this study, we investigated the essential and non-essential genes reported in a previous study and extracted gene ontology (GO) terms and biological pathways that are important for the determination of essential genes. Through the enrichment theory of GO and KEGG pathways, we encoded each essential/non-essential gene into a vector in which each component represented the relationship between the gene and one GO term or KEGG pathway. To analyze these relationships, the maximum relevance minimum redundancy (mRMR) was adopted. Then, the incremental feature selection (IFS) and support vector machine (SVM) were employed to extract important GO terms and KEGG pathways. A prediction model was built simultaneously using the extracted GO terms and KEGG pathways, which yielded nearly perfect performance, with a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.951, for distinguishing essential and non-essential genes. To fully investigate the key factors influencing the fundamental roles of essential genes, the 21 most important GO terms and three KEGG pathways were analyzed in detail. In addition, several genes was provided in this study, which were predicted to be essential genes by our prediction model. We suggest that this study provides more functional and pathway information on the essential genes and provides a new way to investigate related problems.

Many differences between different ethnic groups have been observed, such as skin color, eye color, height, susceptibility to some diseases, and response to certain drugs. However, the genetic bases of such differences have been under-investigated. Since the HapMap project, large-scale genotype data from Caucasian, African and Asian population samples have been available. The project found that these populations were located in different areas of the PCA (Principal Component Analysis) plot. However, as an unsupervised method, PCA does not measure the differences in each single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) among populations. We applied an advanced mutual information-based feature selection method to detect associations between SNP status and ethnic groups using the latest HapMap Phase 3 release version 3, which included more sub-populations. A total of 299 SNPs were identified, and they can accurately predicted the ethnicity of all HapMap populations. The 10-fold cross validation accuracy of the SMO (sequential minimal optimization) model on training dataset was 0.901, and the accuracy on independent test dataset was 0.895. In-depth functional analysis of these SNPs and their nearby genes revealed the genetic bases of skin and eye color differences among populations.

Drug-target interaction (DTI) is a key aspect in pharmaceutical research. With the ever-increasing new drug data resources, computational approaches have emerged as powerful and labor-saving tools in predicting new DTIs. However, so far, most of these predictions have been based on structural similarities rather than biological relevance. In this study, we proposed for the first time a “GO and KEGG enrichment score” method to represent a certain category of drug molecules by further classification and interpretation of the DTI database. A benchmark dataset consisting of 2,015 drugs that are assigned to nine categories ((1) G protein-coupled receptors, (2) cytokine receptors, (3) nuclear receptors, (4) ion channels, (5) transporters, (6) enzymes, (7) protein kinases, (8) cellular antigens and (9) pathogens) was constructed by collecting data from KEGG. We analyzed each category and each drug for its contribution in GO terms and KEGG pathways using the popular feature selection “minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR)” method, and key GO terms and KEGG pathways were extracted. Our analysis revealed the top enriched GO terms and KEGG pathways of each drug category, which were highly enriched in the literature and clinical trials. Our results provide for the first time the biological relevance among drugs, targets and biological functions, which serves as a new basis for future DTI predictions.