The chapter concentrates on the use of swarm intelligence in data mining. It focuses on the problem of medical data clustering. Clustering is a constantly growing area of current research. Medicine, market, trade, and meteorology belong to the numerous fields that benefit of its techniques. First an introduction into data mining and cluster validation techniques is presented, followed by a revi...

In this paper we propose a mathematical model for studying the phenomenon of division of labor in ant colonies. Inside this model we investigate how simple task allocation mechanisms can be used to achieve an optimal division of labor. We believe the proposed model captures the essential biological features of division of labor in ant colonies and is general enough to study a variety of differe...

Ants colonies exhibit very interesting behaviours: even if a single ant only has simple capabilities, the behaviour of a whole ant colony is highly structured. This is the result of coordinated interactions. But, as communication possibilities among ants are very limited, interactions must be based on very simple flows of information. In this paper we explore the implications that the study of ...

MATERIALS Taq DNA polymerase Marker DNA As a reference, use single-stranded DNA from the original bacteriophage M13 recombinant. MgCl2 (25 mM) Oligonucleotide primers The oligonucleotides should be 20-24 nucleotides in length, specific for the target DNA sequences, free of potential secondary structures, and contain no less than 10 and no more than 15 G and C residues. Yeast colony PCR buffer, ...

In this paper we introduce an Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm to find solutions for the well-known Knight’s Tour problem. The algorithm utilizes the implicit parallelism of ACO’s to simultaneously search for tours starting from all positions on the chessboard. We compare the new algorithm to a recently reported genetic algorithm, and to a depth-first backtracking search using Warnsdorff...

We determine and relate the characteristic velocity, length, and time scales for bacterial motion in swarming colonies of Paenibacillus dendritiformis growing on semi-solid agar substrates. The bacteria swim within a thin fluid layer, and they form long-lived jets and vortices. These coherent structures lead to anisotropy in velocity spatial correlations and to a two-step relaxation in velocity...

This paper presents HAS-QAP, an hybrid ant colony system coupled with a local search, applied to the quadratic assignment problem. HAS-QAP uses pheromone trail information to perform modifications on QAP solutions, differently from more traditional ant systems that use pheromone trail information to construct complete solutions. HAS-QAP is analysed and compared with some of the best heuristics ...

Although blue-white screening based on α-complementation has been widely used in the screening of genetically modified bacteria, only a single blue-white screening is typically not enough to eliminate false positives. Sometimes, a secondary blue-white screening for the target colonies is required. In this study, two methods were used to investigate the feasibility of secondary blue-white screen...

Cells that generate splenic colonies within 8 days (day-8 colony-forming units-spleen [CFU-s]) are generally thought to differentiate only into erythroid/myeloid cells. The T and B lymphocyte differentiation potentials of day-8 CFU-s were evaluated and compared with those of day-12 and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) CFU-s. This was achieved by analyzing, after intravenous and intrathymic injection, the ...

Colonies of Podocoryna carnea circulate gastrovascular fluid among polyps via tubelike stolons. At polyp-stolon junctions, mitochondrion-rich cells in part regulate this gastrovascular flow. During competition, colonies hyperproliferate nematocytes and stolons; nematocysts are discharged until one colony is killed. Hyperproliferation then ceases, and normal growth resumes. Here, competing colon...