Integrated probability of coronary heart disease subject to the -308 tumor necrosis factor-alpha SNP: a Bayesian meta-analysis

We present a meta-analysis of independent studies on the potential implication in the occurrence of coronary heart disease (CHD) of the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) at the -308 position of the tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) gene. We use Bayesian analysis to integrate independent data sets and to infer statistically robust measurements of correlation. Bayesian hypothesis testing indicates that there is no preference for the hypothesis that the -308 TNF-alpha SNP is related to the occurrence of CHD, in the Caucasian or in the Asian population, over the null hypothesis. As a measure of correlation, we use the probability of occurrence of CHD conditional on the presence of the SNP, derived as the posterior probability of the Bayesian meta-analysis. The conditional probability indicates that CHD is not more likely to occur when the SNP is present, which suggests that the -308 TNF-alpha SNP is not implicated in the occurrence of CHD.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, Published in PeerJ (2015

Protein signatures using electrostatic molecular surfaces in harmonic space

We developed a novel method based on the Fourier analysis of protein molecular surfaces to speed up the analysis of the vast structural data generated in the post-genomic era. This method computes the power spectrum of surfaces of the molecular electrostatic potential, whose three-dimensional coordinates have been either experimentally or theoretically determined. Thus we achieve a reduction of the initial three-dimensional information on the molecular surface to the one-dimensional information on pairs of points at a fixed scale apart. Consequently, the similarity search in our method is computationally less demanding and significantly faster than shape comparison methods. As proof of principle, we applied our method to a training set of viral proteins that are involved in major diseases such as Hepatitis C, Dengue fever, Yellow fever, Bovine viral diarrhea and West Nile fever. The training set contains proteins of four different protein families, as well as a mammalian representative enzyme. We found that the power spectrum successfully assigns a unique signature to each protein included in our training set, thus providing a direct probe of functional similarity among proteins. The results agree with established biological data from conventional structural biochemistry analyses.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures Published in PeerJ (2013), https://peerj.com/articles/185

Leveraging context-awareness to better support the IoT cloud-edge continuum

Novel Internet of Things (IoT) requirements derived from a broader interconnection of heterogeneous devices have pushed the horizons of Cloud computing and are giving rise to a wider decentralisation of applications and data centers. An answer to the underlying network concerns, such as the need to lower the resulting latency due to heavy computation needs, or safety aspects, gave rise to Edge/Fog computing, where IoT functionality can be also supported closer to data sources. While it is today feasible to perform some IoT functionality on the Edge, the orchestration of operations between Edge and Cloud requires an automated support, where context-awareness plays a key role in assisting the network in deciding when and where to store data and to perform computation. This work is focused on the application of context-awareness to support a smoother operation of the Edge to Cloud operation, aiming at lowering latency, in particular when real-time or close-to-real-time data exchange is present.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Novas inscrições funerárias da Torre Velha de Castro de Avelãs (Bragança)

Publicam-se 4 inscrições funerárias da Torre Velha de Castro de Avelãs (Bragança)

As produções cerâmicas de imitação na Hispânia.

Cerâmicas romanas da Torre Velha (Castro de Avelãs, Bragança). Primeira síntese