Getting the Right Mix: Developing a primary - secondary health provider IT interface in the Waikato District Health Board

The article presents a study on the electronic health record systems (EHR) developed by Waikato District Health Board (DHB) in New Zealand. The DHB develop EHR with the intention of integrating primary, secondary and tertiary provider information. The findings shows key issues like stability of a sound secondary health provider information technology (IT) infrastructure and basis of patient data on health industry standards

COMPARISON OF GROWTH PERFORMANCE OF BEEF CALVES FROM DIFFERENT GENETIC STRAINS REARED UNDER ORGANIC CONDITIONs (D. 3.2)

The objective of the present study was to compare growth performance of 15 Danish Holstein bull (DHB) calves, 15 Limousine x Danish Holstein crossbred bull (CB) calves and 15 Limousine x Danish Holstein crossbred heifer (CH) calves reared under organic conditions. Spring-born calves were puchased at private farms and arrived at approximately 20 days of age with an average initial body weight of 52.9, 58.5 and 56.1 kg, (SEM 2.6) for DHB, CB and CH, respectively. Calves were kept indoor until weaning at 3 months of age. Calves were gradually introduced to a grass-silage based ration from 3 to 4 months of age. From 4 to 7 months calves were kept on mix grass pasture of ryegrass and white clover. There were significant differences between treatment groups in terms of average daily gain (ADGP1) during the first summer pasture period, average daily gain (ADGI) during the indoor winter period, and average daily gain (ADGP2) during the second summer pasture period (first 7 weeks). Thus, CB had significantly greater ADG than CH for all three periods with DHB being in between. CB had greater values than DHB and CH in terms of LWP1 144, 140 and 135 (SEM 4) kg, ADGP1 1.15, 1.04 and 0.95 (SEM 0.05) kg/d, LW Indoor 222, 213, and 201 (SEM 5) kg and ADGI 1.06, 1.02 and 0.95 (SEM 0.02) kg/d, LWP2 462, 445 and 414 (SEM 9) kg and ADGP2 1.24, 0.98 and 0.68 (SEM 0.04) kg/d for CB, DHB and CH, respectively. The final live weight were not different between CB and DHB but was significantly lower for CH than DHB and CB (483, 539 and 582 (SEM 8) kg, for CH, DHB and CB, respectively). Overall growth performance across all periods was 13% higher for CB than CH

Engineering Dehydrated Amino Acid Residues in the Antimicrobial Peptide Nisin

The small antimicrobial peptide nisin, produced by Lactococcus lactis, contains the uncommon amino acid residues dehydroalanine and dehydrobutyrine and five thio ether bridges. Since these structures are posttranslationally formed from Ser, Thr, and Cys residues, it is feasible to study their role in nisin function and biosynthesis by protein engineering. Here we report the development of an expression system for mutated nisin Z (nisZ) genes, using nisin A producing L. lactis as a host. Replacement by site-directed mutagenesis of the Ser-5 codon in nisZ by a Thr codon, led to a mutant with a dehydrobutyrine instead of a dehydroalanine residue at position 5, as shown by NMR. Its antimicrobial activity was 2-10-fold lower relative to wild-type nisin Z, depending on the indicator strain used. In another mutagenesis study a double mutation was introduced in the nisZ gene by replacing the codons for Met-17 and Gly-18 by codons for Gln and Thr, respectively, as in the third lanthionine ring of the related antimicrobial peptide subtilin from Bacillus subtilis. This resulted in the simultaneous production of two mutant species, one containing a Thr residue and the other containing a dehydrobutyrine residue at position 18, both having different bacteriocidal properties.

Further characterization of glycine-containing microcystins from the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica

Microcystins are hepatotoxic cyclic peptides produced by several cyanobacterial genera worldwide. In 2008, our research group identified eight new glycine-containing microcystin congeners in two hydro-terrestrial mat samples from the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Eastern Antarctica. During the present study, high-resolution mass spectrometry, amino acid analysis and micro-scale thiol derivatization were used to further elucidate their structures. The Antarctic microcystin congeners contained the rare substitution of the position-1 D-alanine for glycine, as well as the acetyl desmethyl modification of the position-5 Adda moiety (3S-amino-9S-methoxy-2S,6,8S-trimethyl-10-phenyldeca-4E,6E-dienoic acid). Amino acid analysis was used to determine the stereochemistry of several of the amino acids and conclusively demonstrated the presence of glycine in the microcystins. A recently developed thiol derivatization technique showed that each microcystin contained dehydrobutyrine in position-7 instead of the commonly observed N-methyl dehydroalanine

A Tamper and Leakage Resilient von Neumann Architecture

We present a universal framework for tamper and leakage resilient computation on a von Neumann Random Access Architecture (RAM in short). The RAM has one CPU that accesses a storage, which we call the disk. The disk is subject to leakage and tampering. So is the bus connecting the CPU to the disk. We assume that the CPU is leakage and tamper-free. For a fixed value of the security parameter, the CPU has constant size. Therefore the code of the program to be executed is stored on the disk, i.e., we consider a von Neumann architecture. The most prominent consequence of this is that the code of the program executed will be subject to tampering. We construct a compiler for this architecture which transforms any keyed primitive into a RAM program where the key is encoded and stored on the disk along with the program to evaluate the primitive on that key. Our compiler only assumes the existence of a so-called continuous non-malleable code, and it only needs black-box access to such a code. No further (cryptographic) assumptions are needed. This in particular means that given an information theoretic code, the overall construction is information theoretic secure. Although it is required that the CPU is tamper and leakage proof, its design is independent of the actual primitive being computed and its internal storage is non-persistent, i.e., all secret registers are reset between invocations. Hence, our result can be interpreted as reducing the problem of shielding arbitrary complex computations to protecting a single, simple yet universal component

A Dirac-Hartree-Bogoliubov approximation for finite nuclei

We develop a complete Dirac-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximation to the ground state wave function and energy of finite nuclei. We apply it to spin-zero proton-proton and neutron-neutron pairing within the Dirac-Hartree-Bogoliubov approximation (we neglect the Fock term), using a zero-range approximation to the relativistic pairing tensor. We study the effects of the pairing on the properties of the even-even nuclei of the isotopic chains of Ca, Ni and Sn (spherical) and Kr and Sr (deformed), as well as the $N$=28 isotonic chain, and compare our results with experimental data and with other recent calculations.Comment: 43 pages, RevTex, 13 figure