Salinity adaptation in Tunisian and Portuguese Medicago truncatula populations

Worldwide, salinity is a major constraint for plant growth and reproduction of both crop and wild species. Soil salinization is expected to aggravate, particularly in a scenario of climate change. There is a need to implement sustainable, long-term measurements to guarantee the global agricultural production levels necessary for food security. The study of wild populations that are viable and fertile in saline habitats has the potential to reveal adaptive mechanisms bringing new insights for crop improvement. Here, methods of molecular biology and ecology are used to investigate the genes and traits responsible for salinity adaptation in natural populations of the model legume Medicago truncatula.(...

GRID-enabled bioinformatics applications for comparative genomic analysis at the CBBC

Bioinformatics is an important application area for Grid computing. The Grid computing issues required to tackle current bioinformatics challenges include processing power, large-scale data access and management, security, application integration, data integrity and curation, control/automation/ tracking of workflows, data format consistency and resource discovery. In this poster, we describe preliminary steps taken to develop a Grid environment to advance Bioinformatics research. We developed a system called Grendel, with the aims of providing Bioinformatics researchers transparent access to basic computational resources used in their research. Grendel is a platform and language independent web-services based system for distributed resource management utilising Sun Grid Engine that provides a single entry point for computational tasks while keeping the actual resources transparent to the user. Grendel is developed in Java and deployed using the Tomcat. Client libraries have been developed in Perl and Java to provide access to computation resource exported via Grendel