LAM PCR

The application of viral vectors in gene therapy is rapidly developing and the therapeutic results are highly promising. However, actively and passively integrating (viral) vectors may fail to deliver, or trigger severe side effects by undirected or unintended integration into the genome of the target cell. Thus, the analysis of vector integration sites in target cells is extremely important to address both biological and safety issues. Creative Biogene, as one of the leading biotechnology companies, has extensive expertise and experience which are available to provide you with customer LAM PCR service to analyze the viral vector insertion/integration site

Comparing the Quality of Multiple Descriptions of Multimedia Documents

With the definition of the MPEG-7 standard, thanks to its inter-operability behaviors, it is now possible for applications to use content descriptions of a same document, coming from different sources. This implies that the overall information available at the application can be highly redundant and mechanisms for filtering the information are hence required. In this work, a general approach to descriptions integration is proposed. The idea is to manipulate information readily available from the considered descriptions to reach an accurate integration result, without having to reprocess the multimedia material. The proposed general framework has been applied at a real problem showing how segment decompositions can be integrated on the basis of dominant color descriptors series. This work introduces also the concept of reliability of descriptor extraction methods demonstrating how it can be effectively used through the proposed integration process

VLSI technology for smaller, cheaper, faster return link systems

Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Application-specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) technology has enabled substantially smaller, cheaper, and more capable telemetry data systems. However, the rapid growth in available ASIC fabrication densities has far outpaced the application of this technology to telemetry systems. Available densities have grown by well over an order magnitude since NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) first began developing ASIC's for ground telemetry systems in 1985. To take advantage of these higher integration levels, a new generation of ASIC's for return link telemetry processing is under development. These new submicron devices are designed to further reduce the cost and size of NASA return link processing systems while improving performance. This paper describes these highly integrated processing components

Developing an IS-impact decision tool: A literature based design science roadmap

This paper derives from research-in-progress intending both Design Research (DR) and Design Science (DS) outputs; the former a management decision tool based in IS-Impact (Gable et al. 2008) kernel theory; the latter being methodological learnings deriving from synthesis of the literature and reflection on the DR ‘case study’ experience. The paper introduces a generic, detailed and pragmatic DS ‘Research Roadmap’ or methodology, deriving at this stage primarily from synthesis and harmonization of relevant concepts identified through systematic archival analysis of related literature. The scope of the Roadmap too has been influenced by the parallel study aim to undertake DR applying and further evolving the Roadmap. The Roadmap is presented in attention to the dearth of detailed guidance available to novice Researchers in Design Science Research (DSR), and though preliminary, is expected to evolve and gradually be substantiated through experience of its application. A key distinction of the Roadmap from other DSR methods is its breadth of coverage of published DSR concepts and activities; its detail and scope. It represents a useful synthesis and integration of otherwise highly disparate DSR-related concepts

Concepts and characteristics of the 'COST Reference Microplasma Jet'

Biomedical applications of non-equilibrium atmospheric pressure plasmas have attracted intense interest in the past few years. Many plasma sources of diverse design have been proposed for these applications, but the relationship between source characteristics and application performance is not well-understood, and indeed many sources are poorly characterized. This circumstance is an impediment to progress in application development. A reference source with well-understood and highly reproducible characteristics may be an important tool in this context. Researchers around the world should be able to compare the characteristics of their own sources and also their results with this device. In this paper, we describe such a reference source, developed from the simple and robust micro-scaled atmospheric pressure plasma jet (μ-APPJ) concept. This development occurred under the auspices of COST Action MP1101 'Biomedical Applications of Atmospheric Pressure Plasmas'. Gas contamination and power measurement are shown to be major causes of irreproducible results in earlier source designs. These problems are resolved in the reference source by refinement of the mechanical and electrical design and by specifying an operating protocol. These measures are shown to be absolutely necessary for reproducible operation. They include the integration of current and voltage probes into the jet. The usual combination of matching unit and power supply is replaced by an integrated LC power coupling circuit and a 5 W single frequency generator. The design specification and operating protocol for the reference source are being made freely available

OLT: A Toolkit for Object Labeling Applied to Robotic RGB-D Datasets

In this work we present the Object Labeling Toolkit (OLT), a set of software components publicly available for helping in the management and labeling of sequential RGB-D observations collected by a mobile robot. Such a robot can be equipped with an arbitrary number of RGB-D devices, possibly integrating other sensors (e.g. odometry, 2D laser scanners, etc.). OLT first merges the robot observations to generate a 3D reconstruction of the scene from which object segmentation and labeling is conveniently accomplished. The annotated labels are automatically propagated by the toolkit to each RGB-D observation in the collected sequence, providing a dense labeling of both intensity and depth images. The resulting objects’ labels can be exploited for many robotic oriented applications, including high-level decision making, semantic mapping, or contextual object recognition. Software components within OLT are highly customizable and expandable, facilitating the integration of already-developed algorithms. To illustrate the toolkit suitability, we describe its application to robotic RGB-D sequences taken in a home environment.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Spanish grant pro- gram FPU-MICINN 2010 and the Spanish projects TAROTH: New developments toward a Robot at Home (DPI2011-25483) and PROMOVE: Advances in mobile robotics for promoting independent life of elders (DPI2014-55826-R

Effect of Integrated Nutrient Management Approach on Soil Chemical and Physical Properties and Performance of Tomato (Lycopersicon Lycopersicum) Under Mildly-Acidic Alfisol Conditions

Collection and conversion of freely available wild-plant residues into composted materials for vegetable crop production (either as a substitute or supplement to the highly-priced chemical / synthetic fertilizers), may be beneficial to sustainable tropical crop production and improvement of soil conditions. Field studies were conducted in the year 2009, at the Teaching and Research Farms, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Nigeria, to assess the response of tomato to Tithonia-compost with or without N-mineral fertilizer, and the effects of such integration on some soil properties. It was a factorial combination of three rates of compost application (0.0, 2.5 & 5.0 tons ha-1) and three rates of inorganic nitrogen application (0.0, 30.0 and 60.0 kg N ha-1). Data collected on growth and yield parameters were analyzed using ANOVA at p < 0.05. Compost application significantly improved soil properties, under sole and combined applications. Growth and yield parameters significantly increased with increased levels of sole and combined applications of compost and N-mineral fertilizer. Tomato responded best to integration of 30 kg N ha-1 of urea and 2.5 tons ha-1 of Tithonia-compost as reflected in best growth rate and fruit yield. The rate was found to be equally adequate for improved soil physical and chemical properties. Integration of organic and inorganic fertilizer is therefore essential for efficient soil management and crop production

Representing and querying disease networks using graph databases

BACKGROUND: Systems biology experiments generate large volumes of data of multiple modalities and this information presents a challenge for integration due to a mix of complexity together with rich semantics. Here, we describe how graph databases provide a powerful framework for storage, querying and envisioning of biological data. RESULTS: We show how graph databases are well suited for the representation of biological information, which is typically highly connected, semi-structured and unpredictable. We outline an application case that uses the Neo4j graph database for building and querying a prototype network to provide biological context to asthma related genes. CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggests that graph databases provide a flexible solution for the integration of multiple types of biological data and facilitate exploratory data mining to support hypothesis generation. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13040-016-0102-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Decision support method for the selection of OMSs

With the increasing demand for highly complex, integrated and application-domain-specific systems engineering environments (SEEs) more or less specialized components of the SEEs are developed. An important component is the database management system (DBMS). As conventional DBMSs are not useful to fulfill the requirements on highly complex, persistent data structures, specialized DBMSs, namely object management systems (OMS), have been developed. An advantage of OMSs is that they further enhance the integration not only of data but also of processes. Currently several specialized OMSs with significantly different properties such as the data model, architecture and performance are available. As it is very difficult for an SEE developer to select the most appropriate OMS, we propose a decision support method which enables an SEE developer to identify his requirements and to compare the evaluation results of different OMSs. Additionally we present a practical experiment where we have applied the decision support method for comparing different OMSs. Experiences of the investigation are presented briefly