Finding Our Way through Phenotypes

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility

Finding Our Way through Phenotypes

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility

Indo German project on alternatives to CFCS for refrigeration applications :technical status report

Since its inception with German assistance nearly four decades ago,Indian Institute of Technology Madras has continued active technical collaboration and cooperation with several German Universities in the areas of topical interest. In the past few years, environmental issues such as Ozone Depletion and Global Warming have attracted significant attention over the world. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which have been widely used in Refrigeration and Airconditioning applications, were identified to be the major causes of these derogatory effects on the environment necessitating worldwide ban on such substances. Realising the importance and urgency of the above situation, this Indo-German joint project was conceived. Support for this project comes from BMFT and BMZ through Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH on the German side,and from Ministry for Human Resource Development through Indian Institute of Technology Madras from the Indian side. This project addresses some of the important aspects and impacts of the ban on CFCs Imposed starting from the Monteal Protocol. Particular referencesare made to Refrigeration and Aircondltloning applications relevant to India and Germany. The objective of this first report is to summarize the background and current developments in the search for new or alternative refrigerants. Indian and German positions due to CFC ban are discussed with emphasis on industrial practices. Discussions are also made on the characterstics and performance of currently discussed short- and long- term replacements to existing working fluids. As the new developments are taking place rapidly, and the positionsregarding the time frames and the use of specific fluids are undergoing several changes, this report will be updated during the course of the project

Tools for exploring mouse models of human disease

Despite significant computational challenges, a number of tools have been developed recently to leverage the mouse to model human disease. Here we review these tools and show how they can be applied in the identification of candidate genes and therapeutic targets as well as mouse models for mechanistic studies and drug validation

Tools for exploring mouse models of human disease

Despite significant computational challenges, a number of tools have been developed recently to leverage the mouse to model human disease. Here we review these tools and show how they can be applied in the identification of candidate genes and therapeutic targets as well as mouse models for mechanistic studies and drug validation

Thematic issue of the Second combined Bio-ontologies and Phenotypes Workshop

This special issue covers selected papers from the 18th Bio-Ontologies Special Interest Group meeting and Phenotype Day, which took place at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Dublin in 2015. The papers presented in this collection range from descriptions of software tools supporting ontology development and annotation of objects with ontology terms, to applications of text mining for structured relation extraction involving diseases and phenotypes, to detailed proposals for new ontologies and mapping of existing ontologies. Together, the papers consider a range of representational issues in bio-ontology development, and demonstrate the applicability of bio-ontologies to support biological and clinical knowledge-based decision making and analysis.The full set of papers in the Thematic Issue is available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/sig