Outcomes and complications of fibular head resection

The fibular head is often used as donor graft material for reconstruction of defects of the distal radius. However little is known on the safety of such a procedure. This report describes the long-term donor-site morbidity following the procedure. Fourteen patients who underwent simple or marginal resections of the proximal fibula between 1990 and 2007 were reviewed. Subjective donor-site morbidity, knee and ankle range of motion and instability, presence of sensory or motor function loss, gait and fibular regeneration were assessed. The mean age at surgery was 25 years; six were male, eight were female and the mean follow-up was 11 years. Abnormal clinical findings were present in 10 patients (71.4 %): nine patients (64.3 %) had Grade 2 varus laxity at the knee confirmed by stress radiographs; one had sensory loss in the distribution of the superficial peroneal nerve. Patients with varus laxity had significantly higher mean age at surgery than those without varus laxity (p = 0.001). None had deformity at the knee or ankle. The range of joint movements was normal. All had a normal tibiotalar angle and none had proximal migration of the fibula. One patient demonstrated near-complete regeneration of the fibula. Donor-site morbidity following simple and marginal resection of the proximal fibula is acceptable. Older patients had a higher risk of demonstrable varus laxity at the knee but proximal fibula resection in children appears to be safe

A Grid Computing Based Power System Monitoring Tool Using Gridgain

With the advancement of civilization, Power Sector is undergoing drastic upheavals. With the ever increasing demand and dependence on electric power, protection of power system against failures remains a major challenge, particularly against cascading failures that lead to blackouts. There is a great demand for power systems protection that is scattered all around the globe. Effective monitoring of the power system parameters is a prerequisite in providing effective control and protection schemas. This paper advocates the use of grid computing in power system monitoring which discusses the suitability of grid computing to address the requirements of distinguished power system protection. Albeit, the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is presently implied for monitoring power systems; yet it has its limitations. This paper proposes to use Grid Computing as an aid to the existing SCADA based power system monitoring & control framework and demonstrates is applicability by means of a grid based real-time power system monitoring system. The afore mentioned system has been deployed in desktop computers with GridGain 2.0 as middleware has been employed to set up the grid environment, all relevant details of the design framework has been shown

Regional conductivity structure of Cascadia : preliminary results form 3D inversion of USArray transportable array magnetotelluric data

In conjunction with the USArray component of EarthScope, long period magnetotelluric (MT) data are being acquired in a series of arrays across the continental US. Initial deployments in 2006 and 2007 acquired data (10– 10,000 s) at 110 sites covering the US Pacific Northwest, distributed with the same nominal spacing as the USArray seismic transportable array (~75 km). The most striking and robust features revealed by initial three-dimensional inversion of this dataset are extensive areas of high conductivity in the lower crust beneath all of southeastern Oregon, and beneath the Cascade Mountains, contrasting with very resistive crust in Siletzia and the Columbia Embayment. Significant variations in upper mantle conductivity are also revealed by the inversions, with the most conductive mantle beneath the Washington backarc, and the most resistive corresponding to subducting oceanic mantle

Unifying Parsimonious Tree Reconciliation

Evolution is a process that is influenced by various environmental factors, e.g. the interactions between different species, genes, and biogeographical properties. Hence, it is interesting to study the combined evolutionary history of multiple species, their genes, and the environment they live in. A common approach to address this research problem is to describe each individual evolution as a phylogenetic tree and construct a tree reconciliation which is parsimonious with respect to a given event model. Unfortunately, most of the previous approaches are designed only either for host-parasite systems, for gene tree/species tree reconciliation, or biogeography. Hence, a method is desirable, which addresses the general problem of mapping phylogenetic trees and covering all varieties of coevolving systems, including e.g., predator-prey and symbiotic relationships. To overcome this gap, we introduce a generalized cophylogenetic event model considering the combinatorial complete set of local coevolutionary events. We give a dynamic programming based heuristic for solving the maximum parsimony reconciliation problem in time O(n^2), for two phylogenies each with at most n leaves. Furthermore, we present an exact branch-and-bound algorithm which uses the results from the dynamic programming heuristic for discarding partial reconciliations. The approach has been implemented as a Java application which is freely available from http://pacosy.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/coresym.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013

DifferentialRegulation: a Bayesian hierarchical approach to identify differentially regulated genes

MOTIVATION: Although transcriptomics data is typically used to analyse mature spliced mRNA, recent attention has focused on jointly investigating spliced and unspliced (or precursor-) mRNA, which can be used to study gene regulation and changes in gene expression production. Nonetheless, most methods for spliced/unspliced inference (such as RNA velocity tools) focus on individual samples, and rarely allow comparisons between groups of samples (e.g., healthy vs . diseased). Furthermore, this kind of inference is challenging, because spliced and unspliced mRNA abundance is characterized by a high degree of quantification uncertainty, due to the prevalence of multi-mapping reads, i.e., reads compatible with multiple transcripts (or genes), and/or with both their spliced and unspliced versions. RESULTS: Here, we present DifferentialRegulation , a Bayesian hierarchical method to discover changes between experimental conditions with respect to the relative abundance of unspliced mRNA (over the total mRNA). We model the quantification uncertainty via a latent variable approach, where reads are allocated to their gene/transcript of origin, and to the respective splice version. We designed several benchmarks where our approach shows good performance, in terms of sensitivity and error control, versus state-of-the-art competitors. Importantly, our tool is flexible, and works with both bulk and single-cell RNA-sequencing data. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: DifferentialRegulation is distributed as a Bioconductor R package

Length-weight relationship of brackish water finfish Thryssa kammalensoides Wongratana, 1983 from Chilika Lagoon, India

1308-1311The length-weight relationship (LWR) of brackish water finfish Thryssa kammalensoides Wongratana, 1983 is reported for the first time during the study. Specimens (n = 862) were caught with the help of local fisherman from Chilika lagoon, east coast of India during monsoon (September-October, 2018) and post-monsoon (November, 2018-January, 2019). The maximum total length recorded in this study is the new record for the species. The data revealed that LWR of T. kammalensoides of Chilika shows a significant LWR during monsoon (r2 = 0.872) whereas moderate (r2 = 0.470) during post-monsoon

Relative Abundance of Transcripts (RATs):Identifying differential isoform abundance from RNA-seq [version 1; referees: 1 approved, 2 approved with reservations]

The biological importance of changes in RNA expression is reflected by the wide variety of tools available to characterise these changes from RNA-seq data. Several tools exist for detecting differential transcript isoform usage (DTU) from aligned or assembled RNA-seq data, but few exist for DTU detection from alignment-free RNA-seq quantifications. We present the RATs, an R package that identifies DTU transcriptome-wide directly from transcript abundance estimates. RATs is unique in applying bootstrapping to estimate the reliability of detected DTU events and shows good performance at all replication levels (median false positive fraction < 0.05). We compare RATs to two existing DTU tools, DRIM-Seq & SUPPA2, using two publicly available simulated RNA-seq datasets and a published human RNA-seq dataset, in which 248 genes have been previously identified as displaying significant DTU. RATs with default threshold values on the simulated Human data has a sensitivity of 0.55, a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.71 and a false discovery rate (FDR) of 0.04, outperforming both other tools. Applying the same thresholds for SUPPA2 results in a higher sensitivity (0.61) but poorer FDR performance (0.33). RATs and DRIM-seq use different methods for measuring DTU effect-sizes complicating the comparison of results between these tools, however, for a likelihood-ratio threshold of 30, DRIM-Seq has similar FDR performance to RATs (0.06), but worse sensitivity (0.47). These differences persist for the simulated drosophila dataset. On the published human RNA-seq dataset the greatest agreement between the tools tested is 53%, observed between RATs and SUPPA2. The bootstrapping quality filter in RATs is responsible for removing the majority of DTU events called by SUPPA2 that are not reported by RATs. All methods, including the previously published qRT-PCR of three of the 248 detected DTU events, were found to be sensitive to annotation differences between Ensembl v60 and v87

New distributional record of four Dragonet species (Perciformes: Callionymidae) from Odisha coast, India with comments on occurrence of other Callionymus species in Indian waters

212-218The present paper reports four uncommon fish species of dragonets of the family Callionymidae viz. Callionymus filamentosus Valenciennes, 1837, C. hindsii Richardson, 1844, C. margaretae Regan, 1905 and C. recurvispinis (Li 1966) for the first time from Odisha coast, India. Diagnosis, morphometric and meristic characters of the recorded species are provided herein. The records of Callionymus species in Indian waters are discussed. It is concluded that only 15 species of the genus Callionymus are occurring in India, while reports of C. belcheri, C. japonicus, C. kaianus and C. melanopterus are erroneous