A Generic Architecture for Integrating Health Monitoring and Advanced Care Provisioning

This paper presents a novel approach for advanced person- alized care and health services. It consists of four tiers and presents a high level of openness, privacy and manageability compared to existing systems. Moreover, the architecture is driven by realistic underlying business opportunities and is validated through the design of multiple scenarios.status: publishe

Mechanistic Insights into Ring-Opening and Decarboxylation of 2-Pyrones in Liquid Water and Tetrahydrofuran

2-Pyrones, such as triacetic acid lactone, are a promising class of biorenewable platform chemicals that provide access to an array of chemical products and intermediates. We illustrate through the combination of results from experimental studies and first-principle density functional theory calculations that key structural features dictate the mechanisms underlying ring-opening and decarboxylation of 2-pyrones, including the degree of ring saturation, the presence of C═C bonds at the C4═C5 or C5═C6 positions within the ring, as well as the presence of a β-keto group at the C4 position. Our results demonstrate that 2-pyrones undergo a range of reactions unique to their structure, such as retro-Diels–Alder reactions and nucleophilic addition of water. In addition, the reactivity of 2-pyrones and the final products formed is shown to depend on the solvent used and the acidity of the reaction environment. The mechanistic insights obtained here provide guidance for the selective conversion of 2-pyrones to targeted chemicals.Reprinted (adapted) with permission from Journal of American Chemical Society, 135(15); 5699-5708. Doi: 10.1021/ja312075r. Copyright 2013 American Chemical Society. </p

Design, Validation and Annotation of Transcriptome-Wide Oligonucleotide Probes for the Oligochaete Annelid Eisenia fetida

High density oligonucleotide probe arrays have increasingly become an important tool in genomics studies. In organisms with incomplete genome sequence, one strategy for oligo probe design is to reduce the number of unique probes that target every non-redundant transcript through bioinformatic analysis and experimental testing. Here we adopted this strategy in making oligo probes for the earthworm Eisenia fetida, a species for which we have sequenced transcriptome-scale expressed sequence tags (ESTs). Our objectives were to identify unique transcripts as targets, to select an optimal and non-redundant oligo probe for each of these target ESTs, and to annotate the selected target sequences. We developed a streamlined and easy-to-follow approach to the design, validation and annotation of species-specific array probes. Four 244K-formatted oligo arrays were designed using eArray and were hybridized to a pooled E. fetida cRNA sample. We identified 63,541 probes with unsaturated signal intensities consistently above the background level. Target transcripts of these probes were annotated using several sequence alignment algorithms. Significant hits were obtained for 37,439 (59%) probed targets. We validated and made publicly available 63.5K oligo probes so the earthworm research community can use them to pursue ecological, toxicological, and other functional genomics questions. Our approach is efficient, cost-effective and robust because it (1) does not require a major genomics core facility; (2) allows new probes to be easily added and old probes modified or eliminated when new sequence information becomes available, (3) is not bioinformatics-intensive upfront but does provide opportunities for more in-depth annotation of biological functions for target genes; and (4) if desired, EST orthologs to the UniGene clusters of a reference genome can be identified and selected in order to improve the target gene specificity of designed probes. This approach is particularly applicable to organisms with a wealth of EST sequences but unfinished genome