Standards for Medical Identifiers, Codes, and Messages Needed to Create an Efficient Computer-Stored Medical Record

journal articleBiomedical Informatic

Manual Curation of Vertebrate Proteins in the UniProt Knowledgebase.

The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) aims to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive, consistent and authoritative resource for protein sequence and functional information. Given the importance of human and vertebrate model data in biomedical research, a major focus is the high-quality manual curation of human proteins and their vertebrate orthologues. Manual curation involves (1) the extraction of experimental results from scientific literature to enrich protein records with a wide range of information including function, structure, interactions and subcellular location, (2) the manual verification of each sequence and clarification of discrepancies between sequence reports, and (3) the assessment of the output of a range of analysis programmes to ensure that sequence features are correctly reported. Manual curation also facilitates the standardization of experimental data – a step necessary for development of methods that enable the semi-automated transfer of manual annotation to uncharacterised or related proteins. Consequently, manual curation of vertebrate proteins plays a vital role in providing users with a complete overview of available data while ensuring its accuracy, reliability and accessibility. UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot currently contains the complete manually reviewed human proteome, comprising approximately 20’300 proteins, and an additional 61’000 reviewed entries from model vertebrates such as mouse, rat, apes, cow, chicken, zebrafish and Xenopus. Ongoing efforts continue to improve the quality of vertebrate sequences in collaboration with HAVANA, Ensembl, HGNC and RefSeq, to include new functional information as it becomes available, and to extend the coverage of curated proteins in vertebrate species. All data are freely available from "http://www.uniprot.org":www.uniprot.org

Isolation, via 454 Sequencing, and Characterization of Microsatellites for Vachellia farnesiana (Fabaceae: Mimosoideae)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-NC-SA) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0).Premise of the study: We isolated 15 polymorphic microsatellite markers from Vachellia farnesiana for use in population genetic studies to determine the native range of the species. Methods and Results: Initially, 454 shotgun sequencing was used to identify and design primers for 68 microsatellite loci. Of these, we trialed 47 loci in the target species, and 42 (89%) amplified a product of expected size. Fifteen of the 47 loci were screened for variation in 21 individuals from the native range of V. farnesiana in southern Mexico and 20 from northwestern Australia. Fourteen loci were polymorphic, with observed heterozygosity ranging from 0.026 to 1.00 (mean = 0.515) and two to 12 alleles per locus (average = 5.2). Cross-amplification was successful in four to 11 loci in three other Vachellia species. Conclusions: The new microsatellite loci will be useful in understanding genetic variation and investigating the role of human-mediated dispersal in the current distribution of V. farnesiana

Temperature Dependence Of Wood Surface Energy

A thorough understanding of the wood surface is required to engineer adhesive bonding in composite applications. A surface analysis technique, dynamic contact angle (DCA) analysis, was used to examine the effects of temperature on the wood surface as measured by the contact angle and surface energy. A hydrophobic surface transition was found on the wood surface at 60 C, which coincides with the glass transition of lignin as measured by differential scanning calorimetry. The change in the surface at the glass transition can be attributed to the diffusion of nonpolar molecular groups to the surface. This could be the result of the migration and deposition of extractives, reorientation of macromolecules, or a combination of the two. Similar behavior has been observed in synthetic amorphous polymers. Although the surface of wood is complex, the results indicate that it can be investigated and understood like synthetic polymer materials