Team 2: Situation Awareness of an Infantry Unit in a Chemical Environment

from Scythe : Proceedings and Bulletin of the International Data Farming Community, Issue 2 Workshop 14The German Federal Office of Defense Technology and Procurement has been analyzing the influence of networked sensors and effectors on military capabilities. The background of our overall scenario is peace support operations (PSO) in an urban environment. The background for the actual technical evaluations of sensors, effectors and the connecting network is the following scenario vignette: Convoy Protection

Deep transcriptome-sequencing and proteome analysis of the hydrothermal vent annelid <it>Alvinella pompejana</it> identifies the CvP-bias as a robust measure of eukaryotic thermostability

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Alvinella pompejana</it> is an annelid worm that inhabits deep-sea hydrothermal vent sites in the Pacific Ocean. Living at a depth of approximately 2500 meters, these worms experience extreme environmental conditions, including high temperature and pressure as well as high levels of sulfide and heavy metals. <it>A. pompejana</it> is one of the most thermotolerant metazoans, making this animal a subject of great interest for studies of eukaryotic thermoadaptation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In order to complement existing EST resources we performed deep sequencing of the <it>A. pompejana</it> transcriptome. We identified several thousand novel protein-coding transcripts, nearly doubling the sequence data for this annelid. We then performed an extensive survey of previously established prokaryotic thermoadaptation measures to search for global signals of thermoadaptation in <it>A. pompejana</it> in comparison with mesophilic eukaryotes. In an orthologous set of 457 proteins, we found that the best indicator of thermoadaptation was the difference in frequency of charged versus polar residues (CvP-bias), which was highest in <it>A. pompejana</it>. CvP-bias robustly distinguished prokaryotic thermophiles from prokaryotic mesophiles, as well as the thermophilic fungus <it>Chaetomium thermophilum</it> from mesophilic eukaryotes. Experimental values for thermophilic proteins supported higher CvP-bias as a measure of thermal stability when compared to their mesophilic orthologs. Proteome-wide mean CvP-bias also correlated with the body temperatures of homeothermic birds and mammals.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our work extends the transcriptome resources for <it>A. pompejana</it> and identifies the CvP-bias as a robust and widely applicable measure of eukaryotic thermoadaptation.</p> <p>Reviewer</p> <p>This article was reviewed by Sándor Pongor, L. Aravind and Anthony M. Poole.</p