The iPlant Collaborative: Cyberinfrastructure for Plant Biology

The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that aims to create an innovative, comprehensive, and foundational cyberinfrastructure in support of plant biology research (PSCIC, 2006). iPlant is developing cyberinfrastructure that uniquely enables scientists throughout the diverse fields that comprise plant biology to address Grand Challenges in new ways, to stimulate and facilitate cross-disciplinary research, to promote biology and computer science research interactions, and to train the next generation of scientists on the use of cyberinfrastructure in research and education. Meeting humanity's projected demands for agricultural and forest products and the expectation that natural ecosystems be managed sustainably will require synergies from the application of information technologies. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure design is based on an unprecedented period of research community input, and leverages developments in high-performance computing, data storage, and cyberinfrastructure for the physical sciences. iPlant is an open-source project with application programming interfaces that allow the community to extend the infrastructure to meet its needs. iPlant is sponsoring community-driven workshops addressing specific scientific questions via analysis tool integration and hypothesis testing. These workshops teach researchers how to add bioinformatics tools and/or datasets into the iPlant cyberinfrastructure enabling plant scientists to perform complex analyses on large datasets without the need to master the command-line or high-performance computational services

Functional Impairment of Human Myeloid Dendritic Cells during Schistosoma haematobium Infection

Chronic Schistosoma infection is often characterized by a state of T cell hyporesponsiveness of the host. Suppression of dendritic cell (DC) function could be one of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, since Schistosoma antigens are potent modulators of dendritic cell function in vitro. Yet, it remains to be established whether DC function is modulated during chronic human Schistosoma infection in vivo. To address this question, the effect of Schistosoma haematobium infection on the function of human blood DC was evaluated. We found that plasmacytoid (pDC) and myeloid DC (mDC) from infected subjects were present at lower frequencies in peripheral blood and that mDC displayed lower expression levels of HLA-DR compared to those from uninfected individuals. Furthermore, mDC from infected subjects, but not pDC, were found to have a reduced capacity to respond to TLR ligands, as determined by MAPK signaling, cytokine production and expression of maturation markers. Moreover, the T cell activating capacity of TLR-matured mDC from infected subjects was lower, likely as a result of reduced HLA-DR expression. Collectively these data show that S. haematobium infection is associated with functional impairment of human DC function in vivo and provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of T cell hyporesponsiveness during chronic schistosomiasis

Theoretical-study of Associative Ionization in H+-h- Collisions At Low-energy (0.001-5ev)

A simple mechanism responsible for H+-H- associative ionisation is proposed which selects the (2p sigma u)2 1 Sigma g+ configuration state as the autoionising state relevant to this process. According to results on mutual neutralisation, the HH1 Sigma g+ and B"B1 Sigma u+ adiabatic states of H2 are assumed to be the way of entering the transition region. Quantal calculations have been performed including all dissociation and ionisation channels. The calculated cross section is found to be in agreement with the previous experimental results of Poulaert et al. (1978)

Fish Community Response to Dam Removal in Twelvemile Creek, Pickens County, South Carolina

2012 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Exploring Opportunities for Collaborative Water Research, Policy and Managemen