Analysis of cancer metabolism with high-throughput technologies

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent advances in genomics and proteomics have allowed us to study the nuances of the Warburg effect – a long-standing puzzle in cancer energy metabolism – at an unprecedented level of detail. While modern next-generation sequencing technologies are extremely powerful, the lack of appropriate data analysis tools makes this study difficult. To meet this challenge, we developed a novel application for comparative analysis of gene expression and visualization of RNA-Seq data.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We analyzed two biological samples (normal human brain tissue and human cancer cell lines) with high-energy, metabolic requirements. We calculated digital topology and the copy number of every expressed transcript. We observed subtle but remarkable qualitative and quantitative differences between the citric acid (TCA) cycle and glycolysis pathways. We found that in the first three steps of the TCA cycle, digital expression of aconitase 2 (<it>ACO2</it>) in the brain exceeded both citrate synthase (<it>CS</it>) and isocitrate dehydrogenase 2 (<it>IDH2</it>), while in cancer cells this trend was quite the opposite. In the glycolysis pathway, all genes showed higher expression levels in cancer cell lines; and most notably, digital gene expression of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (<it>GAPDH</it>) and enolase (<it>ENO</it>) were considerably increased when compared to the brain sample.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The variations we observed should affect the rates and quantities of ATP production. We expect that the developed tool will provide insights into the subtleties related to the causality between the Warburg effect and neoplastic transformation. Even though we focused on well-known and extensively studied metabolic pathways, the data analysis and visualization pipeline that we developed is particularly valuable as it is global and pathway-independent.</p

Biological Earth observation with animal sensors.

Space-based tracking technology using low-cost miniature tags is now delivering data on fine-scale animal movement at near-global scale. Linked with remotely sensed environmental data, this offers a biological lens on habitat integrity and connectivity for conservation and human health; a global network of animal sentinels of environmen-tal change

The structure of the system of processing citizens’ appeals

This article describes the features of interaction with public authorities. A realization of citizen appeal processing system and defines its mission. Posted scheme of the system processing of citizens. Detailed description of its components and functions as well as features of the program realization is given. Summarizing the existing regulations and experience of interaction with public authorities is described. Depending on the specifics of each of stages of system creation is given. For accounting and analysis of applications of citizens is designed database structure

Інформаційне забезпечення організації комунікації громадян з архівними установами

Висвітлено перспективи використання вебресурсів в архівній справі. Вебсайт архівної установи можна вважати невід’ємним елементом у діяльності сучасної архівної установи та її комунікації. Він слугує для них засобом оперативного надання інформації особистого та архівного значення, взаємодії зі споживачами інформації, громадянами, сприяє інноваційній діяльності в умовах інформатизації суспільства. Вебсайт допомагає розвивати теорію та практику архівної справи. Проаналізовано переваги наявності вебсайту та висвітлено етапи створення порталу для архіву Національного університету «Львівська політехніка». Проєкт вебсайту створено на базі CMS WordPress; ця система має зрозумілий інтерфейс, вона легка для опанування навіть тим, хто ніколи не створював вебпортали. Реалізований проєкт, що показано в статті, повністю готовий до використання та впровадження в роботу університетського архіву. Проаналізовано відповідну літературу з метою підкреслити перспективи використання сучасних технологій в архівній справі та створено діаграми, які демонструють роботу порталу зсередини

Multiple cryptic species of sympatric generalists within the avian blood parasite Haemoproteus majoris

The avian haemosporidian parasite Haemoproteus majoris has been reported to infect a wide range of passerine birds throughout the Holarctic ecozone. Five cytochrome b (cyt b) lineages have been described as belonging to the morphological species H. majoris, and these form a tight phylogenetic cluster together with 13 undescribed lineages that differ from each other by < 1.2% in sequence divergence. Records in a database (MalAvi) that contains global findings of haemosporidian lineages generated by universal primers suggest that these lineages vary substantially in host distribution. We confirm this pattern in a data set collected at Lake Kvismaren, Sweden, where three of the generalist lineages have local transmission. However, whether these lineages represent intraspecific mitochondrial diversity or clusters of cryptic species has previously not been examined. In this study, we developed novel molecular markers to amplify the partial segments of four nuclear genes to determine the level of genetic diversity and gene phylogenies among the five morphologically described cyt b lineages of H. majoris. All five cyt b lineages were strongly associated with unique nuclear alleles at all four nuclear loci, indicating that each mitochondrial lineage represents a distinct biological species. Within lineages, there was no apparent association between nuclear alleles and host species, indicating that they form genetically unstructured populations across multiple host species