Grid-Enabled Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Measurement

Abstract. Earth and life sciences are at the forefront to successfully include computational simulations and modeling. Medical applications are often mentioned as the killer applications for the Grid. The complex methodology and models of Traditional Chinese Medicine offer different approaches to diagnose and treat a persons health condition than typical Western medicine. A possibility to make this often hidden knowledge ex-plicit and available to a broader audience will result in mutual synergies for Western and Chinese medicine as well as improved patient care. This paper proposes the design and implementation of a method to accurately estimate blood glucose values using a novel non-invasive method based on electro-transformation measures in human body meridians. The frame-work used for this scientific computing collaboration, namely the China-Austria Data Grid (CADGrid) framework, provides an Intelligence Base offering commonly used models and algorithms as Web/Grid-Services. The controlled execution of the Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Measure-ment Service and the management of scientific data that arise from model execution can be seen as the first application on top of the CADGrid

Research report voltage-gated Ca2+ channel CaV1.3 subunit expressed in the hair cell epithelium of the sacculus of the trout Oncorhynchus mykiss: cloning and comparison across vertebrate classes

Full-length sequence (>6.5 kb) has been determined for the Ca(V)1.3 pore-forming subunit of the voltage-gated Ca(2+) channel from the saccular hair cells of the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). Primary structure was obtained from overlapping PCR and cloned fragments, amplified by primers based on teleost, avian, and mammalian sources. Trout saccular Ca(V)1.3 was localized to hair cells, as evidenced by its isolation from an epithelial layer in which the hair cell is the only intact cell type. The predicted amino acid sequence of the trout hair cell Ca(V)1.3 is approximately 70% identical to the sequences of avian and mammalian Ca(V)1.3 subunits and shows L-type characteristics. The trout hair cell Ca(V)1.3 expresses a 26-aa insert in the I-II cytoplasmic loop (exon 9a) and a 10-aa insert in the IVS2-IVS3 cytoplasmic loop (exon 30a), neither of which is appreciably represented in trout brain. The exon 9a insert also occurs in hair cell organs of chick and rat, and appears as an exon in human genomic Ca(V)1.3 sequence (but not in the Ca(V)1.3 coding sequence expressed in human brain or pancreas). The exon 30a insert, although expressed in hair cells of chick as well as trout, does not appear in comparable rat or human tissues. Further, the IIIS2 region shows a splice choice (exon 22a) that is associated with the hair cell organs of trout, chick, and rat, but is not found in human genomic sequence. The elucidation of the primary structure of the voltage-gated Ca(2+) channel Ca(V)1.3 subunit from hair cells of the teleost, representing the lowest of the vertebrate classes, suggests a generality of sensory mechanism for Ca(V)1.3 across hair cell systems. In particular, the exon 9a insert of this channel appears to be the molecular feature most consistently associated with hair cells from fish to mammal, consonant with the hypothesis that the latter region may be a signature for the hair cell