74 research outputs found
Using the Gene Ontology to Annotate Key Players in Parkinson's Disease
The Gene Ontology (GO) is widely recognised as the gold standard bioinformatics resource for summarizing functional knowledge of gene products in a consistent and computable, information-rich language. GO describes cellular and organismal processes across all species, yet until now there has been a considerable gene annotation deficit within the neurological and immunological domains, both of which are relevant to Parkinson's disease. Here we introduce the Parkinson's disease GO Annotation Project, funded by Parkinson's UK and supported by the GO Consortium, which is addressing this deficit by providing GO annotation to Parkinson's-relevant human gene products, principally through expert literature curation. We discuss the steps taken to prioritise proteins, publications and cellular processes for annotation, examples of how GO annotations capture Parkinson's-relevant information, and the advantages that a topic-focused annotation approach offers to users. Building on the existing GO resource, this project collates a vast amount of Parkinson's-relevant literature into a set of high-quality annotations to be utilized by the research community
Longitudinal cohort study of horse owners
This report summarises the findings of a three-year mixed methods research study designed to capture factors that influence horse owner Hendra virus (HeV) risk mitigation practices.
The research project focuses on horse owners; their knowledge, attitudes, and risk mitigation practices, i.e. uptake of vaccination, property management, and biosecurity practices. A flexible research methodology enabled the tracking of core subject areas over time whilst also responding to new or evolving shifts in the HeV landscape, e.g. new HeV cases, event management, and issues arising in the vaccine roll-out.
By tracking relationships within the data and engaging with stakeholders and the horse owner population, it is hoped that findings from the study will help to identify important linkages and effective strategies for communication/information and policy implementation
Path lengths in turbulence
By tracking tracer particles at high speeds and for long times, we study the
geometric statistics of Lagrangian trajectories in an intensely turbulent
laboratory flow. In particular, we consider the distinction between the
displacement of particles from their initial positions and the total distance
they travel. The difference of these two quantities shows power-law scaling in
the inertial range. By comparing them with simulations of a chaotic but
non-turbulent flow and a Lagrangian Stochastic model, we suggest that our
results are a signature of turbulence.Comment: accepted for publication in Journal of Statistical Physic
Dynamics and statistics of heavy particles in turbulent flows
We present the results of Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of turbulent
flows seeded with millions of passive inertial particles. The maximum Taylor's
Reynolds number is around 200. We consider particles much heavier than the
carrier flow in the limit when the Stokes drag force dominates their dynamical
evolution. We discuss both the transient and the stationary regimes. In the
transient regime, we study the growt of inhomogeneities in the particle spatial
distribution driven by the preferential concentration out of intense vortex
filaments. In the stationary regime, we study the acceleration fluctuations as
a function of the Stokes number in the range [0.16:3.3]. We also compare our
results with those of pure fluid tracers (St=0) and we find a critical behavior
of inertia for small Stokes values. Starting from the pure monodisperse
statistics we also characterize polydisperse suspensions with a given mean
Stokes.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, 2 table
Transport properties of heavy particles in high Reynolds number turbulence
The statistical properties of heavy particle trajectories in high Reynolds
numbers turbulent flows are analyzed. Dimensional analysis assuming Kolmogorov
scaling is compared with the result of numerical simulation using a synthetic
turbulence advecting field. The non-Markovian nature of the fluid velocity
statistics along the solid particle trajectories is put into evidence, and its
relevance in the derivation of Lagrangian transport models is discussed.Comment: 30 pages, 11 eps figures included. To appear in Physics of Fluid
Fluid Particle Accelerations in Fully Developed Turbulence
The motion of fluid particles as they are pushed along erratic trajectories
by fluctuating pressure gradients is fundamental to transport and mixing in
turbulence. It is essential in cloud formation and atmospheric transport,
processes in stirred chemical reactors and combustion systems, and in the
industrial production of nanoparticles. The perspective of particle
trajectories has been used successfully to describe mixing and transport in
turbulence, but issues of fundamental importance remain unresolved. One such
issue is the Heisenberg-Yaglom prediction of fluid particle accelerations,
based on the 1941 scaling theory of Kolmogorov (K41). Here we report
acceleration measurements using a detector adapted from high-energy physics to
track particles in a laboratory water flow at Reynolds numbers up to 63,000. We
find that universal K41 scaling of the acceleration variance is attained at
high Reynolds numbers. Our data show strong intermittency---particles are
observed with accelerations of up to 1,500 times the acceleration of gravity
(40 times the root mean square value). Finally, we find that accelerations
manifest the anisotropy of the large scale flow at all Reynolds numbers
studied.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
Stellar turbulence and mode physics
An overview of selected topical problems on modelling oscillation properties
in solar-like stars is presented. High-quality oscillation data from both
space-borne intensity observations and ground-based spectroscopic measurements
provide first tests of the still-ill-understood, superficial layers in distant
stars. Emphasis will be given to modelling the pulsation dynamics of the
stellar surface layers, the stochastic excitation processes and the associated
dynamics of the turbulent fluxes of heat and momentum.Comment: Proc. HELAS Workshop on 'Synergies between solar and stellar
modelling', eds M. Marconi, D. Cardini, M. P. Di Mauro, Astrophys. Space
Sci., in the pres
Generation of small-scale structures in the developed turbulence
The Navier-Stokes equation for incompressible liquid is considered in the
limit of infinitely large Reynolds number. It is assumed that the flow
instability leads to generation of steady-state large-scale pulsations. The
excitation and evolution of the small-scale turbulence is investigated. It is
shown that the developed small-scale pulsations are intermittent. The maximal
amplitude of the vorticity fluctuations is reached along the vortex filaments.
Basing on the obtained solution, the pair correlation function in the limit
is calculated. It is shown that the function obeys the Kolmogorov law
.Comment: 18 page
Expanding the horizons of microRNA bioinformatics
MicroRNA regulation of key biological and developmental pathways is a rapidly expanding area of research, accompanied by vast amounts of experimental data. This data, however, is not widely available in bioinformatic resources, making it difficult for researchers to find and analyse microRNA-related experimental data and define further research projects. We are addressing this problem by providing two new bioinformatics datasets that contain experimentally verified functional information for mammalian microRNAs involved in cardiovascular-relevant, and other, processes. To date, our resource provides over 3,900 Gene Ontology annotations associated with almost 500 miRNAs from human, mouse and rat and over 2,200 experimentally validated miRNA:target interactions. We illustrate how this resource can be used to create miRNA-focused interaction networks with a biological context using the known biological role of miRNAs and the mRNAs they regulate, enabling discovery of associations between gene products, biological pathways and, ultimately, diseases. This data will be crucial in advancing the field of microRNA bioinformatics and will establish consistent datasets for reproducible functional analysis of microRNAs across all biological research areas
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