Smart Aerospace eCommerce: Using Intelligent Agents in a NASA Mission Services Ordering Application

This paper describes how intelligent agent technology was successfully prototyped and then deployed in a smart eCommerce application for NASA. An intelligent software agent called the Intelligent Service Validation Agent (ISVA) was added to an existing web-based ordering application to validate complex orders for spacecraft mission services. This integration of intelligent agent technology with conventional web technology satisfies an immediate NASA need to reduce manual order processing costs. The ISVA agent checks orders for completeness, consistency, and correctness, and notifies users of detected problems. ISVA uses NASA business rules and a knowledge base of NASA services, and is implemented using the Java Expert System Shell (Jess), a fast rule-based inference engine. The paper discusses the design of the agent and knowledge base, and the prototyping and deployment approach. It also discusses future directions and other applications, and discusses lessons-learned that may help other projects make their aerospace eCommerce applications smarter

The Plasmodium falciparum sexual development transcriptome: a microarray analysis using ontology-based pattern identification.

The sexual stages of malarial parasites are essential for the mosquito transmission of the disease and therefore are the focus of transmission-blocking drug and vaccine development. In order to better understand genes important to the sexual development process, the transcriptomes of high-purity stage I-V Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes were comprehensively profiled using a full-genome high-density oligonucleotide microarray. The interpretation of this transcriptional data was aided by applying a novel knowledge-based data-mining algorithm termed ontology-based pattern identification (OPI) using current information regarding known sexual stage genes as a guide. This analysis resulted in the identification of a sexual development cluster containing 246 genes, of which approximately 75% were hypothetical, exhibiting highly-correlated, gametocyte-specific expression patterns. Inspection of the upstream promoter regions of these 246 genes revealed putative cis-regulatory elements for sexual development transcriptional control mechanisms. Furthermore, OPI analysis was extended using current annotations provided by the Gene Ontology Consortium to identify 380 statistically significant clusters containing genes with expression patterns characteristic of various biological processes, cellular components, and molecular functions. Collectively, these results, available as part of a web-accessible OPI database (http://carrier.gnf.org/publications/Gametocyte), shed light on the components of molecular mechanisms underlying parasite sexual development and other areas of malarial parasite biology

Cell types of the human retina and its organoids at single-cell resolution: developmental convergence, transcriptomic identity, and disease map

How closely human organoids recapitulate cell-type diversity and cell-type maturation of their target organs is not well understood. We developed light-sensitive human retinal organoids with multiple nuclear and synaptic layers. We sequenced the RNA of 158,844 single cells from these organoids at seven developmental time points and from the periphery, fovea, pigment epithelium and choroid of light-responsive adult human retinas, and performed histochemistry. Cell types in organoids matured in vitro to a stable ‘developed’ state at a rate similar to human retina development in vivo and the transcriptomes of organoid cell types converged towards the transcriptomes of adult peripheral retinal cell types. The expression of disease-associated genes was significantly cell-type specific in adult retina and cell-type specificity was retained in organoids. We implicate unexpected cell types in diseases such as macular degeneration. This resource identifies cellular targets for studying disease mechanisms in organoids and for targeted repair in human retinas

RIFINs are adhesins implicated in severe Plasmodium falciparum malaria.

Rosetting is a virulent Plasmodium falciparum phenomenon associated with severe malaria. Here we demonstrate that P. falciparum-encoded repetitive interspersed families of polypeptides (RIFINs) are expressed on the surface of infected red blood cells (iRBCs), where they bind to RBCs-preferentially of blood group A-to form large rosettes and mediate microvascular binding of iRBCs. We suggest that RIFINs have a fundamental role in the development of severe malaria and thereby contribute to the varying global distribution of ABO blood groups in the human population