Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Event Log Privacy Based on Differential Petri Nets

Process mining uses event logs to improve business processes, but such logs may contain privacy information. One popular research problem is the privacy protection of event logs. Publishing logs with differential privacy is one of major research directions. Existing research achieves privacy protection primarily by injecting random noise into event logs, or merging similar information. The former ignores the fact that injecting random noise will produce apparently unreasonable activity traces, and the latter will cause a loss of process information in the process mining perspective. To solve the above problems, this article proposes a differential algorithm based on randomized response to model Petri nets for the original event logs, select the important labels in the logs by the weak sequential relationship of control flow between activities, inject noise into the Petri net model based on the important labels using the randomized response approach, and establish a differential Petri net model. Experiments on public datasets show that the event logs produced by the approach proposed do not contain unreasonable traces. Compared with the baseline approach, the proposed approach performs better on Fitness metrics with consistent privacy requirements and retains more process variants, reducing the loss of original event log process information

Source and Distribution of Lead in the Surface Sediments From the South China Sea as Derived From Pb Isotopes

Rapid economic development in East Asian countries has inevitably resulted in environmental degradation in the surrounding seas, and concern for the environment and its protection against pollutants is increasing. Identification of sources of contaminants and evaluation of current environmental status are essential to environmental pollution management, but relatively little has been done in the South China Sea (SCS). In order to investigate the abundance, distribution, and sources of Pb within the SCS, stable Pb isotopes and their ratios were employed to assess the contamination status and to differentiate between natural and anthropogenic origins of Pb in the surface sediments. The total Pb concentrations in sediments varied from 4.18 to 58.7 mg kg(-1), with an average concentration of 23.6 +/- 8.9 mg kg(-1). The observed Pb isotope ratios varied from 18.039 to 19.211 for (206)Pb/(204)Pb, 15.228 to 16.080 for (207)Pb/(204)Pb, 37.786 to 39.951 for (208)Pb/(204)Pb, 1.176 to 1.235 for (206)Pb/(207)Pb, and 2.468 to 2.521 for (208)Pb/(207)Pb. The majority of these ratios are similar to those reported for natural detrital materials. Combined with Pb enrichment factor values, our results show that Pb found within most of the SCS sediments was mainly derived from natural sources, and that there was not significant Pb pollution from anthropogenic sources before 1998. Further studies are needed to reconstruct deposition history and for trend analysis. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved