Organization and Management of the Sead Help Desk

ARNe (Regis University Academic Research Network Enterprise), is the graduate student run and managed intranet which is organized as an IT company. The operating structure is based upon a Service Oriented Architecture where each student is involved in an operating portion of the network. New students participating in the SEAD practicum are required to work the ARNe help desk as a requirement of their project. They are expected to login to Track-It! on a daily basis and check for new tickets in the queue. The tickets are submitted by students as well as faculty. Without having a defined walk through on what the duties and responsibilities are required of working the help desk, transitioning students may not know what is expected of them. By creating a tiered escalation structure with set demarcations, students will be able to utilize a process flow and work the trouble tickets accordingly. My thesis is that by establishing a clear and concise help desk schedule and having processes for working, escalating and resolving Track-It tickets, the mean time to repair (MTTR) will decrease significantly which will increase the amount of work that the practicum participants can complete. Also, by running reports that look for trends on customer reported problems, processes and procedures can be developed which will help identify and resolve these issues in a timely manner. It is also hoped that by implementing a root cause analysis (RCA) tool, the likelihood of future occurrences can be minimized

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

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

Genetic studies of body mass index yield new insights for obesity biology

Note: A full list of authors and affiliations appears at the end of the article. Obesity is heritable and predisposes to many diseases. To understand the genetic basis of obesity better, here we conduct a genome-wide association study and Metabochip meta-analysis of body mass index (BMI), a measure commonly used to define obesity and assess adiposity, in up to 339,224 individuals. This analysis identifies 97 BMI-associated loci (P 20% of BMI variation. Pathway analyses provide strong support for a role of the central nervous system in obesity susceptibility and implicate new genes and pathways, including those related to synaptic function, glutamate signalling, insulin secretion/action, energy metabolism, lipid biology and adipogenesis.</p