A digital solution to improve communication efficiency between environmental sensors and webservers (the osd2ERDDAP API).

The purpose of this report is to document the communications protocol and test system osd2ERDDAP developed as part of the Enhancing Climate Observations, Models and Data (ECO MAD) project. The approach allows deployed sensors to telemeter small quantities of arbitrary tabular Ocean Science Data (osd) directly to an ERDDAP server via the Internet in a way that is more efficient for the sensor than using ERDDAP’s existing HTML Forms interface. ERDDAP is a data server that provides a simple and consistent way to download subsets of scientific datasets in common file formats and make graphs and maps. It is the online server used by the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to publicly share environmental data in a format that meets international data management standards. Future use of this API with a range of ocean sensors and ERDDAP will increase the efficiency of data streaming. In turn this reduces power (and associated maintenance) requirements that is vital to deliver low-cost long-term monitoring networks, which support climate research and the management of climate impacts

Coastal wave overtopping: New Nowcast and monitoring technologies

It is projected that global mean sea level could rise up to 1 m this century with a strong regional pattern. It is estimated that 20% of England's coastal defenses could fail under just half this rise. Ambitious climate mitigation and adaptation plans may protect 400,000 - 500,000 people, but flood and coastal erosion risks cannot be fully eliminated. Building coastal climate resilience requires accurate wave overtopping prediction tools and nowcast information to prepare for and respond to coastal hazards. In Dawlish, SW England, a new monitoring system to measure concurrent beach level and wave overtopping conditions over a 1-year period was installed. The system obtains in-situ measurements of the inland wave overtopping distribution across a public walkway and railway line, and issues near real-time overtopping data to the British Oceanographic Data Centre, making it accessible online within 15 minutes of detection. This public web service also ingests near-real time wave and water level data from existing national coastal monitoring networks, providing a full dataset to validate and calibrate an operational wave, water-level and overtopping forecast system. Using these data, the numerical forecasts have been refined by incorporating recent beach levels to reduce the uncertainty in the wave overtopping predictions due to seasonal variability in the beach level at the toe of the sea wall

Genome-wide Analyses Identify KIF5A as a Novel ALS Gene

To identify novel genes associated with ALS, we undertook two lines of investigation. We carried out a genome-wide association study comparing 20,806 ALS cases and 59,804 controls. Independently, we performed a rare variant burden analysis comparing 1,138 index familial ALS cases and 19,494 controls. Through both approaches, we identified kinesin family member 5A (KIF5A) as a novel gene associated with ALS. Interestingly, mutations predominantly in the N-terminal motor domain of KIF5A are causative for two neurodegenerative diseases: hereditary spastic paraplegia (SPG10) and Charcot-Marie-Tooth type 2 (CMT2). In contrast, ALS-associated mutations are primarily located at the C-terminal cargo-binding tail domain and patients harboring loss-of-function mutations displayed an extended survival relative to typical ALS cases. Taken together, these results broaden the phenotype spectrum resulting from mutations in KIF5A and strengthen the role of cytoskeletal defects in the pathogenesis of ALS.Peer reviewe

Harnessing the power of the electronic health record for ALS research and quality improvement: CReATe CAPTURE‐ALS and the ALS Toolkit

The electronic health record (EHR) is designed principally to support the provision and documentation of clinical care, as well as billing and insurance claims. Broad implementation of the EHR, however, also yields an opportunity to use EHR data for other purposes, including research and quality improvement. Indeed, effective use of clinical data for research purposes has been a longstanding goal of physicians who provide care for patients with ALS, but the quality and completeness of clinical data, as well as the burden of double data entry into the EHR and into a research database, have been persistent barriers. These factors provided motivation for the development of the ALS Toolkit, a set of interactive digital forms within the EHR that enable easy, consistent, and structured capture of information relevant to ALS patient care (as well as research and quality improvement) during clinical encounters. Routine use of the ALS Toolkit within the context of the CReATe Consortium’s IRB-approved Clinical Procedures to Support Research in ALS (CAPTURE-ALS) study protocol, permits aggregation of structured ALS patient data, with the goals of empowering research and driving quality improvement. Widespread use of the ALS Toolkit through the CAPTURE-ALS protocol will help to ensure that ALS clinics become a driving force for collecting and aggregating clinical data in a way that reflects the true diversity of the populations affected by this disease, rather than the restricted subset of patients that currently participate in dedicated research studies

COASTAL WAVE OVERTOPPING: NEW NOWCAST AND MONITORING TECHNOLOGIES

It is projected that global mean sea level could rise up to 1 m this century with a strong regional pattern. It is estimated that 20% of England\u27s coastal defenses could fail under just half this rise. Ambitious climate mitigation and adaptation plans may protect 400,000 - 500,000 people, but flood and coastal erosion risks cannot be fully eliminated. Building coastal climate resilience requires accurate wave overtopping prediction tools and nowcast information to prepare for and respond to coastal hazards. In Dawlish, SW England, a new monitoring system to measure concurrent beach level and wave overtopping conditions over a 1-year period was installed. The system obtains in-situ measurements of the inland wave overtopping distribution across a public walkway and railway line, and issues near real-time overtopping data to the British Oceanographic Data Centre, making it accessible online within 15 minutes of detection. This public web service also ingests near-real time wave and water level data from existing national coastal monitoring networks, providing a full dataset to validate and calibrate an operational wave, water-level and overtopping forecast system. Using these data, the numerical forecasts have been refined by incorporating recent beach levels to reduce the uncertainty in the wave overtopping predictions due to seasonal variability in the beach level at the toe of the sea wall

PlantMetabolomics.org: A Web Portal for Plant Metabolomics Experiments

PlantMetabolomics.org (PM) is a web portal and database for exploring, visualizing, and downloading plant metabolomics data. Widespread public access to well-annotated metabolomics datasets is essential for establishing metabolomics as a functional genomics tool. PM integrates metabolomics data generated from different analytical platforms from multiple laboratories along with the key visualization tools such as ratio and error plots. Visualization tools can quickly show how one condition compares to another and which analytical platforms show the largest changes. The database tries to capture a complete annotation of the experiment metadata along with the metabolite abundance databased on the evolving Metabolomics Standards Initiative. PM can be used as a platform for deriving hypotheses by enabling metabolomic comparisons between genetically unique Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) populations subjected to different environmental conditions. Each metabolite is linked to relevant experimental data and information from various annotation databases. The portal also provides detailed protocols and tutorials on conducting plant metabolomics experiments to promote metabolomics in the community. PM currently houses Arabidopsis metabolomics data generated by a consortium of laboratories utilizing metabolomics to help elucidate the functions of uncharacterized genes. PM is publicly available at http://www. plantmetabolomics.org.This article is published as Bais, Preeti, Stephanie M. Moon, Kun He, Ricardo Leitao, Kate Dreher, Tom Walk, Yves Sucaet et al. "PlantMetabolomics. org: a web portal for plant metabolomics experiments." Plant physiology 152, no. 4 (2010): 1807-1816. doi:10.1104/pp.109.151027.</p

PlantMetabolomics.org: A Web Portal for Plant Metabolomics Experiments1[C][W][OA]

PlantMetabolomics.org (PM) is a web portal and database for exploring, visualizing, and downloading plant metabolomics data. Widespread public access to well-annotated metabolomics datasets is essential for establishing metabolomics as a functional genomics tool. PM integrates metabolomics data generated from different analytical platforms from multiple laboratories along with the key visualization tools such as ratio and error plots. Visualization tools can quickly show how one condition compares to another and which analytical platforms show the largest changes. The database tries to capture a complete annotation of the experiment metadata along with the metabolite abundance databased on the evolving Metabolomics Standards Initiative. PM can be used as a platform for deriving hypotheses by enabling metabolomic comparisons between genetically unique Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) populations subjected to different environmental conditions. Each metabolite is linked to relevant experimental data and information from various annotation databases. The portal also provides detailed protocols and tutorials on conducting plant metabolomics experiments to promote metabolomics in the community. PM currently houses Arabidopsis metabolomics data generated by a consortium of laboratories utilizing metabolomics to help elucidate the functions of uncharacterized genes. PM is publicly available at http://www.plantmetabolomics.org