!!!سائنسی بیٹھک: 2011

BioMOO is a virtual meeting place for biologists, connected to the Globewide Network Academy. The main physical part of BioMOO is located at the BioInformatics Unit of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
BioMOO is a professional community of Biology researchers. It is a place to come meet colleagues in Biology studies and related fields and brainstorm, to hold colloquia and conferences, to explore the serious side of this new medium.
A “MOO” is a text-based chat system which was used for text-based adventure gaming or general text chat in the late 1980’s through the 1990’s (and relatively popular within the then-fledgling internet-gaming crowd). The BioMOO also had a web interface to the system. In BioMOO, both classes and scheduled meetings were held, where biologists and students would collaborate and discuss biology (from 940711-ACEDB-meeting):
The first Ecology and Evolution Journal Club on BioMOO
(bioinformatics.weizmann.ac.il 8888) was held on the 28th of January 1994,
at 2100 GMT. The paper for discussion was Reznick, D. and A. P. Yang
(1993). The influence of fluctuating resources on life history: patterns
of allocation and plasticity in female guppies. _Ecology_ 74(7):
2011-2019.
Over all, most people deemed the meeting to be quite successful, though
not without teething problems. Hopefully these will be fixed for the next
meeting. The meeting had many similarities with real-life meetings: The
discussion wandered, people were confused, people were misunderstood, but
some important issues were discussed, and many good points were made.
Thanks to Gustavo Glusman for establishing and running BioMOO, and the
Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, for providing BioMOO with a place
to exist. Thanks also to those who participated, of course!
Those participating and/or present were:
Simon Blomberg, School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney.
Shan D. Duncan, Indiana University - Bloomington
Bill Adlam, Oxford University (St. Peter's College)
Yoni Freedhoff, York University
John Foster Towell III, Ph.D., Affiliated (loosely): Northern Illinois
        University/Argonne National Labs
Gustavo Glusman, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Alon Haberfeld, University of Guelph, Canada
Geordie Torr, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia
Andy Peters, Indiana University
Helen Rodd, York University
James Everett Ward, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
William J. Turner, Miami University
C. Alex Buerkle, Indiana University
Julio M. Arias, Univ. of Florida - Inst. of Food & Agric. Sciences - Citrus
        Res. & Educ. Ctr
Michael J. Coady, Universite de Montreal
Massimo Pigliucci, University of Connecticut
Victoria McGovern, UNCC
David W. Ranney, University of California, Santa Cruz
Mark MacKenzie, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Michael P. McKenna, Miles Biotechnology, Inc.
Paul Munro, University of Pittsburgh
L Ramakrishnan, The University of Texas at Austin
Mark VanderMuelen
Lev Yampolsky
Dann Paul Siems, University of Minnesota
and seven anonymous guests.
A transcript of the meeting follows. Speakers are not necessarily
identified by their real names (though some may be), but can choose
nicknames. Speakers who are not yet registered on BioMOO appear as
various kinds of “guest”. Keep in mind that this discussion was occurring
in real time, over the internet. The transcript should not be considered
a coherent, clearly thought out, document. Rather, it is the ideas and
opinions of a group of biologists thinking on their feet and coming to
grips with a new medium.
Transcript begins…
[...]
The nematode guest says, “Okay, this is brad again, I am now nematode-guest”
The nematode guest says, “I was answering your question about AGsDB”
Buttercup says, “Gustavo Thanks for reposting my question to Brad. ”
The nematode guest says, “I will try again”
The nematode guest says, “AGsDB is a multi-species database by design due to”
The nematode guest says, “Leland ellis of Keck”
The nematode guest says, “The idea is to use Anchor Loci to compare maps of different species e.g”
The nematode guest says, “Bos taurs and Homo Sapiens”
The nematode guest says, “I also have a multispecies database of ForestTrees”
The nematode guest says, “Are you folks biologists, or computerists (like myself)”
Gustavo is a biologist with computer knowledge..
JohnTowell is a computationally-oreinted biochemist
Buttercup says, “in the case of AGsDB there are 5 species. Are comparisons done 1:1 or with all 5 ata a time ?”
Dwight is a cell culturist with minimal computr
The nematode guest says, “The Idea of AGsDB is certainly to allow multiple species > 2, and ACEDB supports”
Buttercup says, “Buttercup is a biochemist who occassionaly dabbles in molecular biology and is computer literate”
The nematode guest says, “”
The nematode guest says, “Jaime P. has just arrived, he is looking over my shoulder as he”
The nematode guest says, “cannot get access to a computer right now”
The nematode guest says, “Do you have anything to say to him?”
Buttercup says, “Hi Jaime P. Greetings from down-under”
Gustavo waves at Jaime.
JohnTowell has a question
Buttercup says, “How is the conference going ? Getting them sorted out ?”
JohnTowell says, “If cross-referencing occurs when loading, then relationships have beenpre-determined. What about queries of the dbase of relationships that have yet to be discovered? i.e., how do you query the data base outside of hypertext linkages?”
The nematode guest says, “Okay, this is tough. First, the conference is going better than I expected”
The nematode guest says, “because there are more than 30 people here, we are making some progress and it is good to hav e both Durbin and Thierry-Mieg in one place …”
Buttercup says, “will the proceedings be published ? A summary on the Internet ? or on BioMOO?”
The nematode guest says, “The cross-referencing …, ACEDB has a query language which allows retrieval of informaion”
The nematode guest says, “from both inside the database and using windows , and a textual interface called TACE which allows querying without a windows interface (answer to proceedings coming next)”
JohnTowell . o O ( SQL? )
The nematode guest says, “Okay, we are preparing various documentation, in fact Jaime has just returned from a session on this topic, so I am inclined to let him talk, but he refuses to do so as he says he cannot type! (SQL question next)”
The nematode guest says, “ACEDB query language is not SQL, SQL will not map to the pseudo-object orientation of the Database”
The nematode guest says, “”
The nematode guest says, “Okay , do you all know that there is a documentation server on the WWW, and also”
The nematode guest says, “a FAQ –which I publish once a month –hold on for one minute and I will give you pointers”
The nematode guest says, “The WWW URL for the documentation is: http://probe.nalusda.gov:8000/”
Buttercup says, “I got mine from net.bio.net (134.172.2.69)”
The guest has arrived.
Buttercup says, “as file pub/BIOSCI/ACEDB/ACEDB.FAQ”
The amoeban guest materializes out of thin air.
The nematode guest says, “You can get the FAQ at rtfm.mit.edu anon ftp in pub/usenet/news.answers/acedb-faq”
The nematode guest says, “whew over to you guys”
The guest has disconnected.
Buttercup says, “No nematode, tell me more. I am interested in what it might do for me !”
The housekeeper arrives to remove the guest.
JohnTowell thinks the nematode has tired fingers
Buttercup says, “thinks you are correct”
BioMOO closed in 2001 with the following notice:

May 23rd, 2001 Due to sustained low levels of usage (i.e. barely anyone has really used BioMOO for years now), BioMOO will be shut down, to enable a better use for the resources it consumes nonetheless. The final shutdown is scheduled for the end of July 2001.
In the technology world, some R&D groups have been experimenting with online real-time collaboration in a graphical 3D environment. A project manager at Microsoft mentioned his project team uses OpenSIM, which is an open source version of a virtual world. A similar commercial systems (“world”) is Second Life. This project manager said he found it incredibly effective for team-building and day-to-day communication, especially when some team members work in remote offices. Though he is on the cutting edge of collaboration for 2009’s standards, and a technology group will probably always be ahead of most biology teams, it is nonetheless interesting that a forward-looking biology group offered a text-based virtual collaboration environment back in 1994 — even if it didn’t have continued use through today. With the renewed interest in “garage biotech”, a virtual collaboration beyond simple email lists or web-based forums might be called for; a significant portion of biology is in the demonstration of wetlab technique, so a multimedia (video streaming) environment could be very useful.

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Some bioinformatics project ideas

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Bioinformatics industry-a failure in Pakistan!

Natarajan started a discussion on Linkedin that why hasn't the Bioinformatics industry rocketed to success.This stirred up alot of questions that had been at the back of my mind for several months and some utterly new ones with loads of answers. We all kept hearing and seeing the numbers and projections,Somehow it hasn't created or lived upto the buzz and hype it generated a few years ago. One answer could be that there has been no 'explosion' of the businesses that would have been founded in an easier-credit economy? Would one have expected by now, thatthere would have been a lot of (admittedly: inefficiently-redundant) small businesses founded which would ultimately absorb each other into new power houses.No allotted budgets for bioinformaticians.There is another paradox- On one hand you can see plenty of ads for Bioinformatics programmers while on other hand there is indeed a feeling of oversupply
when it comes to trying to sell a bioinformatics product (e.g. Ah! I can have one of the local programmers build it in-house for me, so why should I pay). All the ads for such programmers feed to the hope that there is this industry, while the industry itself is looking for promising revenue generating areas.

The summary of the discussion was “Average biologist has become far more computer-savvy than he or she was in 2003. It is now routine for wet labs to maintain Wikis to organize their papers and protocols, and
unexceptional to see an enterprising graduate student or postdoc create a relational database to manage the results from a complex set of experiments.”
“With all these training and online resources available, one would think there would be less need for card-carrying bioinformaticians. Eight years ago, at the height of the bioinformatics bubble,
pharmaceutical companies and other industry players were offering big premiums to
qualified bioinformaticians. "Maybe, one of the reason bioinformatics could not rocket because biology is still struggling to make some valid sense out of the statistics and analysis. There are no well established models and theories in biology that could help understand the data. Theoretical biology lags behind.
I program and chose to do a PhD in Molecular Biology to understand:
1. the mindset of a Biologist that is very different from an informatician,
2. biology itself.
I suppose those who went into "bioinformatics" with a biology background will stay mainly "biologists". Those going into "bioinformatics" from a computer science background, will still mainly be "tool developers", "software engineers", part of "BioIT" (?)

This is the cry of those areas and bioinformaticians whom i awed w.r.t the situation of Pakistani bioinformatics industry.Pakistani industry has no formulated policies, no job perspective, nothing to lure people;those already in the field are dishearted. When the leading nations in research are crying;what should Pakistani industry do?

I think carry on sleeping as it has been doing all the years:(

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Cloud computing-Role in Drug discovery

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Cloud-Driven Biopharmaceutical Company

Ariel Schwartz at FastCompany recently profiled Nimbus, a biopharmaceutical company that is making big waves in the drug discovery space. The firm has made announcements about pending developments in obesity and lymphoma-fighting drugs. While there are already numerous efforts underway to tackle these conditions at any number of other pharmaceutical companies, Nimbus has a particularly “nimble” drug discovery model that hinges on cloud computing.Nimbus has garnered some significant attention as of late beyond its upcoming obesity pill that aims to mimic the effects of exercise by preventing new fat and burning that which is stored. The company just received an undisclosed amount of financial backing from Bill Gates. Another contributor to the seed round was Dr. Richard Friesner, who founded the computational drug design company Schrodinger.

According to the Schwartz, “The company’s secret sauce is its computer-inspired drug discovery approach, which uses cloud computing to simulate what a drug target looks like. This allows the company to do research overnight that would take months at other pharmaceutical companies.

During the brief interview Nimbus suggested that another ingredient of their secret sauce is that computational scalability and flexibility using the cloud model allows for more agility to consider a more extensive set of options during modeling and drug discovery. In this case, the Nimbus process is unique in that it is able to consider the important role water plays during absorption of a drug since it can determine how well the drug is retained.

According to Nimbus, this is something many companies cannot (or do not consider) because of the massive computational requirements it takes to factor this into the equation.

As the company’s Chief Business Officer, Jonathan Montagu noted, “It’s the difference between Google Maps and Google Earth…most drug companies have a two-dimensional view, but we have an understanding of how water molecules in a protein target impact drug binding. This gives you more of a three-dimensional representation of how a drug target works.”

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Cloud computing

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Genome Sequence Could Reveal 'Achilles' Heels' of Important Wheat Disease

Research published in PLoS Genetics on June 9 provides insights into how an important fungal disease is able to evade wheat's defences. The researchers hope that the study, which reveals the fungus' complete genome sequence, will enable them to breed resistant crop plants or improve the use of pesticides.

The genome sequence was produced by an international consortium of researchers including scientists at Rothamsted Research in the UK. The scientists, who were funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and others, are already using the fungus' genome sequence to find ways to control the disease in order to help meet the challenges of ensuring global food security.

The consortium has sequenced the genome of a fungus called Mycosphaerella graminicola which causes leaf blotch disease in wheat. The disease kills cells in the plants leaves leaving large dead blotches which are unable to absorb energy from the sun. This significantly reduces yields and takes a serious toll on wheat crops globally and in the UK; annually a 5-15% reduction in grain yield is incurred in each wheat field solely as a result these infections.

Professor Kim Hammond-Kosack of Rothamsted Research who led the study in the UK said "M. graminicola attacks wheat plants by stealth. There is normally a period of about a week between when a plant first becomes infected and when the characteristic blotches of the disease appear on its leaves. During this time it appears that the plant fails to recognise it has become infected and so is unable to activate its defences to fight back. Studying the fungus' genome will help us to understand how the pathogen is able to go undetected and maybe reveal a chink in its armour that we can exploit."

The genome sequence reveals that M. graminicola has very few genes which produce enzymes able to break-down plant cell walls compared with other fungi which specialise in infecting plants. Plants often use the presence of the sugars and proteins released when a cell is broken down as cue for turning on their immune responses, so the researchers think that the unusually low numbers of genes producing enzymes for breaking down plant cells may be crucial to the fungus' stealth approach.

The team from Rothamsted have already started on work using the genome to look for potential weaknesses in the fungus' defences. Collaborating with researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands they have identified a protein in the fungus which is important in keeping it hidden. This research was published recently in Plant Physiology.

Dr Jason Rudd who worked on the project at Rothamsted Research said "We were able to use the information in the genome sequence almost immediately to look for a potential Achilles' heel. We singled out a protein which helps keep the fungus camouflaged and protects it from the plant's defences. When we generated a mutant strain of the fungus which didn't contain the gene for this protein, the infected wheat plants produced strong immune responses and didn't develop the characteristic leaf blotches. Our next step is to use these and similar findings to help farmers combat this disease out in the field in order to reduce wheat losses."

Professor Maurice Moloney, Director and Chief Executive of Rothamsted Research commented "Rothamsted Research is proud to be part of the team that has sequenced and analysed the M. graminicola genome. This fungal pathogen causes one of the most pernicious plant diseases and accounts for significant losses annually in wheat yields throughout the world. This work illustrates the power of sequencing the genomes of plant pathogens in identifying key targets for efficient plant protection."

Professor Douglas Kell, Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, said "Genome sequencing is an important tool in the fight to ensure global food security. Determining the sequence of a destructive crop disease like this is now so quick and affordable that it can be viewed as a research tool rather than a project in itself. This is especially true when the complementary talents of researchers in different countries can be brought to bear. As in this project, this information can be put to immediate use in finding new ways to combat plant disease."

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Software review:VNL and ATK(nanotechnology)

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Water,governance and corruption-Pakistan

This is a review of the essay by Feisal khan; from the book “Running on empty-Pakistan’s water crisis” published by Woodrow Wilson International centre for scholars. Feisal khan is assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
In the article ,Feisal khan highlights the major factors behind the brutality of the Pakistani water crisis and attributes these factors to a historical legacy of bad policies, misgovernance, and corruption.
He starts with the narration of 2005 analysis of the Pakistani water situation by the World Bank. The facts and figures mentioned are very distressing. Pakistan seems to be one of the most arid and water-stressed countries, on par with those of the Sahara Desert. A per capita annual water availability of 1,000 cubic meters (m3) is believed to be low enough to “impede development and harm human health”. Indeed, in one important sense, the story of Pakistani agriculture is a story of declining farm-gate. The author has represented the declining per capita water availability in Pakistan graphically. The graph shows water availability of 3000 m3/capita/year to less than a 1000 in 2035.The comparison of yields and water productivity of wheat in USA, Pakistan, and India shows the clear difference in outputs of wheat crop per hectare. Seven tons/ha is obtained in USA,3.9 tons in India and just 2 tons in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s wheat yield is low as compared to US and the yield of Punjab which represents the breadbasket of Pakistan is approximately half than that of Indian Punjab.
Considering the importance of water to Pakistan’s economy and its relative scarcity, water conservation and use-efficiency should be high on Pakistan’s list of national priorities but they are not. A major factor behind the severity of the Pakistani water crisis is a historical legacy of bad policies, misgovernance, and corruption.
Work on the Pakistani irrigation system was started by the British colonial administration and Pakistan had an extensive and well-developed irrigation structure with provincial irrigation departments of considerable technical expertise and professional ability after the independence. Soon after independence, India started tempering with the Pakistan’s water resources. In 1948, India shut down water flow to Pakistan in 1948. The Punjab Irrigation Department rapidly dug the 100-mile Bombanwala-Ravi-Bedian-Dipalpur canal to divert water from the Ravi to the Sutlej River, thereby forestalling another Indian attempt to cripple Pakistan by shutting the downstream flow of the Sutlej.

Basically the colonial-era irrigation department focused on technical administration and water project construction, with virtually all decisions made internally and without any user input into the decision-making process. The colonial-era Canal and Drainage Act of 1873 gave the state all rights and authority over water issues. The legal lack of rights for the water users was more strengthened by government of Pakistan amendments that stripped the Act of the extremely limited redress available to water users—i.e., farmers. This was done to consolidate power of loyalist large land owners and micromanage small farmers. This situation has remained till date and irrigation official power has remained unchecked.
In 1959, Military govt. of General Ayub established WAPDA to plan and implement a strategy for Pakistan’s water resources. As part of the water-use planning policy, the riparian dispute with India were resolved with the signing Indus water treaty in 1960.After Indus water treaty, Mangla and Tarbela dams were established. These were highly successful projects with extensive economic benefits for the Pakistani economy.
The bad policies responsible for water crisis include inadequate infrastructure investment, especially in maintenance and repair. World Bank characterizes Pakistani government policy as “Build/Neglect/Rebuild,” where all basic maintenance is literally ignored until the infrastructure is on the verge of collapse. The Promotion of sugar cane cultivation has a negative impact on the already precarious water situation as well. Besides that ;massive diversion of river waters into agriculture has led to a decline in the lower Sindh wetlands, the Indus Delta mangrove forests, and coastal fishing, as well as taken a horrible toll on the biodiversity and fauna of the entire Indus Basin ecosystem. All this has exacerbated a bad water situation, and decades of neglect have allowed major problems to reach near-catastrophic levels.
The water bureaucracy is notoriously corrupt. There is no effective internal administrative check on decisions made by irrigation bureaucrats. Second, they are more vulnerable to pressure to “accommodate” large local landowners and politicians. The level of money involved is staggering. The senior officials pay “crores of rupees” to obtain desirable posts and turn down “clean jobs at four times the [official] salary” because the bribe income is 5-8 times more than the clean salary. In 2002, many farmers were charged an annual “fee” of Rs. 30,000 for each watercourse outlet.With about 60,000 outlets in the irrigation system, this gives an income of roughly Rs. 1.8 billion to be shared among irrigation officials. And this is just for having a water outlet that gets some water at some point. This fee did not entitle a farmer to more than one’s share.At least 25 percent of farmers report bribing irrigation officials for irrigation water, with the typical payment averaging about 2.5 percent of income/hectare.
Nawaz sharif made an effort to reform through decentralization by implementing the Provincial Irrigation Authority Act of 1997.But in practice ,nothing changed because the water rights and entitlements were not on the immediate agenda of the government. The government’s habit of creating more institutions to cover the inefficiency of parent institutions is one cause of the ineffective water reforms too.

The government needs a radical restructuring of water use patterns and effective implementation to save Pakistan from disaster. We also need to eliminate corruption from the water administrating authorities. Some major reform efforts will have to be undertaken to shore up the system. The professional competence and integrity of the provincial irrigation bureaucracies need to be improved, and this will require greater centralization and reassertion of administrative control and not devolution and decentralization so that large landowners cannot threaten or bribe officials. At the same time, the government of Pakistan should also discourage sugarcane cultivation and increase the freshwater flow to the Indus Delta. The prospects for any meaningful reforms in Pakistani agricultural and irrigation administration are extremely unlikely in the immediate future. Pakistan’s water crisis and attendant misgovernance will surely worsen.

Reference:
Khan, Feisal. “Water, Governance and Corruption in Pakistan.” In Kugelman (Ed.) “Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis.” 2009, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

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Medical tourism in Pakistan

Medical tourism is the practice of travelling across international borders to obtain health care. It also refers negatively to the practice of healthcare providers travelling internationally to deliver healthcare. The concept of medical tourism is not a new one. The first recorded instance of medical tourism dates back thousands of years to when Greek pilgrims traveled to Epidauria for medical tourism. Pakistan is a charming and affordable destination for medical tourism and has full potential to grow further.Medical tourism in Pakistan is already arranging successful medical treatments health, care and wellness trips. Pakistan has lots of modern hospitals in federal capital city Islamabad, and two provincial capitals Lahore and Karachi. Hospitals are fully equipped with the modern means of cure, and have enough facilities and comforts for the patients. Complicated plastic and reconstructive surgeries are available in Pakistan like liposuctions, face lift and many others. Surgeons of Pakistan are dealing with the orthopedic surgeries masterly; procedures of joint replacement surgeries like knee and hip replacement surgery are available in Pakistan. Hair replacement is another strong side of medical tourism in Pakistan.www.medtravelpak.com is the forum where you can get the quality information regarding every medical procedure in Pakistan. Federal ministry of health is striving hard to meet the strict standards of health and care in the hospitals sector. There are lots of benefits for medical tourists like in Pakistan it is easy to meet the legal requirements, visa policy is not very strict and it is easy to get the health insurance in Pakistan. No doubt Pakistan is a charming and affordable destination for medical tourism and has full potential to grow further.

Pakistan manages to make a meager amount of money despite a low cost of operations as compared to neighboring country India as it receives more than 100,000 foreign patients a year. The Confederation of Indian Industry expects the sector to grow to $2 billion by 2012. Despite that operation rates are lower in Pakistan than India and fifteenth of rates in west; the medical tourism industry is declining due to several reasons:

organ transplant tourism: poverty in Pakistan resulted in commercializing of organs from live donors resulting in criticism from WHO and human rights organizations and transmission of HIV,hepatitis B and C viruses.
Terrorism acts and instability in the region
Language barrier(English is not spoken officialy in hospitals etc)
superbug NDM-1(leading to resistance to antibiotics)
Unaware consumers about the plethora options ( different range of packages, tourism options)
lack of proper advertisement

Conclusion:

The Government of Pakistan and Financial institutions should invest in medical tourism.
and take steps for the up gradation of basic amenities and hospitals infrastructure.
The co-ordination between the health care and tourism sectors should be increased. Media and marketing agencies should play a positive and effective role in the marketing of medical tourism in Pakistan. We should also create a resource pool of highly skilled and cordial manpower along with standardization of services and accreditation of hospitals. Facilities with the latest equipment such as heart mapping equipment, CT Scanners, Open MRI machines, heart catheterization labs, digital ultrasound and mammogram machines and more should be introduced in the hospitals.
Organ transplant tourism should be banned and the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Authority (Thota) should work properly with the total elimination of corruption and improve image of Pakistani medical tourism over the world.

References:

Facts and figures from the Wikipedia encyclopedia

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HARMONY 2011

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wikipedia as an ontology-zareen syed

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Blame the 'chaperone'

A Jackson Laboratory research team led by Professor Patsy Nishina, Ph.D., has identified a mutation in a gene that's essential for correct protein-processing in cells. Defects in protein folding are associated with a variety of abnormalities and diseases ...
Cells don’t come prefabricated, with pieces plunked down and tacked together like modular homes offloaded from trucks. The structural proteins that give cells shape, tubulin and actin (think beams and girders), are themselves subject to essential processing before they become part of the assembly. Proteins must be folded in very specific ways to function properly, and depend on “chaperone” proteins to help them in the process. Defects in the chaperone proteins lead to disruption of the folding process, which adversely affects cellular development and growth.
The chaperones themselves, such as prefoldin, are quite complicated. Prefoldin, which stabilizes brand new proteins, has six subunits assembled into a structure that looks like a jellyfish. Nishina and colleagues identified a mutation in one of the subunits of prefoldin, Pfdn5. In mice, it causes photoreceptor degeneration in the eye, central nervous system abnormalities and male infertility. Although Pfdn5 is widely expressed in other tissues, its disruption appears to significantly affect only these cells. Defects in other subunits disrupt development in other tissues, indicating that each prefoldin subunit is important for the processing of different proteins in different tissues.
The complex protein transport and folding process is only beginning to be fully studied in mammals. Given that disruptions in the process contribute to a variety of human disease mechanisms, the Pdfn5 mutation will be a valuable tool for further research.
Nishina published the research in the Journal of Biological Chemistry with Jackson colleagues YongSuk Lee, Richard S. Smith, Wanda Jordan, Benjamin L. King, Jungyeon Won and Juergen Naggert, as well as Jose M. Valpuesta of the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, CSIC Campus de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain.
The Jackson Laboratory is a nonprofit biomedical research institution based in Bar Harbor, Maine. Its mission is to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community.Lee et al.: Prefoldin 5 is required for normal sensory and neuronal development in a murine model. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 286, 726-736, January 7, 2011.

Contact(s):

Joyce Peterson, 207-288-6058, The Jackson Laboratory

For information on automatic email delivery of news releases (journalists only), please send an email request for details to news@jax.org. Please address other inquiries to pubinfo@jax.org.

Media Relations, Communications Office
The Jackson Laboratory
600 Main Street
Bar Harbor, Maine 04609-1500
Phone: 207-288-6058 (journalists only)
Main Jackson Laboratory phone: 207-288-6000
Fax: 207-288-6076
Email: news@jax.org

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!!!سائنسی بیٹھک

Note to Danish environmental protection agency!

McGraw-Hill: Environmental Nanotechnology : Book

BioMoo-biohackers virtual meeting place

Some bioinformatics project ideas

Bioinformatics industry-a failure in Pakistan!

Cloud computing-Role in Drug discovery

Cloud-Driven Biopharmaceutical Company

Cloud computing

Genome Sequence Could Reveal 'Achilles' Heels' of Important Wheat Disease

Software review:VNL and ATK(nanotechnology)

Water,governance and corruption-Pakistan

Medical tourism in Pakistan

HARMONY 2011

HARMONY : The Hackathon on Resources for Modeling in Biology

wikipedia as an ontology-zareen syed

Blame the 'chaperone'

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