BOL: Related items

Paper test for cancer !!!

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:20:30 -0600

The American Cancer Society projects the numbers of new cancer cases and deaths expected each year in order to estimate the contemporary cancer burden, because cancer incidence and mortality data lag three to four years behind the current year. In addition, the regularly updated Facts & Figures publications present the most current trends in cancer occurrence and survival, as well as information on symptoms, prevention, early detection, and treatment. Cancer rates in developing nations have climbed sharply in recent years, and now account for 70 percent of cancer mortality worldwide. Early detection has been proven to improve outcomes, but screening approaches such as mammograms and colonoscopy, used in the developed world, are too costly to be implemented in settings with little medical infrastructure.

The US born Sangeeta Bhatia at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a cheap, simple, paper test that can detect cancer. These diagnostic, which works much like a pregnancy test, could reveal within minutes, based on a urine sample, whether a person have cancer or not. The MIT media announce the major and amazing breakthrough in cancer diagonistics. These newly developed technology will allow non-communicable diseases to be detect at early stage, which will be cheap and easily accessible to the masses. For the developing world it would be exciting to adapt it instead to a paper test that could be performed on unprocessed samples in a rural setting, without the need for any specialized equipment. The simple readout could even be transmitted to a remote caregiver by a picture on a mobile phone.

The MIT professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Sangeeta Bhatia, who is also the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, invented a new class of synthetic biomarker, which is highly specialized instrument to do these kind of analysis. These paper test essentially relies on nanoparticles that interact with tumor proteins called proteases, each of which can trigger release of hundreds of biomarkers that are then easily detectable in a patient's urine. The MIT nanoparticles are coated with peptides (short protein fragments) targeted by different MMPs. These particles congregate at tumor sites, where MMPs cleave hundreds of peptides, which accumulate in the kidneys and are excreted in the urine.

To create the test strips, the researchers first coated nitrocellulose paper with antibodies that can capture the peptides. Once the peptides are captured, they flow along the strip and are exposed to several invisible test lines made of other antibodies specific to different tags attached to the peptides. If one of these lines becomes visible, it means the target peptide is present in the sample. The technology can also easily be modified to detect multiple types of peptides released by different types or stages of disease.

In tests in mice, the researchers were able to accurately identify colon tumors, as well as blood clots. Bhatia says these tests represent the first step toward a diagnostic device that could someday be useful in human patients. "This is a new idea — to create an excreted biomarker instead of relying on what the body gives you," she says. "To prove this approach is really going to be a useful diagnostic, the next step is to test it in patient populations."

Reference:

Image: jasongrowclients

Homepage: http://lmrt.mit.edu/about.html

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/a-paper-diagnostic-for-cancer-0224.html

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/PIO-develops-cheap-paper-test-to-detect-cancer/articleshow/30963615.cms

Cancer Dependency Map

Jit — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 04:38:47 -0600

The consequences of alterations in the DNA of cancer cells and subsequent vulnerabilities are not fully understood. This project aims to assign a dependency to every cancer cell in a patient which could be exploited to develop new therapies. This knowledge is foundational for precision cancer medicine.

Address of the bookmark: https://depmap.sanger.ac.uk/

Genomics and sequencing approach for identification of biomarkers to assess the efficacy of TGF-βRI inhibitors (of liver cancer) in vivo

Rahul Agarwal — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 13:55:32 -0500

Liver cancer is third leading cause of deaths and fourth most frequent occuring cancer worldwide. There are multiple signaling pathways responsible for causing cancer amongst which TGFb is most important cytokine whose signaling pathway promote cancer. However, main problem is to cure this cancer at late stage where we still have no treatment strategy to tackle this deadly cancer. Hence we need to find out new therapeutic target. One way is to look the relationships between mRNA, methylation and miRNA data of patients with different pathological conditions (cancer vs control either with inhibitor/not). MiRNA is small RNA molecules known to inhibit mRNA expression of particular gene by binding improperly to 3'UTR region of a gene and hence block binding of TF /translation of gene. CpG regions is known to located at promoter region of gene (5' UTR) and usually hypomethylated which allow to gene to transcribe and translate however sometime this region become hyper-methylated thats prevent expression of host gene. Thus , integration of these three data reveal new targets and pathways important for causing or preventing cancer and also reveal biomarker thats check the effects of inhibitor on signaling pathway underlying liver cancer.

Monitor running jobs on Linux server

Jitendra Narayan — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 16:18:43 -0500

You as a bioinformatican run lots of program on your servers. Sometime the shared server is also used by your colleague. If server is busy you sometime need to check the running programs and want to monitor the running programs as well. The "top" command will come in handy when you need to find out if things are still running, how long they’ve been running, or how much memory is being used.

‘top’ is very simple to run: type

%% top

You’ll get a screen that looks like this, and is updated regularly:

Simple, right? Heh.

First! Note that you can use ‘q’ or ‘CTRL-C’ to exit from ‘top’.

Now let’s read and understand at each line independently.

The first line:

top - 23:00:48 up 39 days, 2 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

The first line tells you the current time, how long the machine has been up, how many users are logged in, and the short/medium/long-term compute load on the machine. If you run something for a long time, you’ll see these numbers go up. Right now, the machine is basically just sitting there, so these are all close to 0.

The second line:

Tasks: 239 total,   1 running, 238 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

This line tells you how many processes are running. If you are using laptops machines it’s not so interesting because you really are the only one using this machine.

Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st

This line contains the CPU load. The first two numbers are how busy the system is doing computation (“us” stands for “user”) and how busy the system is doing system-y things like accessing disks or network (“sy” stands for “system”). We’ll talk more about this later.

Mem:   49457320k total,    3492174k used, 14535596k free,    1435148k buffers

This should be easy to understand – how much memory you’re using!

Swap:   539356k total,   28332k used,   836562k free,    29862014k cached

Swap is just on-disk memory that can be used to “swap” out programs from main memory. Again, we’ll talk about this later.:

PID USER      PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+ COMMAND
1 root      39 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0   246:57.22 kipmi0
2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S 0.0 0.0   0:00.00 migration/0

And... finally! What’s actually running! The two most important numbers are the %CPU and %MEM towards the right, as well as the COMMAND. This tells you how compute- and memory-intensive your program is. Right now, nothing’s running so the numbers aren’t very interesting, but just wait until we run something...

DNA tale of 3 to 4 years old Serbia boy

Rahul Agarwal — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 17:34:00 -0600

The genome of a young boy found underground at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal of eastern Siberia around 24,000 years ago came out as close relative of Europeans and Native Indians.

Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/science/two-surprises-in-dna-of-boy-found-buried-in-siberia.html?_r=0

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12736.html

The Cat: evolution, domestication and Genome 10k

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 14:33:56 -0600

A public lecture by Dr Stephen J O'Brien at the UCD Earth Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland. Dr O'Brien is a world leading molecular biologist and dedicated conservationist who uses the tools of molecular biology to help protect endangered species and understand devastating diseases such as cancer and AIDS. He received his PhD in Genetics from Cornell University, USA, in 1971. He then joined the prestigious National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health as a post-doc in 1971 and, there, served as Founder and Chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity from 1986-2011. In December 2011, he joined the Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, as Chief Scientific Officer. Convinced of the utility of exploring diverse species to advance our understanding of the human genome, Dr O'Brien and his team have assembled over 62,000 animal and 424,000 human tissue/DNA specimens, facilitating wide-ranging studies of disease gene associations, species adaptation and natural history. His research interests and expertise span human and comparative genomics, genetic epidemiology, HIV/AIDS, retro-virology, bioinformatics biodiversity and species conservation. Dr O'Brien is best known for documenting the remarkable genetic uniformity of African cheetahs, resolving the mammalian tree of life, describing heretofore unrecognized species of Orangutans, African forest elephants, and Bornean clouded leopards. He is credited with the discovery of CCR5 delta 32, the first of 20 human AIDS restriction genes, which imparts natural immunity to HIV. He is the one of the founders of the Genome 10K initiative, has published over 750 leading research papers, written multiple books and is adjunct professor in over 12 international leading universities. The UCD Earth Institute, University College Dublin, is a multidisciplinary research and education centre with a focus on creating and sharing new knowledge. We aim to contribute to sustainable solutions for many of the pressing Earth-related problems affecting societies now and in the near future.

Faculty post at Zhejiang University

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 03:40:40 -0500

Zhejiang University (ZJU) is seeking faculty candidates for its newly launched, highly competitive and well funded “Hundred Talents Program”. This search covers all colleges and departments at ZJU. Applicants, expected to be about 35 years old, should hold PhD degree, and postdoctoral experiences are preferred for applicants in most fields. Applicants should have demonstrated commitment to excellence in teaching and research at a level comparable to the academic achievement of assistant professor or associate professor in world-renowned universities. Successful candidates must work full-time and are expected to establish internationally competitive and independent research program in cutting-edge areas of the relevant field at ZJU.

As one of the leading research-intensive universities in China, ZJU is located in the beautiful city of Hangzhou. Successful candidates will be employed as Principal Investigators and are qualified to supervise doctoral students. ZJU will offer an internationally competitive salary and the opportunity to purchase university's apartment at a price much lower than the market price, and will provide office and laboratory spaces as well as internationally competitive research startup packages.

Qualified applicants are strongly encouraged to submit their applications electronically to tr@zju.edu.cn. Applicants should include the following materials in pdf format: a comprehensive CV, a statement of research and teaching plan, and a list of 3 to 5 references with detailed contact information.

Contact：Talents Office, ZJU

Tel：+86-571-88981345, +86-571-88981390

Fax：+86-571-88981976

E-mail:tr@zju.edu.cn

XAMPP: Starting Apache fail Ubuntu

Ram Yash Pal — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 05:52:35 -0500

Once you install XAMMP on linux, the most common problem you face is Apache failure. To fix the issues please use following command to first stop and then again start it.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd stop

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

PhpMyAdmin “Wrong permissions on configuration file, should not be world writable!”

Once the Xammp is installed, it might be possible to set up the configuration file in writable mode. Try the following steps:

Just chmod 0755 the file

sudo chmod 0755 config.inc.php

Vicoso group

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 02:51:27 -0600

The Vicoso group investigates how sex chromosomes evolve over time, and what biological forces are driving their patterns of differentiation.

The Vicoso group is interested in understanding several aspects of the biology of sex chromosomes, and the evolutionary processes that shape their peculiar features. By combining the use of next-generation sequencing technologies with studies in several model and non-model organisms, they can address a variety of standing questions, such as: Why do some Y chromosomes degenerate while others remain homomorphic, and how does this relate to the extent of sexual dimorphism of the species? What forces drive some species to acquire global dosage compensation of the X, while others only compensate specific genes? What are the frequency and molecular dynamics of sex-chromosome turnover?

More at https://ist.ac.at/en/research/vicoso-group/
http://pub.ist.ac.at/~bvicoso/

Faculty Positions at Central University of Punjab

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 23:33:33 -0500

Faculty Positions: Rolling/Open Advertisement Advt.No: T-10 (2013)

Pay Scale: Pay Band Rs.15600-39100 with AGP of Rs.6,000/-

Essential Qualifications for Professors, Associate Professors, and Assistant Professors: As per “UGC REGULATIONS ON MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS FOR APPOINTMENT OF TEACHERS AND OTHER ACADEMIC STAFF IN UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES AND MEASURES FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF STANDARDS IN HIGHER EDUCATION 2010“ and the 2nd Amendments to the regulation issued in June 2013.

For details: http://www.ugc.ac.in/oldpdf/regulations/revised_finalugcregulationfinal10.pdf http://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/8539300_English.pdf and University rules.

Procedure to apply:

Application forms along with API form complete in all respect along with necessary documents and application fee of Rs. 500/-. (Rs. 250/- for Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe/Person with disabilities) should be sent to:

Registrar, Central University of Punjab, City Campus, Mansa Road, Bathinda-151001

For more info visit: http://www.centralunipunjab.com/Teaching/Final%20Details-t10-2013.pdf, http://www.centralunipunjab.com/Teaching/Advertisement-t10-2013.jpg

Last Apply Date: 31 Dec 2014