Making metabolism accessible and meaningful: is the definition of a central metabolic dogma within reach?

Intermediary metabolism, a dominant research area before the emergence of molecular biology, is attracting renewed interest for fundamental and applied reasons as documented here. Nonetheless, the field may appear to be a thicket precluding entry to all but the most determined. Here we present a metabolic overview that makes this important and fascinating area accessible to a broad range of the molecular biological and biotechnological communities that are being attracted to biological problems crying out for metabolic solutions. This is accomplished by identifying seven key concepts, a so-called metabolic central dogma, that provide a core understanding analogous to the “Central Dogma of Molecular Biology” which focused upon maintenance and flow of genetic information.     

Trust-Enhanced Cloud Service Selection Model Based on QoS Analysis

Cloud computing technology plays a very important role in many areas, such as in the construction and development of the smart city. Meanwhile, numerous cloud services appear on the cloud-based platform. Therefore how to how to select trustworthy cloud services remains a significant problem in such platforms, and extensively investigated owing to the ever-growing needs of users. However, trust relationship in social network has not been taken into account in existing methods of cloud service selection and recommendation. In this paper, we propose a cloud service selection model based on the trust-enhanced similarity. Firstly, the direct, indirect, and hybrid trust degrees are measured based on the interaction frequencies among users. Secondly, we estimate the overall similarity by combining the experience usability measured based on Jaccard’s Coefficient and the numerical distance computed by Pearson Correlation Coefficient. Then through using the trust degree to modify the basic similarity, we obtain a trust-enhanced similarity. Finally, we utilize the trust-enhanced similarity to find similar trusted neighbors and predict the missing QoS values as the basis of cloud service selection and recommendation. The experimental results show that our approach is able to obtain optimal results via adjusting parameters and exhibits high effectiveness. The cloud services ranking by our model also have better QoS properties than other methods in the comparison experiments.     

Optimization of cell culture conditions for production of biologically active proteins

We investigated the basic technology of cell culture conditions for production of useful substances such as cytokines, and related proteins produced by Namalwa cells. Namalwa cells (Klein, 1972), human B lymphoblastoid cells, were used for large scale production of alpha-interferon (Klein, 1979). Namalwa KJM-1, a subline of Namalwa cells, adapted to serum- and albumin-free medium, can grow at a high density above 1 × 10⁷ cells/ml in suspension mode by the use of a perfusion culture system, Biofermenter^?, containing a cone-type cell-sedimentation column as cell separator (Sato, 1983).Several kinds of cytokine cDNA can be introduced and expressed in Namalwa KJM-1 cells (Miyaji, 1990a,b,c). Some of these were produced in large quantities by use of a gene amplification method with dhfr (Miyaji, 1990c), even though the Namalwa KJM-1 cells contained endogenous dhfr genes. For stable production of the target protein, Namalwa KJM-1 cells are very useful host cells, because they have no effective endogenous protease activity in the conditioned medium.Using Biofermenter with micro-silicone fibers and a dialysis system, the specific productivity of the target proteins was not depressed at a high cell density.     

Emerging roles of HOTAIR in human cancer

Long noncoding RNA HOX antisense intergenic RNA (HOTAIR) is overexpressed in many types of cancers, and substantial evidence has suggested a link between cancers and HOTAIR. In the present study, we reviewed the structure and the corresponding biologic function of HOTAIR to clarify its molecular mechanism in cancer progression. HOTAIR promotes proliferation, invasion, and migration, and inhibits apoptosis in cancer cells. HOTAIR also participates in the pathogenesis and progression of cancer by regulating inflammation and immune signaling. These findings suggested that HOTAIR is a novel biomarker in human cancers.     

Animal Welfare in Relation to Standards in Organic Farming

The new EU-regulations on organic farming (1804/1999) are also influencing the animal welfare. A lot of positive regulations is to find, but also regulations that seen to mind more about the general public and customer and their view on organic farming, than the health and welfare of the animals.The paper specially focus on the impact of the regulations and the recommendations that phytotherapeutic essences and homeopathic products take precedence over the so called chemically-synthesised allopatic veterinary medical products, and that the use of the same is prohibited for preventive treatments. Key questions here are the lack of scientific evidence concerning homeopathy in animals, and that Swedish veterinarians are not allowed to work with homeopathy.Differences in interpretation of the regulations between animal owners and veterinarians will also be discussed. What is a disease that needs treatment? Who is to decide about the treatment? Parasitic infections are discussed as an illustrative example.Other consequences of the regulations concerning the animal welfare are problems in certain geographical zones, for instance subarctic areas where necessary crops are impossible to grow.Animal transports and splitting mother-offspring are briefly discussed as future problems to be handled in the regulations, and the paper ends by presenting the need of regulated herd health control programs in organic husbandry, which can detect and focus on welfare and production problems. The organic movement is not static, and must not be so.     

Reduced Medication in Organic Farming with Emphasis on Organic Dairy Production

Medication is an important focus area in organic animal husbandry. The combination of goals relating to improved animal welfare and reduced use of chemicals in general creates a common wish to reduce medication. Based on data from current Danish research projects in organic dairy farming, one specific organic medication pattern or policy cannot be described. The disease treatment pattern is influenced by many factors, e.g. the interaction with colleagues, veterinarians and agricultural advisors. No significant difference could be found with regard to incidence of mastitis treatments or somatic cell counts in 27 organic and 57 conventional herds. A marked tendency to shorter treatment periods in relation to mastitis treatments was described for organic farms in comparison with conventional farms (1.9 days versus 3.2 days (5 organic and 7 conventional herds)). In a study of development of health advisory service in organic herds, the dialogue between farmer, veterinarian and agricultural cattle advisor changed the treatment pattern markedly during a period of 6 months. Among important future challenges for veterinarians in organic farming is pointed at the constructive, open, and critical interaction with the single organic farmer as well as the organic animal husbandry system in general.