Social processes and disease in nonhuman primates: introduction to the special section

Most nonhuman primate species are remarkably social, but their social nature presents many challenges, including increased opportunities for pathogen transmission and development of disease (both physical and psychological). An interdisciplinary symposium was convened at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Society of Primatologists on the topic of social processes and disease in nonhuman primates, and four articles from that session, as well as a fifth that was separately solicited, appear in this special section. The articles reflect a variety of disciplines and perspectives that highlight the many ways that social processes can impact disease processes (and vice versa) in this highly social taxon. This is an increasingly active area of research interest as a consequence of technological developments and the availability of long-term field data. The continuing loss of primate habitat in the wild, climate change, and the need to manage high densities of primates in captivity, however, all add urgency to our need to better understand the bidirectional relationship between social factors and disease processes.     

Guest Editors' Introduction to the Special Section on Bioinformatics Research and Applications

The five papers in this special section were presented at the Fourth International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Application (ISBRA), held at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA, on 6-9 May 2008.     

Introduction to the special focus section

The three articles presented in this special section of Medical Anthropology Quarterly are devoted to the ways that military servicemembers' bodies are figured, deployed, symbolized, and represented. These articles illustrate two issues that confront the members of many contemporary militaries exemplified here by examples from the United States and Turkey (Ben Ari 2001; Bickford 2011; Pengelly and Irwin 2010; Weiss 1998). The first is that they are embedded in a set of ethical relations with the state that deploys them to conflicts. Military service confers a level of prestige and status, but it also entangles those who serve in complex social dilemmas. They are refigured as celebrated heroes in their communities but may also, as illustrated in Aciksoz's and Wool and Messinger's articles (this issue), find themselves dependent on their families and loved ones, as well as on military and state institutions. Servicemembers are also placed in new and complex relationships with their own bodies, and they come to experience vulnerability, mortality, and morality in novel and distinct ways.     

On the parallelisation of bioinformatics applications

This paper surveys the computational strategies followed to parallelise the most used software in the bioinformatics arena. The studied algorithms are computationally expensive and their computational patterns range from regular, such as database-searching applications, to very irregularly structured patterns (phylogenetic trees). Fine- and coarse-grained parallel strategies are discussed for these very diverse sets of applications. This overview outlines computational issues related to parallelism, physical machine models, parallel programming approaches and scheduling strategies for a broad range of computer architectures. In particular, it deals with shared, distributed and shared/distributed memory architectures.     

PCR primer design: an inquiry-based introduction to bioinformatics on the World Wide Web

A project is described which details the selection of PCR primers for an unknown gene of the Herpes Simplex Virus (Type 1) using tools available on the World Wide Web. Within the context of designing PCR primers, students are introduced to some of the basic tools used in the field of bioinformatics and have the opportunity to further develop the concepts of nucleic acid sequence and structure, based on the analysis of selected nucleotide primers.