Zeitschrift für Informatik und Systembiologie

Introduction: Aspergillus fumigatus is a highly pathogenic fungus for immunocompromised patients and invasive aspergillosis exhibits mortality rates around 50-80%. Thus, the apoptosis pathway in this fungus may be an important target for the development of new drugs.

Materials and Methods: From a data bank, we analyzed five different proteins (Bax, Bir, Nma111, Pca1, and Rad9) belonging to the apoptosis pathway in the genome of Aspergillus fumigatus. Phylogenetic trees, splits graphs, recombination analyses, and assessment of selection strength from codon to codon were developed to understand the evolution and the function of these proteins in the fungus.

Results: Our results suggest a conservation of these proteins in the Aspergillaceae family, as well as a low rate of gene recombination with a putative preservation of the function.

Conclusion: We thus propose that the apoptosis pathway in Aspergillus fumigatus is started with the Rad9 protein followed by the activation of Bax and Pca1 proteins. Also, Nma111 cleaves the Bir protein resulting in the consequent activation of the Bax protein. Further studies are necessary to better understand the apoptosis process in Aspergillus fumigatus and to confirm the proteins belonging to the pathway.

The Air Force often uses paper to document expeditionary medical records because its IT systems are not properly integrated. To solve this, the Air Force Medical Service (AFMS) and DoD must successfully migrate to a joint cloud based electronic health record (EHR) system. It must be centralized, always up, and easily accessed through a tablet or a smartphone. 83% of healthcare organizations are using cloud based applications today. The AFMS and DoD healthcare will not remain a high reliability organization unless cloud migration is successful. A successful cloud migration will enable all treatment to be electronically documented jointly and available across multiple echelons in the expeditionary continuum of care. If successful, the DoD will deliver the world’s first globally integrated cloud based expeditionary healthcare system. Qualitative and quantitative analysis in this research concludes that cloud migrations must properly address IT security and cloud privacy concerns. The DoD must reach out to software vendors to help them integrate security standards cheaply during product design. Success here will allow the use of innovative application development platforms such as Amazon Cloud as well as Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) software and telehealth applications.

Although many attempts have been made to explain what life is, the high diversity of behavioral and structural properties of living creatures makes it difficult to formulate a comprehensive definition of life. Among the many signs of life, the one which seems truly ubiquitous is effort expended on maintaining the internal environment in living constructs independent of its surroundings. Stability of the internal environment is based on automatic regulation, which, in turn, depends on negative feedback. Manifestation of features produced by this effort is taken as the most specific sign of life. Hence, automatism of regulation differentiates living creatures from inanimate objects. The paper explains why regulation needs to be automatic, and discusses those attributes of automatic regulation which are particularly relevant in the context of life.