Effect of electron avalanche breakdown on a high-purity semi-insulating 4H-SiC photoconductive semiconductor switch under intrinsic absorption.

High-power photoconductive semiconductor switching devices were fabricated from a high-purity, semi-insulating 4H-SiC wafer. A highly n-doped GaN subcontact layer was inserted between the contact metal and the high-resistivity SiC wafer. The minimum ON-state resistance of the device was less than 1 ohm when the energy of a 355 nm laser was 10.

Comparing computational methods for identification of allele-specific expression based on next generation sequencing data.

Allele-specific expression (ASE) studies have wide-ranging implications for genome biology and medicine. Whole transcriptome RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) has emerged as a genome-wide tool for identifying ASE, but suffers from mapping bias favoring reference alleles. Two categories of methods are adopted nowadays, to reduce the effect of mapping bias on ASE identification-normalizing RNA allelic ratio with the parallel genomic allelic ratio (pDNAar) and modifying reference genome to make reads carrying both alleles with the same chance to be mapped (mREF).

cGRNB: a web server for building combinatorial gene regulatory networks through integrated engineering of seed-matching sequence information and gene expression datasets.

Background: We are witnessing rapid progress in the development of methodologies for building the combinatorial gene regulatory networks involving both TFs (Transcription Factors) and miRNAs (microRNAs). There are a few tools available to do these jobs but most of them are not easy to use and not accessible online. A web server is especially needed in order to allow users to upload experimental expression datasets and build combinatorial regulatory networks corresponding to their particular contexts.

SchistoDB: an updated genome resource for the three key schistosomes of humans.

The new release of SchistoDB (http://SchistoDB.net) provides a rich resource of genomic data for key blood flukes (genus Schistosoma) which cause disease in hundreds of millions of people worldwide. SchistoDB integrates whole-genome sequence and annotation of three species of the genus and provides enhanced bioinformatics analyses and data-mining tools.

PMRD: a curated database for genes and mutants involved in plant male reproduction.

Background: Male reproduction is an essential biological event in the plant life cycle separating the diploid sporophyte and haploid gametophyte generations, which involves expression of approximately 20,000 genes. The control of male reproduction is also of economic importance for plant breeding and hybrid seed production. With the advent of forward and reverse genetics and genomic technologies, a large number of male reproduction-related genes have been identified.

EST pipeline system: detailed and automated EST data processing and mining.

Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are widely used in gene survey research these years. The EST Pipeline System, software developed by Hangzhou Genomics Institute (HGI), can automatically analyze different scalar EST sequences by suitable methods. All the analysis reports, including those of vector masking, sequence assembly, gene annotation, Gene Ontology classification, and some other analyses, can be browsed and searched as well as downloaded in the Excel format from the web interface, saving research efforts from routine data processing for biological rules embedded in the data.

Gene identification and expression analysis of 86,136 Expressed Sequence Tags (EST) from the rice genome.

Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) analysis has pioneered genome-wide gene discovery and expression profiling. In order to establish a gene expression index in the rice cultivar indica, we sequenced and analyzed 86,136 ESTs from nine rice cDNA libraries from the super hybrid cultivar LYP9 and its parental cultivars. We assembled these ESTs into 13,232 contigs and leave 8,976 singletons.

Database and analyses of known alternatively spliced genes in plants.

Alternative splicing is an important cellular mechanism that increases the diversity of gene products. The number of alternatively spliced genes reported so far in plants is much smaller than that in mammals, but is increasing as a result of the explosive growth of available EST and genomic sequences. We have searched for all alternatively spliced genes reported in GenBank and PubMed in all plant species under Viridiplantae.