Cost-effective and accurate method of measuring fetal fraction using SNP imputation.

Motivation: With the discovery of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal blood, the demand for non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) has been increasing. To obtain reliable NIPT results, it is important to accurately estimate the fetal fraction. In this study, we propose an accurate and cost-effective method for measuring fetal fractions using single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

Synthesis and size characterization of silica nanospheres using sedimentation field-flow fractionation (SdFFF).

Silica nanoparticles were synthesized by a conventional emulsion polymerization by mixing ethanol, ammonium hydroxide, water and tetra ethyl orthosilicate (TEOS). A new reaction apparatus was assembled for a large scale synthesis of silica nanospheres in the laboratory, which was designed for uniform mixing of the reactants. The apparatus was equipped with a disc type agitator with six rectangular propellers.

Exploring protein fold space by secondary structure prediction using data distribution method on Grid platform.

Motivation: Since the newly developed Grid platform has been considered as a powerful tool to share resources in the Internet environment, it is of interest to demonstrate an efficient methodology to process massive biological data on the Grid environments at a low cost. This paper presents an efficient and economical method based on a Grid platform to predict secondary structures of all proteins in a given organism, which normally requires a long computation time through sequential execution, by means of processing a large amount of protein sequence data simultaneously. From the prediction results, a genome scale protein fold space can be pursued.