Toward personalized care for insomnia in the US Army: development of a machine-learning model to predict response to pharmacotherapy.

Study Objectives: Although many military personnel with insomnia are treated with prescription medication, little reliable guidance exists to identify patients most likely to respond. As a first step toward personalized care for insomnia, we present results of a machine-learning model to predict response to insomnia medication.

Methods: The sample comprised n = 4,738 nondeployed US Army soldiers treated with insomnia medication and followed 6-12 weeks after initiating treatment.

The relationship between DNA methylation, genetic and expression inter-individual variation in untransformed human fibroblasts.

Background: DNA methylation plays an essential role in the regulation of gene expression. While its presence near the transcription start site of a gene has been associated with reduced expression, the variation in methylation levels across individuals, its environmental or genetic causes, and its association with gene expression remain poorly understood.

Results: We report the joint analysis of sequence variants, gene expression and DNA methylation in primary fibroblast samples derived from a set of 62 unrelated individuals.

Computational analysis of whole-genome differential allelic expression data in human.

Allelic imbalance (AI) is a phenomenon where the two alleles of a given gene are expressed at different levels in a given cell, either because of epigenetic inactivation of one of the two alleles, or because of genetic variation in regulatory regions. Recently, Bing et al. have described the use of genotyping arrays to assay AI at a high resolution (approximately 750,000 SNPs across the autosomes).

PSORTb 3.0: improved protein subcellular localization prediction with refined localization subcategories and predictive capabilities for all prokaryotes.

Motivation: PSORTb has remained the most precise bacterial protein subcellular localization (SCL) predictor since it was first made available in 2003. However, the recall needs to be improved and no accurate SCL predictors yet make predictions for archaea, nor differentiate important localization subcategories, such as proteins targeted to a host cell or bacterial hyperstructures/organelles. Such improvements should preferably be encompassed in a freely available web-based predictor that can also be used as a standalone program.

Benchmarking HIPAA compliance.

One of the nation's largest academic medical centers is benchmarking its operations using internally developed software to improve privacy/confidentiality of protected health information (PHI) and to enhance data security to comply with HIPAA regulations. It is also coordinating the development of a web-based interactive product that can help hospitals, physician practices, and managed care organizations measure their compliance with HIPAA regulations.