Vesicle Dynamics during Plant Cell Cytokinesis Reveals Distinct Developmental Phases.

Cell division in plant cells requires the deposition of a new cell wall between the two daughter cells. The assembly of this plate requires the coordinated movement of cargo vesicles whose size is below the diffraction-limited resolution of the optical microscope. We combined high spatial and temporal resolution confocal laser scanning microscopy with advanced image-processing tools and fluorescence fluctuation methods and distinguished three distinct phases during cell plate expansion in tobacco () 'Bright Yellow-2' cells: massive delivery of preexisting vesicles to a disk-shaped region at the equatorial plane precedes a primary rapid expansion phase followed by a secondary, slow expansion phase during which the extremity of the circular plate seeks contact with the mother wall and brings about the separation of the two portions of cytoplasm.

A review of genomic data warehousing systems.

To facilitate the integration and querying of genomics data, a number of generic data warehousing frameworks have been developed. They differ in their design and capabilities, as well as their intended audience. We provide a comprehensive and quantitative review of those genomic data warehousing frameworks in the context of large-scale systems biology.

The EnzymeTracker: an open-source laboratory information management system for sample tracking.

Background: In many laboratories, researchers store experimental data on their own workstation using spreadsheets. However, this approach poses a number of problems, ranging from sharing issues to inefficient data-mining. Standard spreadsheets are also error-prone, as data do not undergo any validation process.

Bacterial protein structures reveal phylum dependent divergence.

Protein sequence space is vast compared to protein fold space. This raises important questions about how structures adapt to evolutionary changes in protein sequences. A growing trend is to regard protein fold space as a continuum rather than a series of discrete structures.

PROFESS: a PROtein function, evolution, structure and sequence database.

The proliferation of biological databases and the easy access enabled by the Internet is having a beneficial impact on biological sciences and transforming the way research is conducted. There are approximately 1100 molecular biology databases dispersed throughout the Internet. To assist in the functional, structural and evolutionary analysis of the abundant number of novel proteins continually identified from whole-genome sequencing, we introduce the PROFESS (PROtein Function, Evolution, Structure and Sequence) database.

Classification integration and reclassification using constraint databases.

Objective: We propose classification integration as a new method for data integration from different sources. We also propose reclassification as a new method of combining existing medical classifications for different classes.

Background: In many problems the raw data are already classified according to a set of features but need to be reclassified.