It's that time again: I'll be attending my fave SF con EVAR, the inimitable Duckon (XVI) June 8th to 10th at the Naperville Holiday Inn Select. This time around I'm going to see about getting Alan Dean Foster to sign my copies of Alien and Outland (if I can find them).
UFie Punmeister hadji is arranging a UF gathering at the con. You can find out who, where and when here and if you're gonna show, do let him know so you're not left behind. My own schedule is a bit up in the air -- aside from some panels my availability remains at the mercy of my offspring, the wee bugger. Rest assured I will try my best to attend the UFie gathering. See y'all there!
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HELP DEFEAT CANCER UPDATE: Dr. Foran has provided an update on Help
Defeat Cancer, now that crunching is complete and the project is delivering
results. You can read the whole update on the WCG forums.
This is what he says about the next phase:
"Leveraging the experimental results gathered during the course
of the "Help Defeat Cancer" project we submitted a new grant proposal to the
National Institutes of Health for funding consideration entitled, "Image
Mining for Comparative Analysis of Expression Patterns in Tissue Microarrays".
The central objective of this proposal is to build a deployable, grid-enabled
clinical decision support system to enable researchers and physicians to
automatically analyze and classify imaged cancer specimens with improved
diagnostic and prognostic accuracy. Proof-of-concept for the proposed system
was conducted using the core reference library of expression signatures that
was generated as part of the HDC project."
Thank you all again for your work on this project. I'm sure you enjoy seeing
the results unfold as much as I do.
FIGHTAIDS@HOME UPDATE: The FightAIDS@Home project have published their
first paper using World Community
Grid data. It's called Analysis of HIV Wild-Type and
Mutant Structures via in Silico Docking against Diverse Ligand Libraries.
You can read the whole paper online. Here's the abstract:
"The FightAIDS@Home distributed computing project uses AutoDock
for an initial virtual screen of HIV protease structures against a broad range
of 1771 ligands including both known protease inhibitors and a diverse library
of other ligands. The volume of results allows novel large-scale analyses of
binding energy "profiles" for HIV structures. Beyond identifying potential
lead compounds, these characterizations provide methods for choosing
representative wild-type and mutant protein structures from the larger set.
From the binding energy profiles of the PDB structures, a principal component
analysis based analysis identifies seven "spanning" proteases. A complementary
analysis finds that the wild-type protease structure 2BPZ best captures the
central tendency of the protease set. Using a comparison of known protease
inhibitors against the diverse ligand set yields an AutoDock binding energy
"significance" threshold of -7.0 kcal/mol between significant, strongly
binding ligands and other weak/nonspecific binding energies. This threshold
captures nearly 98% of known inhibitor interactions while rejecting more than
95% of suspected noninhibitor interactions. These methods should be of general
use in virtual screening projects and will be used to improve further
FightAIDS@Home experiments."
FightAIDS@Home is about to go into a new phase, with the launch of a new
version of the science program - AutoDock 4.0. Keep tuned for further updates
about these new experiments.
If you haven't joined yet, please give Team UserFriendly.Org some deep
consideration. If you joined but had trouble with the software, please contact
me and I'll try to solve it for you.
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