Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Human Disease Insight (HDI) Database Development

Human Disease Insight (HDI) Database Development Motivation: The scope of the Human Disease Insight (HDI) will not be limited to researchers or doctors but also provide basic information to common people and creating awareness among them and thereby reducing the chances of suffering due to ignorance. The integrated bioinformatics tools within the database will enable researchers to perform comparison among the disease specific genes, and perform protein analysis, search for biomarkers and identification of potential vaccine candidates. Eventually the tools would be of great help to analyze facts about the diseases. Results: The HDI is a knowledge based resource for human disease information to both scientists as well as general public. Here, our mission is to provide a comprehensive human disease database containing most of the useful information with extensive cross-referencing. HDI is a knowledge management system that acts as a central hub to access information about human diseases, drugs and genes involved in various diseases. In addition, the HDI contains well classified bioinformatics tool with description. HDI provides two types of search capabilities, and has provision for downloading, uploading and searching disease/gene/drug related information. Logistics designed for HDI allow regular updation of the database. Availability and implementation: The HDI is freely accessible at http://humandiseaseinsight.com, with user-friendly web interface, and is highly useful to the physicians, researchers, patient and general public. Keywords: Database, Knowledge Management System, Relational Database Management System, Three-Tier Architecture, Web-Server, Mysql, Disease, Gene, Drug 1. Introduction Scientists have documented diseases pertaining to a specific category in various online databases. Due to advancement in science and technology, especially genomics and information technology, we have entered in an exciting era of modern biology. The major challenge, that medical science community presently facing, is the integration of vast and rapidly growing volumes of information on various diseases into a holistic understanding. Recent progress of disease genetics and genome-related medicine has been considerable, with extensive data being generated. The remarkable approach of the Human Genome Project in identification of most of the human genome, transcriptome and proteome, and making them publicly available through online databases, assisted in in-depth inspection of disease genetics. At present databases containing information about human diseases are focused predominantly on a particular category: all known Mandelian disorders (Hamosh, et al., 2005), infectious disease database, rare children diseases (http://www.madisonsfoundation.org/index.php), hereditary ocular disease (https://disorders.eyes.arizona.edu), dermatological diseases (http://www.aocd.org/) and gastrointestinal diseases (http://www.gastro.net.au/). Such attempts enormously uplift the efforts related to prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, developing new approaches to alleviate the consequences of life threatening diseases. However, till date no disease database is populated with guidance towards bioinformatics tools and information available for common individual. Integration of all human diseases from different categories at a common place has become an important issue in the Bioinformatics. Over a period of time, amendments in diagnostic evaluation and treatment emerges. In order to facilitate the community with the latest knowledge of human diseases and discovery of gene involved in diseases, we have created a Knowledge Management System (KMS), that includes information of various categories of human diseases, drugs used to cure the diseases, genes involved in causing the diseases and bioinformatics tools to analyze the involved gene. HDI is thus a comprehensive database of human diseases classified in various categories and cross linked to other databases to retrieve a detailed knowledge of genes, drugs and tools. HDI has broader utility in that it renders clinical information for physicians, genetic information and tools classification for researchers and general description of disease for general public. 2. OVERVIEW OF THE DATABASE Human Disease Insight (HDI) introduces an integrated knowledgebase of diseases, genes, drugs and bioinformatics tools list, with a user friendly interface. It is designed to assemble, store, organize and display information about human diseases, genes associated with human diseases and drugs used to cure diseases in conjunction with classified list of bioinformatics tools for sequence analysis and structure modeling of genes/protein. HDI currently includes information about 625 human diseases, 320 drugs, 1440 gene and classified list of bioinformatics tools (Table 1). Diseases have been classified into 12 categories, each category has been populated with disease information that includes synonym/s, pathogen, general description of disease, gene, clinical features, pathways, investigations, prevention, treatment, risk factor, prevalence and references (Kanehisa and Goto, 2000), (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/), (http://www.medscape.com/). Drugs have been classified into 26 broad categories. Assignment of the genes to human diseases are enlisted with links to NCBI (Maglott, et al., 2007) and UniProt (Wu, et al., 2006) for detailed information. Bioinformatics tools are broadly classified into 3 main categories, each category is then categorized into further sub categories. Information collected for disease, drugs and genes are interconnected in such a way that through disease option, multiple genes and/or multiple drugs involved in a particular disease can be retrieved, through drugs option number of diseases where a particular drug can be used is retrieved and through gene option number of disease/s where a particular gene is involved can be displayed. These information can be accessed freely. The information is curated and updated regularly. 3. Database Structure HDI, is a knowledge based data ware house, that provides an integrated and curated repository of human diseases, drugs and reported genes involved in the pathogenesis of the disease along with the links to bioinformatics tools. Classification of bioinformatics tools with description and links to their respective web pages assists in performing research analysis of gene/protein sequence/s. HDI endows user friendly web interface to allow user to retrieve, download and upload information through interactive web forms. The schematic representation of the logistics used in HDI is shown in Figure1. 3.1. Software design and implementation The data ware house HDI is developed and implemented on a three-tier architecture-user/client, web-interface and relational database management system (RDBMS) backend. User/client can be a physician, researcher, student and/or general public. The web interface is comprised of web pages and web forms, designed in HTML5, CSS, PHP, javascript, ajax, jquery and MySql queries, to provide common gateway interface. At the backend we have created data marts of various information pertaining to human diseases. This developed database is dynamically constructed, web pages and web forms are interlinked with the data ware house created at the backend, for querying the database as instructed by the end user through button clicks and drop down menus. The data ware house created at the backend is a relational database, managed with MySql developed on Windows operating system. For web services, Apache HTTP web server was used. Data mining was performed to retrieve information for human diseases, gen es, drug and tools through various web resources and text books, obtained data was then subjected to curation and uploaded to the database. Framework for HDI primarily consists of tables for disease, drugs and genes information including bioinformatics tools. Diseases are classified broadly into 12 categories. Each category is populated with number of diseases. Each entry in HDI provides a comprehensive information about human disease characterized by synonyms, general description, pathogen, gene involved, clinical features, pathways, investigations, prevention, treatment, drug, prevalence, risk factors and references. The drugs are classified into 26 broad categories, each category is populated with number of drugs with their description and links to Drug databank for detailed information. Genes involved in human diseases are collected and their links to NCBI and UniProt are provided in drop down menu to retrieve elaborate knowledge. For convenience of users, major bioinformatics tools with description and links are classified in an effort to guide them for performing specified analysis of the gene/protein. HDI can be p ublicly accessed from any web browser at http://humandiseaseinsight.com. 3.2. Data curation The HDI is being enhanced through continued efforts to improve diseases knowledge and interlinking of disease, drug and gene tables to obtain optimum information. The information made available for the user is achieved after extensive data mining process. Knowledge thus obtained is managed in a relational database through cross linking to fetch the data stored in the data ware house of HDI and through cross linking of the web resources (NCBI, UniProt and DrugBank) Genes which are related to human diseases are included in the database, and are interlinked with the disease tables so as to get the name/s of disease/s governed by a specific gene. 3.3. Knowledgebase access HDI data can be retrieved efficiently through drop down menus and search functions provided on each page of the web site. User can access alphabetically ordered diseases, drugs, genes and tools through drop down menu. Diseases from different categories can be selected through drop down menu. Clicking on the disease displays the stored information about the disease. Similarly, drugs can be selected from different categories in the drop down menu, clicking on any drug will give its description, disease/s that can be cured and linked with the drug bank for detail. For convenience of users, two different search boxes are provided. One search box present at the home page can search the complete data mart for diseases in the data ware house of the HDI. To enhance the usability of this search box, codes were written to provide auto-complete search suggestion to the user that would save searching time and do spelling correction. Another search present on each page is Google search box, which searches for the term entered, in the database as well as on the web. Our web site has provision for downloading and uploading published articles, e-books and articles related to disease, drug and genes for registered users. All uploads by the user will be timely updated in the database. For registration, signup option is provided, registered user can login for downloading and uploading related information. Medicinal and research oriented news will be emailed to the email address provided by the user. Feedback option is given to receive feedback from the user, to improve the database. Advertisement option is provided for the advertisement companies to display their advertisement on the provided space of the web site after filling the form. Further the database is connected to social networking sites for gaining popularity. 4. Database availability The database can be accessed without any charges to retrieve disease, drug, gene and tool related information. Free registration is required for downloading and uploading the related content. 5. Salient features of the HDI HDI is a robust knowledge management system, that manages data mined knowledge, through cross-linking of the data marts and web resources. This user-friendly, data-intensive repository provide the user a platform to retrieve comprehensive disease related information and perform gene/protein sequence based analysis using direct links of the classified bioinformatics tools. HDI allow users to upload content to improve the data base. 6. Future directions HDI provide optimum information required for diagnosis and treatment of various human diseases. Currently, there are 625 diseases, 1440 genes, 320 drugs and 39 tools. The content of information in specified fields is rapidly expanding, our aim is to collect a complete dataset of human diseases, genes, drugs and tools and to generate a tool that can identify gene causing human disease. We also aim to integrate various bioinformatics tools to annotate human disease specific genes. In future, main challenge is to keep the dataset up to date with growing number diseases, genes, drugs and bioinformatics tools. 7. Conclusions HDI offers a premier platform that deals with all aspects of diseases including history, symptom, cause, epidemiology, treatment, precaution, etc. Moreover, all diseases have been linked with the pharmacology, genomics, proteomics and many other relevant databases. HDI will not only help in greater understanding of the diseases and provide primary data for research but also enable to find the interactions between various diseases by comparing them by various biotools provided here in our database. The information provided shall lay the foundation for further advances in disease diagnosis and also help in design of novel approaches for diagnosing and treating diseases. We consider that, with enrichment of the database, user will get information about all of the human diseases.

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Challenges of Living with Diabetes Essays -- Health Medicine

A long-term health condition can also be referred to as a ‘chronic illness’ and it can be used to define recurring conditions such as asthma, arthritis, and diabetes. When living with a long-term health condition it can for some people present them with many new challenges. Not only does it take time for them to adapt and accept their illness but also they may feel affected not just physically, but psychologically, culturally, and sometimes even personally such as financial or relationships with family and friends. In this essay, I will examine in turn the main challenges people with diabetes face. Sometimes with diabetes, a person may feel an array of emotions when their illness has been diagnosed this can vary from being confused, and anxious about their health and future, to feeling resentment and frustration with their own bodies. It is also common that many people who have long-term health conditions can also be susceptible to depression and stress when attempting to deal with the aspects of their illness, such as being reliant on insulin injections or having to take care about what they eat and drink. As explained in an article by W.H Polonsky. (K101, Resources 3, pg19 ) Many individuals may feel as if they have lost control of their everyday routines, or are somewhat defeated when following treatments programmes and not being able to see an improvement in health. Recently healthcare professionals recognized that if they provide patients with well-defined, straightforward information and knowledge about their illness, it could encourage people to take more of an involved role in managing their condition, such as setting achievable goals, or becoming better practiced at monitoring and managing insulin levels. Thi... ...e boundaries of the physical situation but also that of their psychological status too. Works Cited Lawton, J., Ahmad, N., Hanna, L., Douglas, M. (2006) ‘Pakistani and Indian patient’s experience of Scottish diabetes services: a qualitative study.’ In: K101 An introduction to health and social care, resources, Block 2, pg. 15, Milton Keynes, The open university. NHS, (2010) Diabetes NHS choices, Available: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/diabetes/pages/diabetes.aspx. Last accessed 4th Nov 2010. Polonsky, W.H (2006). ’Encouraging effective self-management in diabetes.’ In: k101 An introduction to health and social care, resources, Block 3, pg19, Milton Keynes, The open university. The open university (2008) K101 An introduction to health and social care, block 1, unit 2, Illness, health and care, pg. 84, Milton Keynes, The open university.

Saturday, January 11, 2020

Articles of Confederation Essay

America’s first form of government was under the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation was written after the Revolutionary War, compiled of ideas by the Continental Congress. Under the Articles of Confederation its powers included conducting foreign relations, settling disputes between states, controlling maritime affairs, regulating Indian trade, and valuing state and national coinage. It purposely did not give the national government all the power in fear of tyranny like in Britain. In the end, the Articles of Confederation proved to be both inadequate in economic conditions and foreign relations. Under the Articles of Confederation the national government was not allowed to raise revenue to finance the war and other essential needs that a country need money for. The state governments had control of taxing the American people but many were unwilling to do so. So to try and finance the war the government and the states started to print currency. Although the currency was just paper and not backed by anything it was given out freely without excessive downgrading during 1775 to 1776. As 1776 went on the demand for both military supplies and civilian goods began to increase as the war progressed. America also encouraged trade and local production between the states. As the end of 1776 was approaching, the armies suffered reverses in both New York and New Jersey causing the prices to rise and inflation to finally set in. The state governments tried to fight inflation by taking control of wages and prices, and accepting paper money equal to hard money. They would also borrow funds, establish lotteries and even levy taxes to try and stop inflation. Their efforts were useless, though Congress attempted to stop printing currency altogether, they relied solely on money contributed by the states. By 1780, currency was worthless. Congressmen started to take action by establishing a department of finance with help from Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant. The government then asked the states to amend the Articles of Confederation and allow the Congress to levy duty of 5% on imported goods. Robert Morris had put national finances on stable balance, but the customs that Congress asked for were never adopted. The states’ had resisted in fear that the central government would become too powerful. As the war was ending Congress had to face major diplomatic problems. In the Articles of Confederation Article 4 had promised repayment of prewar debts, most of which were owed to by Americans to British merchants. In Article 5 it stated that states should allow loyalists to recover their confiscated property, which aroused considerable opposition. The state governments passed lass that denied the British subjects the right to sue for the recovery of property or debts in American courts. Since Congress had no power under the Articles of Confederation to overturn the decision, many loyalists were unable to get back what had rightfully been theirs to begin with. With this decision it gave the British an excuse to main their military posts on the Great Lakes long after when troops were supposed to have withdrawn. This had showed Congress weakness in the area of trade because the Articles of Confederation denied power to establish a national commercial policy. Right after the war had ended, Britain, France and Spain limited American trade with the colonies. The Americans were outraged but were unable to do anything about it. They thought that after the war, their independence would bring about trade with all nations. Members of the Congress, watched as British manufactured goods started to flood the states, while American produce could no longer be sold in British West Indies, once its prime market of trade. In the areas of finance, overseas trade and foreign affairs the Articles of Confederation were obviously inadequate. Congress was not allowed to levy taxes, nor was it able to impose its will on the states to establish a commercial policy. The Articles of Confederation, led the economy into a depression. The Continental Congress gave little power under the Articles of Confederation to the central government in fear of tyranny. In the end it only proved that too little power is not sufficient in controlling both economic conditions and foreign relations.

Friday, January 3, 2020

Feminist Criticism of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Feminist Criticism of The Great Gatsby The pervasive male bias in American literature leads the reader to equate the experience of being American with the experience of being male. In F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, the background for the experience of disillusionment and betrayal revealed in the novel is the discovery of America. Daisys failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations in the imagination of the men who discovered it. America is female; to be American is male; and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by woman. Fetterley believes that power is the issue in the politics of literature. Powerlessness characterizes womans experience of reading not only because†¦show more content†¦It is she for whom men compete, and possessing her is the clearest sign that one has made it into that magical world. Gatsbys desire for Daisy is enhanced by the fact that she is the object of the desires of many other men. Daisy is the most expensive item on the mark et as Tom points out when he gives her a string of pearls valued at $350,000 on the night before they are married. She is that which money exists to buy. Having her makes Tom Buchanans house in East Egg finished and right; not having her makes Gatsbys mansion in West Egg incomplete and wrong. Daisy is viewed as a possession rather than a person. There are no emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy to give an account of; there is only an emotional relation between Gatsby and his unutterable visions, of which she is the unwitting symbol. Not only are women treated as inanimate objects in The Great Gatsby, they are also shown as childlike and without morality, whereas it is actually the men who have these characteristics. One can see this in the way that Nick Carraway treats Daisy and Jordan. Nick conceals the fact that Daisy was the driver of the car that killed Myrtle Wilson, supposedly because of his loyalty to Gatsby. But his deceit derives not simply from his loyalty to the dead Gatsby; it is equally the product of his assumption that women, rich women in particular, are incapable of moral responsibility. He even admits to having a different standard of honesty for women than he has forShow MoreRelatedEssay about Paradoxical Role of Women in the Great Gatsby1333 Words   |  6 PagesThe women in The Great Gatsby appear to be free-spirited, scorning norms of what the nineteenth century would have considered proper female behavior; this essay investigates just how independent they really are. Women play a paradoxical role in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a novel dominated by the eponymous hero and the enigmatic narrator, Nick Carraway. With the background of Gatsby’s continual and lavish parties, women seem to have been transformed into â€Å"flappers,† supposedly the incarnationRead MoreAre Women Destructive Forces?1674 Words   |  7 Pagesworking in the farm. In F. Scott Fitzgeralds book The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald utilized Daisy Buchanan, an ignorant, materialistic and intolerant lady, to portray the materialistic and lost era of the 1920s. When comparing the female figures in the three books, the authors depict the diminishing self-confidence and role of the ladies as the American culture advanced. These classical American works record the shifting role of a woman from when they were an able feminist to when they turned intoRead More Comparing Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby and Brett of The Sun Also Rises2630 Words   |  11 PagesDaisy B uchanan of The Great Gatsby and Brett Ashley of The Sun Also Rises      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Written right after the publication of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is apparently influenced in many ways.   The most obvious of Fitzgeralds influence is manifested in Hemingways portrayal of his heroine, Brett Ashley. Numerous critics have noted and discussed the similarities between Brett and Daisy Buchanan, and rightly so; but the two women also have fundamental differences