Title: A screen-printed, amperometric biosensor array incorporated into a novel automated system for the simultaneous determination of organophosphate pesticides Crew A, Lonsdale D, Byrd N, Pittson R, Hart JP Ref: Biosensors & Bioelectronics, 26:2847, 2011 : PubMed
Organophosphate pesticides present serious risks to human and environmental health. A rapid reliable, economical and portable analytical system will be of great benefit in the detection and prevention of contamination. A biosensor array based on six acetylcholinesterase enzymes for use in a novel automated instrument incorporating a neural network program is described. Electrochemical analysis was carried out using chronoamperometry and the measurement was taken 10s after applying a potential of 0 V vs. Ag/AgCl. The total analysis time for the complete assay was less than 6 min. The array was used to produce calibration data with six organophosphate pesticides (OPs) in the concentration range of 10(-5) M to 10(-9) M to train a neural network. The output of the neural network was subsequently evaluated using different sample matrices. There were no detrimental matrix effects observed from water, phosphate buffer, food or vegetable extracts. Furthermore, the sensor system was not detrimentally affected by the contents of water samples taken from each stage of the water treatment process. The biosensor system successfully identified and quantified all samples where an OP was present in water, food and vegetable extracts containing different OPs. There were no false positives or false negatives observed during the evaluation of the analytical system. The biosensor arrays and automated instrument were evaluated in situ in field experiments where the instrument was successfully applied to the analysis of a range of environmental samples. It is envisaged that the analytical system could provide a rapid detection system for the early warning of contamination in water and food.
The Rice Annotation Project Database (RAP-DB) was created to provide the genome sequence assembly of the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP), manually curated annotation of the sequence, and other genomics information that could be useful for comprehensive understanding of the rice biology. Since the last publication of the RAP-DB, the IRGSP genome has been revised and reassembled. In addition, a large number of rice-expressed sequence tags have been released, and functional genomics resources have been produced worldwide. Thus, we have thoroughly updated our genome annotation by manual curation of all the functional descriptions of rice genes. The latest version of the RAP-DB contains a variety of annotation data as follows: clone positions, structures and functions of 31 439 genes validated by cDNAs, RNA genes detected by massively parallel signature sequencing (MPSS) technology and sequence similarity, flanking sequences of mutant lines, transposable elements, etc. Other annotation data such as Gnomon can be displayed along with those of RAP for comparison. We have also developed a new keyword search system to allow the user to access useful information. The RAP-DB is available at: http://rapdb.dna.affrc.go.jp/ and http://rapdb.lab.nig.ac.jp/.
We present here the annotation of the complete genome of rice Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica cultivar Nipponbare. All functional annotations for proteins and non-protein-coding RNA (npRNA) candidates were manually curated. Functions were identified or inferred in 19,969 (70%) of the proteins, and 131 possible npRNAs (including 58 antisense transcripts) were found. Almost 5000 annotated protein-coding genes were found to be disrupted in insertional mutant lines, which will accelerate future experimental validation of the annotations. The rice loci were determined by using cDNA sequences obtained from rice and other representative cereals. Our conservative estimate based on these loci and an extrapolation suggested that the gene number of rice is approximately 32,000, which is smaller than previous estimates. We conducted comparative analyses between rice and Arabidopsis thaliana and found that both genomes possessed several lineage-specific genes, which might account for the observed differences between these species, while they had similar sets of predicted functional domains among the protein sequences. A system to control translational efficiency seems to be conserved across large evolutionary distances. Moreover, the evolutionary process of protein-coding genes was examined. Our results suggest that natural selection may have played a role for duplicated genes in both species, so that duplication was suppressed or favored in a manner that depended on the function of a gene.