Georgia State University is a large public university located in the heart of downtown Atlanta. The university was founded in 1913, and today is part of the University System of Georgia. Georgia State is the leading urban research institution in the Southeast.
The university’s current enrollment exceeds 30,000 students. It offers 55 degree programs at the bachelors, masters, specialist, and doctoral levels. GSU’s six colleges are the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education, the College of Health and Human Services, the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, the Robinson College of Business, and the College of Law. These six colleges offer 250 areas of study.
The Robinson College of Business is the sixth largest business school in the US. Its programs are ranked among the best in the nation. In addition to the undergraduate programs, the college offers an Executive MBA, a Flex MBA, and an Executive Doctorate.
The Andrew Young School of Policy Studies offers degrees in Economics and Public Management and Policy. It is one of the country’s best policy schools. The College of Law is ranked by National Jurist magazine as the best value in the country for law schools. It offers both a traditional full time program and a part time program for non-traditional students.
Georgia State University has a strong athletics program. Sixteen different sports are offered for men and women. The GSU Panthers participate in NCAA Division I athletics in the Colonial Athletic Association Conference. The university just launched its inaugural football season this fall. Head coach Bill Curry has been developing and directing the program for two years, and their season is off to an exciting start. The opening game against Shorter College was an impressive 41-7 win for the Panthers.
The university partners with other institutions to conduct research in many disciplines. Their research focuses on the areas of biomedicine, the brain and behavior, urban health, and language and literacy. GSU has state of the art core research facilities and support labs.
The campus occupies approximately 35 acres in downtown Atlanta, with more than 40 buildings. In 2006 the university embarked on a $1 billion dollar expansion program, which will include more than a dozen new buildings, a major renovation of the library complex, additional student housing, and streetscape improvements. All of this will be needed to keep pace with the fastest growing enrollment in the university system.
A major international conference on agricultural biotechnology starts in Melbourne, Australia, today (August 6, 2006).The Agricultural Biotech International Conference (ABIC) brings together representatives of biotech companies, agricultural researchers and policy makers from across the world.
The theme of this conference is Unlocking the Potential of Agricultural Biotechnology. Some of the topics to be discussed include:
* Importance of biotechnology in meeting global food requirements.
* Application of agricultural biotechnology in biomedicine.
* Commercialization of innovative biotechnology.
* Practical applications of genomics to cereal crops.
* Using biotechnology to protect and enhance food supply.
* Biotechnology in developing countries.
Unlocking the potential of agricultural biotechnology is an issue that has been with us since the commercialization of the first genetically modified crop a decade ago. Developed countries, notably the U.S. and Canada, appreciate that agricultural biotechnology has been a prime mover of their economies. They have massively invested in it, effectively eclipsing the so-called conventional agriculture. The gains have been innumerable.
Farmers in these countries have almost doubled their income from cultivating genetically modified crops, that are usually high yielding and pest resistant.
In developing countries, the picture is different. Agricultural biotechnology remains a contested issue. Many developing countries would not embrace because of their distrust for the developed countries. Others have been fed with lies that agricultural biotechnology, and in particular Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), pose danger to the environment and the health of consumers.
Positive attributes of agricultural biotechnology must be played out at the Melbourne meeting for all to listen.
It’s encouraging that delegates from developing countries such as Prof. Jennifer Thomson (South Africa), Dr. Jagadish Mittur (India), and Dr. Rangsun Parnpai (Thailand) are attending this conference. They have a chance to learn firsthand how agricultural biotechnology has revolutionized the economies of such countries as the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. These delegates must explore how their countries can similarly benefit from agricultural biotechnology.
Since this is a gathering of experts in agricultural biotechnology, it’s expected that there will a productive debate on the potential of agricultural biotechnology. Delegates should conduct their deliberations with developing countries in mind. It’s here where agricultural biotechnology is in dire need.
Developing countries delegates are encouraged to view this conference as a window of opportunity to learn from as many experts as possible on the potential of agricultural biotechnology.
Once the curtains of this conference fall, delegates from developing countries must ensure that they share the lessons learnt with policy makers, scientists and farmers in their respective countries.
From the images taken with the microscope, the scientists were able to measure and classify the zygotes and embryos, as well as the blastomeres (undifferentiated animal cells produced by the division of the zygote), their degree of fragmentation and the thickness of the ‘zona pellucida’, a membrane that surrounds them. (Credit: Morales et al / SINC)
A team of researchers from the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) have developed a mathematical classification which makes it possible to select human embryos for use in assisted reproduction treatments. Scientists have used the morphology of embryos to select the best candidates for implantation in the woman’s uterus.
“Up to now experts working in in vitro fertilisation have selected the best embryos subjectively, based on their training and experience”, so SINC was informed by Dinora A. Morales, from the Intelligent Systems Group at the UPV-EHU. However, in two studies carried out by researchers from this team the use of mathematical classifiers to help embryologists with that task was looked at.
In the first work, published in the journal Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, the scientists presented an “intelligent system” of support for infertility treatments. For this they used information from 63 cases from the infertility programme at Clínica del Pilar in San Sebastian (Guipúzcoa), and analysed the evolution of trios of embryos (Spanish law allows for the transfer of up to three embryos to a woman’s uterus).
To prepare the study, the researchers focused on the case history of infertile couples (age, type of infertility, quality of sperm, etc), as well as the morphological characteristics of the zygote (the resulting cell from the fusion of two gametes) and the embryos.
From the images taken with the microscope, the scientists were able to measure and classify the zygotes and embryos, as well as the blastomeres (undifferentiated animal cells produced by the division of the zygote), their degree of fragmentation and the thickness of the ‘zona pellucida’, a membrane that surrounds them.
All this information was processed with Bayesian classifiers, so-called due to the application of Bayes rules, which make it possible to calculate the probability of implanting an embryo in a woman’s uterus if transferred there. “What’s more, these types of mathematical classifiers provide experts with evidence on what embryo characteristics enable the identification of the most ideal embryos, through the selection of variables”, explained Morales.
The results of this study indicate that the size and degree of fragmentation of the blastomeres, thickness of the zona pellucida and the fact that they might have various nuclei are some of the aspects embryologists should concentrate on.
The Basque research group also carried out a second study, published in the journal Computers in Biology and Medicine to check the effectiveness of different Bayesian classifiers as a tool for choosing the best embryo.
The researchers analysed 249 photographs of embryos from the database at the Genesis Centre in Rome (Italy) and discovered that the “wrapper-TAN” classifier had a success rate of over 90%.
The team’s next lines of work will concentrate on perfecting these techniques for selecting the best embryo in infertility treatments and in predicting multiple pregnancies, due to the risk they pose to women. The scientists will try to collaborate with other hospitals in this task.
The development of a variety of new technologies for exploring the composition of sugar chains has opened up a new frontier of molecular biology which has been named glycobiology. This word was first coined in 1988 by Rademacher, Parekh, and Dwek to name the coming together of the known variations of carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry with new understanding of the cellular and molecular biology of glycans. The name glycobiology has acquired wide acceptance, with an important biomedical journal, a growing scientific society, and a Gordon Research Conference now using this title.
Defined in the broadest terms, glycobiology is the research of the composition, biosynthesis, and biology of saccharides (sugar chains or glycans) that are widely distributed in nature. It is one of the most rapidly growing fields in the biomedical sciences, with relevance to normal research, biomedicine, and biotechnology.
Certainly, many biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and laboratory supply companies have invested heavily in the area. The area ranges from the chemistry of carbohydrates and the enzymology of glycan-modifying proteins to the roles of glycans in complex biological systems, and their regulation by a variety of techniques.
Glycosaminoglycans
In recent times, important studies of a type of linear glycans (complex sugar chains) called glycosaminoglycans (or GAGs for short), and specially a sub-set called HSGAGs, which are made up of heparan sulfate and its relative heparin have been specially important in shedding a good deal of light on the role of the glycoconjugates.
Constructing the Chains
An HSGAG chain can be generically described as a regular repeat of about 10 to 100 disaccharide building blocks that, when gathered together, make up the backbone of each sugar molecule. In its most basic configuration, each disaccharide unit consists of two chemically distinct monosaccharides (a uronic acid and a glucosamine) linked by a glycosidic bond.
The chains can change a great deal in their structural configuration because the disaccharide building blocks can be chemically modified at a number of positions. These changes include the elimination of the two-carbon acetyl groups at the amino position of the glucosamine portion and the addition of sulfate groups at many different locations, along with differences in the stereochemical disposition of bonds around specific carbons.
Different combinations of these many chemical changes make it possible for even short chains to have an enormous quantity of structural permutations. In fact, the potential for an enormous quantity of structural information to be embedded in a glycan exceeds that of nucleic acids or proteins.
