The burrow behavior and influenced factors of a prairie subterranean zokor (Myospalax psilurus).

The Transbaikal zokor (Myospalax psilurus) is a dominant rodent distributed in the meadow steppe of Inner Mongolia in northern China. Due to long history of evolution in subterranean environment, the zokor has an adaptive behavior: sealing burrow entrances. When a burrow is damaged, exposed entrances appear, and within a relatively short time, the zokor would be active in sealing the entrances to reduce risks to its survival. In general, it is thought that zokors avoid light and wind, which is consistent with their behavior of sealing burrow entrances. However, direct evidence from field experimental research has been lacking. This study set up 68 field sampling points in a meadow steppe in Inner Mongolia from August to September, 2014 and used a wind-light isolator to study the effects of wind and light factors on zokor burrow entrance sealing behavior. The results showed that there were no significant correlations between wind or light factors and the frequency of zokor burrow entrance sealing. Therefore, wind and light factors are not direct factors associated with zokors actively sealing burrow entrances.

Developing science gateways for drug discovery in a grid environment.

BACKGROUND: Methods for in silico screening of large databases of molecules increasingly complement and replace experimental techniques to discover novel compounds to combat diseases. As these techniques become more complex and computationally costly we are faced with an increasing problem to provide the research community of life sciences with a convenient tool for high-throughput virtual screening on distributed computing resources. RESULTS: To this end, we recently integrated the biophysics-based drug-screening program FlexScreen into a service, applicable for large-scale parallel screening and reusable in the context of scientific workflows. CONCLUSIONS: Our implementation is based on Pipeline Pilot and Simple Object Access Protocol and provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface to construct complex workflows, which can be executed on distributed computing resources, thus accelerating the throughput by several orders of magnitude.