Veterinary public health essentials to deployment health surveillance: applying zoonotic disease surveillance and food/water safety at SOF deployment sites.

The Special Operations Force (SOF) medic must have a public health and environmental awareness mindset while conducting operations in any AO. Whether deployed at a Forward Operating Base (FOB) or isolated outpost, the SOF medic can specifically apply two U.S. Army veterinary public health mission priorities--zoonotic disease surveillance and food/water safety. The SOF medic should be knowledgeable of and perform continual surveillance for zoonotic disease(s) present within animals in their AO that may affect the deployed SOF team, other American or host-nation Soldiers, and civilians. Likewise, the critical nature of ensuring safe food/water requires the SOF medic to aggressively and continually apply food/water safety principles in all deployment settings. SOF deployments to South America and Afghanistan have confirmed the need and benefits of employing a U.S. Army veterinary public health mission focus. This article is a reference for the SOF medic to expand his overall veterinary public health and environmental awareness skill-set thereby enhancing the varied, intricate, and, often times, political SOF missions.

The generation challenge programme platform: semantic standards and workbench for crop science.

The Generation Challenge programme (GCP) is a global crop research consortium directed toward crop improvement through the application of comparative biology and genetic resources characterization to plant breeding. A key consortium research activity is the development of a GCP crop bioinformatics platform to support GCP research. This platform includes the following: (i) shared, public platform-independent domain models, ontology, and data formats to enable interoperability of data and analysis flows within the platform; (ii) web service and registry technologies to identify, share, and integrate information across diverse, globally dispersed data sources, as well as to access high-performance computational (HPC) facilities for computationally intensive, high-throughput analyses of project data; (iii) platform-specific middleware reference implementations of the domain model integrating a suite of public (largely open-access/-source) databases and software tools into a workbench to facilitate biodiversity analysis, comparative analysis of crop genomic data, and plant breeding decision making.