[Infrastructure of clinical support and research in the Danish national genome centre].

This review presents an overview of how the Danish parliament has decided to establish a new infrastructure for personalised medicine in Denmark. The core activities are a national whole genome sequencing centre, a national high-performance computing centre, a national genome database with associated tools and various databases for clinical support. The infrastructure will be developed over the coming years and will include tools for genome interpretation and clinical follow-up of patients, who have been whole-genome sequenced.

Mathematical arterialization of venous blood in emergency medicine patients.

OBJECTIVES: Arterial punctures represent a painful and unpleasant experience. Acid-base and oxygenation status can be assessed from peripheral venous blood, but agreement with arterial values is not always clinically acceptable. This study evaluates a method for mathematically transforming peripheral venous values into arterial values in emergency medicine patients. METHODS: Paired arterial and peripheral venous samples were analysed in groups A (47 patients) and B (101 patients), corresponding to the clinical need for arterial blood sampling (A) and without (B). Venous values were input into the mathematical arterialization method and the values of arterial pH, PCO2 and PO2 were calculated and compared with the measured values. RESULTS: The calculated and measured arterial pH and PCO2 values correlated well with the correlation coefficients (r ) of group A, pH 0.94, PCO2 0.97; group B, pH 0.87, PCO2 0.83; and Bland-Altman limits of agreement well within the limits of acceptable laboratory and clinical performance. The calculated values of arterial PO2 followed a set of predefined rules relating calculated and measured PO2 levels in all cases. The method represents an improvement on the use of venous blood alone where the correlation coefficients were as follows: group A, pH 0.85, PCO2 0.88; group B, pH 0.79, PCO2 0.59; and limits of agreement for PCO2 at the border of (group A) or beyond (group B) acceptable clinical limits. CONCLUSION: Application of the mathematical arterialization method may reduce the pain associated with assessment of acid-base and oxygenation status, maximize the information obtained from peripheral venous blood and allow venous measurements to be presented as more commonly interpreted arterial values.

Global transcript profiling of potato tuber using LongSAGE.

Solanum tuberosum (potato) is the fourth major crop worldwide and is used for food, feed and biotechnological applications. To fully realize the biosynthetic potential for the production of starch, protein and metabolites, we conducted an extensive quantitative profiling of the expressed genes of mature potato tuber. A total of 58,322 serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) tags of 19 nucleotides (nt), representing 22,233 different tags, were analysed. The 695 tags seen 10 or more times were assigned a tentative function by comparison with homologous genes. The identities of 12 'known' and 12 'unknown' transcripts were confirmed by rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) cloning using the 19 nt tag as a primer. The SAGE and expressed sequence tag (EST) profiles of potato tuber were compared. Transcripts for four types of protease inhibitor, a metallothionein and a lipoxygenase were more prominent than patatin isoforms.