Deciphering the comprehensive knowledgebase landscape featuring infertility with IDDB Xtra.

Infertility affects ∼15% of couples globally and half of cases are related to genetic disorders. Despite growing data and unprecedented improvements in high-throughput sequencing technologies, accumulated fertility-related issues concerning genetic diagnosis and potential treatment are urgent to be solved. However, there is a lack of comprehensive platforms that characterise various infertility-related records to provide research applications for exploring infertility in-depth and genetic counselling of infertility couple. To solve this problem, we provide IDDB Xtra by further integrating phenotypic manifestations, genomic datasets, epigenetics, modulators in collaboration with numerous interactive tools into our previous infertility database, IDDB. IDDB Xtra houses manually-curated 2369 genes of human and nine model organisms, 273 chromosomal abnormalities, 884 phenotypes, 60 genomic datasets, 464 epigenetic records, 1144 modulators relevant to infertility diagnosis and treatment. Additionally, IDDB Xtra incorporated customized graphical applications for researchers and clinicians to decipher in-depth disease mechanisms from the perspectives of developmental atlas, mutation effects, and clinical manifestations. Users can browse genes across developmental stages of human and mouse, filter candidate genes, mine potential variants and retrieve infertility biomedical network in an intuitive web interface. In summary, IDDB Xtra not only captures valuable research and data, but also provides useful applications to facilitate the genetic counselling and drug discovery of infertility. IDDB Xtra is freely available at https://mdl.shsmu.edu.cn/IDDB/and http://www.allostery.net/IDDB.

An Energy Efficient Technique Using Electric Active Shielding for Capacitive Coupling Intra-Body Communication.

Capacitive coupling intra-body communication (CC-IBC) has become one of the candidates for healthcare sensor networks due to its positive prevailing features of energy efficiency, transmission rate and security. Under the CC-IBC scheme, some of the electric field emitted from signal (SIG) electrode of the transmitter will couple directly to the ground (GND) electrode, acting equivalently as an internal impedance of the signal source and inducing considerable energy losses. However, none of the previous works have fully studied the problem. In this paper, the underlying theory of such energy loss is investigated and quantitatively evaluated using conventional parameters. Accordingly, a method of electric active shielding is proposed to reduce the displacement current across the SIG-GND electrodes, leading to less power loss. In addition, the variation of such loss in regard to frequency range and positions on human body was also considered. The theory was validated by finite element method simulation and experimental measurement. The prototype result shows that the receiving power has been improved by approximate 5.5 dBm while the total power consumption is maximally 9 mW less using the proposed technique, providing an energy efficient option in physical layer for wearable and implantable healthcare sensor networks.