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Xenbase (http://www.xenbase.org) is a model organism database that provides genomic, molecular, cellular and developmental biology content to biomedical researchers working with the frog, Xenopus and Xenopus data to workers using other model organisms. As an amphibian Xenopus serves as a useful evolutionary bridge between invertebrates and more complex vertebrates such as birds and mammals. Xenbase content is collated from a variety of external sources using automated and semi-automated pipelines then processed via a combination of automated and manual annotation. A link-matching system allows for the wide variety of synonyms used to describe biological data on unique features, such as a gene or an anatomical entity, to be used by the database in an equivalent manner. Recent updates to the database include the Xenopus laevis genome, a new Xenopus tropicalis genome build, epigenomic data, collections of RNA and protein sequences associated with genes, more powerful gene expression searches, a community and curated wiki, an extensive set of manually annotated gene expression patterns and a new database module that contains data on over 700 antibodies that are useful for exploring Xenopus cell and developmental biology.

Xenbase (www.xenbase.org) is the model organism database for Xenopus tropicalis and Xenopus laevis, two frog species used as model systems for developmental and cell biology. Xenbase curation processes centre on associating papers with genes and extracting gene expression patterns. Papers from PubMed with the keyword ‘Xenopus’ are imported into Xenbase and split into two curation tracks. In the first track, papers are automatically associated with genes and anatomy terms, images and captions are semi-automatically imported and gene expression patterns found in those images are manually annotated using controlled vocabularies. In the second track, full text of the same papers are downloaded and indexed by a number of controlled vocabularies and made available to users via the Textpresso search engine and text mining tool.

This paper introduces ThinAV, an anti-malware system for Android that uses pre-existing web-based file scanning services for malware detection. The goal in developing ThinAV was to assess the feasibility of providing real-time anti-malware scanning over a wide area network where resource limitation is a factor. As a result, our research provides a necessary counterpoint to many of the big-budget, resource-intensive idealized solutions that have been suggested in the area of cloud-based security. The evaluation of ThinAV shows that it functions well over a wide area network, resulting in a system which is highly practical for providing anti-malware security on smartphones.

Why should a user's computer be trusted at all? We propose a new model of the computer, Babel, that makes a user's computer appear as it normally would, but is actually untrusted to the point where it cannot run the code installed on it. Each computer, each process, speaks a different language, and a translator on the network, in the cloud, is needed to allow a user's computer to execute code. This has enormous implications. The user gets continuous protection, and multiple kinds of protection, with no need for security updates or patches. At the same time, the user effectively has an adjustable control that they can set based on their risk assessment and need for privacy. Babel can work perfectly well alongside existing systems, and opens new markets for security.

The demand for cloud services is growing at a phenomenal rate, and so is the energy cost of the data centres powering those services. This is pressing cloud service providers to look for ways of reducing energy consumption. One approach is to utilize energy-efficient hardware and/or software in the data centres, the other approach is to relocate some services, e.g., personal files and data rendering, to end-host computers, a.k.a. peers. In the later approach, peers contribute their communication and computation resources to exchange data and provide services, while the data centre performs central administration and authentication, as well as backend processing. In this paper, we model the energy consumption for both approaches and then perform analytical studies. Our analysis shows that (1) making the data centre energy efficient can reduce the energy cost significantly; (2) the number of hops from the data centre to the peers and among peers directly influences the energy saving; (3) it is preferred to utilize peers that are already online for other purposes; (4) introducing content delivery network (CDN) servers and enabling proxy service on home modems are the keys to make a hybrid P2P-cloud network go green. We further verified these findings by simulation.

Xenbase (www.xenbase.org), the model organism database for Xenopus laevis and X. (Silurana) tropicalis, is the principal centralized resource of genomic, development data and community information for Xenopus research. Recent improvements include the addition of the literature and interaction tabs to gene catalog pages. New content has been added including a section on gene expression patterns that incorporates image data from the literature, large scale screens and community submissions. Gene expression data are integrated into the gene catalog via an expression tab and is also searchable by multiple criteria using an expression search interface. The gene catalog has grown to contain over 15 000 genes. Collaboration with the European Xenopus Research Center (EXRC) has resulted in a stock center section with data on frog lines supplied by the EXRC. Numerous improvements have also been made to search and navigation. Xenbase is also the source of the Xenopus Anatomical Ontology and the clearinghouse for Xenopus gene nomenclature.

Xenbase (www.xenbase.org) is a model organism database integrating a diverse array of biological and genomic data on the frogs, Xenopus laevis and Xenopus (Silurana) tropicalis. Data is collected from other databases, high-throughput screens and the scientific literature and integrated into a number of database modules covering subjects such as community, literature, gene and genomic analysis. Gene pages are automatically assembled from data piped from the Entrez Gene, Gurdon Institute, JGI, Metazome, MGI, OMIM, PubMed, Unigene, Zfin, commercial suppliers and others. These data are then supplemented with in-house annotation. Xenbase has implemented the Gbrowse genome browser and also provides a BLAST service that allows users to specifically search either laevis or tropicalis DNA or protein targets. A table of Xenopus gene synonyms has been implemented and allows the genome, genes, publications and high-throughput gene expression data to be seamlessly integrated with other Xenopus data and to external database resources, making the wealth of developmental and functional data from the frog available to the broader research community.