Understanding altered gene expression in osteoarthritic cartilage can lead to new targets for drug intervention. We established a functional assay based on chondrocyte cluster formation, a phenotype associated with osteoarthritis (OA), to screen an OA cartilage gene library. Previous reports have demonstrated that normal chondrocytes grown in suspension culture maintain their chondrocytic phenotype, however, certain growth factors such as basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) will induce the cells to proliferate in tight clusters similar to those seen in osteoarthritic cartilage. In this study we validate that overexpression of bFGF by retrovirally transduced normal chondrocytes would similarly induce the proliferation of tight cell clusters. We then used this approach as a basis to set up a functional screen where an entire OA cartilage cDNA library was tranduced into normal chondrocytes to search for other genes that would also induce cluster formation. Seven potential genes were isolated from the OA gene library, including BPOZ, IL-17 receptor C, NADH ubiquinone oxidoreductase, COMP, Soluble carrier 16 (MCT 3), C1r, and bFGF itself. None of the identified genes were upregulated by bFGF, however, all of them upregulated the expression of bFGF suggesting a common pathway. Although cluster formation is not considered to be destructive in OA cartilage, it is consistent with the disease and could yield answers to the altered phenotype. Further studies are needed to elucidate how these genes are linked to the disease state.

The methods developed in this study can be applied to screen for genes capable of inducing an OA-like phenotype in chondrocytes on a genome-wide scale and identify novel mediators of OA pathogenesis. Thus, coordinated functional genomic approaches can be used to delineate key genes and pathways activated in complex human diseases such as OA.

Privacy-preserving online disease prediction and diagnosis are critical issues in the emerging edge-cloud-based healthcare system. Online patient data processing from remote places may lead to severe privacy problems. Moreover, the existing cloud-based healthcare system takes more latency and energy consumption during diagnosis due to offloading of live patient data to remote cloud servers. Solve the privacy problem. The proposed research introduces the edgecloud enabled privacy-preserving healthcare system by exploiting additive homomorphic encryption schemes. It can help maintain the privacy preservation and confidentiality of patients' medical data during diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. In addition, the energy and delay aware computational offloading scheme is proposed to minimize the uncertainty and energy consumption of end-user devices. The proposed research maintains the better privacy and robustness of live video data processing during prediction and diagnosis compared to existing healthcare systems.

Transposon tagging is the direct way of gene identification and cloning in living organisms. In plants, well characterized transposable elements are available from Zea mays and Antirrhinum majus. These have been used as simple insertion mutagens to clone genes in both native and several heterologous plant species. Transposon mediated techniques are also increasingly being used to study the pattern and regulation of gene expression in plants. Recently, transposons have been used in ingenious ways to bring about deletion and inversion of chromosomal segments. The transposon-based reverse genetics and its potentials in assigning biological functions to the known DNA sequences makes it useful in functional genomics. This review traces the developments in the use of plant transposons, from a simple technique for insertional mutagenesis to a powerful tool for gene discovery and study of gene function.

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