The near exponential growth in sequence data available to bioinformaticists, and the emergence of new fields of biological research, continue to fuel an incessant need for in- creases in sequence alignment performance. Today, more than ever before, bioinformatics researchers have access to a wide variety of HPC architectures including high core count Intel Xeon processors and the many-core Intel Xeon Phi.In this work, the implementation of a distributed, NCBI compliant, BLAST+ (C++ toolkit) code, targeted for multi- and many-core clusters, such as those containing the Intel Xeon Phi line of products is presented. The solution is robust: distributed BLAST runs can use the CPU only, the Xeon Phi processor or coprocessor, or both by utilizing the CPU or Xeon Phi processor plus a Xeon Phi coprocessor. The distributed BLAST implementation employs static load balancing, fault tolerance, and contention aware I/O. The distributed BLAST implementation, HPC-BLAST, maintains greater than 90% weak scaling efficiency on up to 160 Xeon Phi (Knights Landing) nodes.The source code and instructions, are available under the Apache License, Version 2.0 at https://github.com/UTennessee-JICS/HPC-BLAST.

Background/Aim: High-calcium diets modulate energy metabolism and suppress inflammatory stress. These effects are primarily mediated by calcium suppression of calcitriol. We have now investigated the effect of additional components in dairy products [branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEi)] on adipocyte and muscle metabolism in an animal model of diet-induced obesity. Methods: aP2-agouti mice were fed four different 70% restricted diets for 6 weeks: basal-restricted diet (0.4% Ca), nonfat dry milk (1.2% Ca), calcium-depleted milk (0.4% Ca), or basal-restricted diet (0.4% Ca) with supplemented BCAA/ACEi. A high-density oligonucleotide microarray approach was used to compare the effects on energy metabolism. Results: Lipogenic genes in adipose tissue were downregulated in the milk group while in muscle protein synthetic pathways were stimulated by the Ca-depleted and low Ca/BCAA/ACEi diets. Pathways involved in inflammation were altered in adipose tissue and muscle by all three diet treatment groups. Conclusions: The results support our previous findings that calcium and BCAA contribute to the alteration of energy partitioning between adipose tissue and muscle. They provide further evidence for a calcium-independent effect of BCAA and ACEi in energy metabolism and inflammation.

Changes in hepcidin and transferrin receptor gene expression were consistent with the known biology of iron metabolism. The decrease in expression of a gene identified as "similar to calreticulin," while not statistically significant, was consistent with the findings of other investigators that suggest iron plays a role in calreticulin expression.

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