Summary: Biological sequence diagrams are fundamental for visualizing various functional elements in protein or nucleotide sequences that enable a summarization and presentation of existing information as well as means of intuitive new discoveries. Here, we present a software package called illustrator of biological sequences (IBS) that can be used for representing the organization of either protein or nucleotide sequences in a convenient, efficient and precise manner. Multiple options are provided in IBS, and biological sequences can be manipulated, recolored or rescaled in a user-defined mode. Also, the final representational artwork can be directly exported into a publication-quality figure.Availability and implementation: The standalone package of IBS was implemented in JAVA, while the online service was implemented in HTML5 and JavaScript. Both the standalone package and online service are freely available at http://ibs.biocuckoo.org.Contact: renjian.sysu@gmail.com or xueyu@hust.edu.cnSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Penicillium marneffei is an emerging pathogenic fungus that can cause a life-threatening systemic mycosis in immunocompromised hosts, especially in patients with AIDS. This infection is endemic in Southeast Asia. With the prevalence of AIDS in this area, the number of patients with systemic penicilliosis marneffei is found to be increasing rapidly in mainland China in recent years. We recently reviewed 668 cases of penicilliosis marneffei in mainland China from January 1984 to December 2009 in cnki, cqvip, CBMdisc and PubMed. We analyzed epidemiological and clinical features, laboratory findings, reaction to therapy and prognosis of the disease. We found that 99.4% of the cases were reported in the southern part of China; among these cases, 42.8% were from Guangxi (286 cases) and 40.6% were from Guangdong province (271 cases). Five hundred and eighty-six cases (87.7%) of penicilliosis marneffei were reported with infection by the human immunodeficiency virus, 25 cases (3.8%) with other immunocompromised diseases, and 57 cases (8.5%) without any documented underlying diseases. Fever, weight loss, anemia, lymphadenopathy, hepatosplenomegaly, respiratory signs and skin lesions were the common clinical manifestations of P. marneffei infections. The 569 cases received antifungal therapy with a mortality of 24.3% (138 cases), 99 cases who had not received antifungal therapy had a mortality of 50.6%. P. marneffei was an emerging pathogenic fungus and become a medical and public health importance in mainland China. The immunocompromised patients should pay more attention to P. marneffei infection in the endemic areas.

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In this paper, a system designed for helping the deaf to communicate with others is presented. Some useful new ideas are proposed in design and implementation. An algorithm based on geometrical analysis for the purpose of extracting invariant feature to signer position is presented. An ANN–DP combined approach is employed for segmenting subwords automatically from the data stream of sign signals. To tackle the epenthesis movement problem, a DP-based method has been used to obtain the context-dependent models. Some techniques for system implementation are also given, including fast matching, frame prediction and search algorithms. The implemented system is able to recognize continuous large vocabulary Chinese Sign Language. Experiments show that proposed techniques in this paper are efficient on either recognition speed or recognition performance.