Regulatory affairs issues and legal ontologies in drug development.

It usually can take more than ten years from the time a new drug is discovered, until can be launched on the market. Regulatory requirements are part of the process of drug discovery and drug development. It acts at every developmental stage. Regulatory affairs works to establish an effective and uniform balance between voluntary and regulatory compliance and agency responsiveness to consumer needs. It evaluates and coordinates all proposed legal actions to ascertain compliance with regulatory policy. The ontology presented for regulatory affairs and drug research and development gives us the possibility to correlate information from different levels and to discover new relationships between the legal aspects. In addition, the transparency of the information is affected by the inability of existing integration strategies to organize and apply the available knowledge to the range of real scientific and business issue in critical safety and regulatory applications. Therefore, the semantic technologies based on ontologies make the knowledge reusable by several applications across business, from discovery to corporate affairs.

TRICHOME BIREFRINGENCE and its homolog AT5G01360 encode plant-specific DUF231 proteins required for cellulose biosynthesis in Arabidopsis.

The Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) trichome birefringence (tbr) mutant has severely reduced crystalline cellulose in trichomes, but the molecular nature of TBR was unknown. We determined TBR to belong to the plant-specific DUF231 domain gene family comprising 46 members of unknown function in Arabidopsis. The genes harbor another plant-specific domain, called the TBL domain, which contains a conserved GDSL motif known from some esterases/lipases. TBR and TBR-like3 (TBL3) are transcriptionally coordinated with primary and secondary CELLULOSE SYNTHASE (CESA) genes, respectively. The tbr and tbl3 mutants hold lower levels of crystalline cellulose and have altered pectin composition in trichomes and stems, respectively, tissues generally thought to contain mainly secondary wall crystalline cellulose. In contrast, primary wall cellulose levels remain unchanged in both mutants as measured in etiolated tbr and tbl3 hypocotyls, while the amount of esterified pectins is reduced and pectin methylesterase activity is increased in this tissue. Furthermore, etiolated tbr hypocotyls have reduced length with swollen epidermal cells, a phenotype characteristic for primary cesa mutants or the wild type treated with cellulose synthesis inhibitors. Taken together, we show that two TBL genes contribute to the synthesis and deposition of secondary wall cellulose, presumably by influencing the esterification state of pectic polymers.