6,476 research outputs found
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Dissecting a complex chemical stress: chemogenomic profiling of plant hydrolysates.
The efficient production of biofuels from cellulosic feedstocks will require the efficient fermentation of the sugars in hydrolyzed plant material. Unfortunately, plant hydrolysates also contain many compounds that inhibit microbial growth and fermentation. We used DNA-barcoded mutant libraries to identify genes that are important for hydrolysate tolerance in both Zymomonas mobilis (44 genes) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (99 genes). Overexpression of a Z. mobilis tolerance gene of unknown function (ZMO1875) improved its specific ethanol productivity 2.4-fold in the presence of miscanthus hydrolysate. However, a mixture of 37 hydrolysate-derived inhibitors was not sufficient to explain the fitness profile of plant hydrolysate. To deconstruct the fitness profile of hydrolysate, we profiled the 37 inhibitors against a library of Z. mobilis mutants and we modeled fitness in hydrolysate as a mixture of fitness in its components. By examining outliers in this model, we identified methylglyoxal as a previously unknown component of hydrolysate. Our work provides a general strategy to dissect how microbes respond to a complex chemical stress and should enable further engineering of hydrolysate tolerance
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Novel translational approaches to the search for precision therapies for acute respiratory distress syndrome.
In the 50 years since acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was first described, substantial progress has been made in identifying the risk factors for and the pathogenic contributors to the syndrome and in characterising the protein expression patterns in plasma and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from patients with ARDS. Despite this effort, however, pharmacological options for ARDS remain scarce. Frequently cited reasons for this absence of specific drug therapies include the heterogeneity of patients with ARDS, the potential for a differential response to drugs, and the possibility that the wrong targets have been studied. Advances in applied biomolecular technology and bioinformatics have enabled breakthroughs for other complex traits, such as cardiovascular disease or asthma, particularly when a precision medicine paradigm, wherein a biomarker or gene expression pattern indicates a patient's likelihood of responding to a treatment, has been pursued. In this Review, we consider the biological and analytical techniques that could facilitate a precision medicine approach for ARDS
Achieving Reliability Through Distributed Data Flows and Recursive Delegation
Strong reliability properties, such as state machine replication or virtual synchrony, are hard to implement in a scalable manner. They are typically expressed in terms of global membership views. As we argue, global membership is non-scalable. We propose a way of modeling protocols that does not rely on global membership. Our approach is based on the concept of a distributed data flow, a set of messages distributed in space and time. We model protocols as networks of such flows, constructed through recursive delegation. The resulting system uses multiple small membership services instead of a single global one while still supporting stronger properties. Our work was inspired by the functional approach to modeling distributed systems pioneered by I/O automata. This paper focuses on the basic model. Internal details of our system architecture and a compiler that translates protocols from our data flow language to real executable code will be discussed elsewhere.This work was supported in part by grants from AFOSR, AFRL, NSF, and Intel Corporatio
ANCHOR: logically-centralized security for Software-Defined Networks
While the centralization of SDN brought advantages such as a faster pace of
innovation, it also disrupted some of the natural defenses of traditional
architectures against different threats. The literature on SDN has mostly been
concerned with the functional side, despite some specific works concerning
non-functional properties like 'security' or 'dependability'. Though addressing
the latter in an ad-hoc, piecemeal way, may work, it will most likely lead to
efficiency and effectiveness problems. We claim that the enforcement of
non-functional properties as a pillar of SDN robustness calls for a systemic
approach. As a general concept, we propose ANCHOR, a subsystem architecture
that promotes the logical centralization of non-functional properties. To show
the effectiveness of the concept, we focus on 'security' in this paper: we
identify the current security gaps in SDNs and we populate the architecture
middleware with the appropriate security mechanisms, in a global and consistent
manner. Essential security mechanisms provided by anchor include reliable
entropy and resilient pseudo-random generators, and protocols for secure
registration and association of SDN devices. We claim and justify in the paper
that centralizing such mechanisms is key for their effectiveness, by allowing
us to: define and enforce global policies for those properties; reduce the
complexity of controllers and forwarding devices; ensure higher levels of
robustness for critical services; foster interoperability of the non-functional
property enforcement mechanisms; and promote the security and resilience of the
architecture itself. We discuss design and implementation aspects, and we prove
and evaluate our algorithms and mechanisms, including the formalisation of the
main protocols and the verification of their core security properties using the
Tamarin prover.Comment: 42 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, 5 algorithms, 139 reference
The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocol Design and Implementation
Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have recently been extensively used
by decentralized data management systems with non-trustworthy infrastructures,
e.g., permissioned blockchains. BFT protocols cover a broad spectrum of design
dimensions from infrastructure settings such as the communication topology, to
more technical features such as commitment strategy and even fundamental social
choice properties like order-fairness. The proliferation of different BFT
protocols has rendered it difficult to navigate the BFT landscape, let alone
determine the protocol that best meets application needs. This paper presents
Bedrock, a unified platform for BFT protocols design, analysis, implementation,
and experiments. Bedrock proposes a design space consisting of a set of design
choices capturing the trade-offs between different design space dimensions and
providing fundamentally new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of BFT
protocols. Bedrock enables users to analyze and experiment with BFT protocols
within the space of plausible choices, evolve current protocols to design new
ones, and even uncover previously unknown protocols. Our experimental results
demonstrate the capability of Bedrock to uniformly evaluate BFT protocols in
new ways that were not possible before due to the diverse assumptions made by
these protocols. The results validate Bedrock's ability to analyze and derive
BFT protocols
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