A preliminary transcriptomic approach to elucidate post harvest ripening of plum fruit

The aim of the present study was to dissect common and/or diverse mechanisms regulating plum (Prunus salicina) fruit ripening in genotypes characterized by different patterns of ethylene production. Fruit of an ethylenesuppressed cultivar ('Shiro') and a cultivar characterized by the typical increase of ethylene production during fruit ripening ('Santa Rosa') were harvested at commercial maturity stage and allowed to further ripen at room temperature (23°C) up to 4 days. While non-detectable amounts of ethylene were recorded in 'Shiro' fruit, a typical climacteric behavior was observed in 'Santa Rosa' plums. For comparative purposes, the peach microarray μPEACH 1.0 containing 4,806 oligonucleotides corresponding to an equal number of genes expressed in peach fruit was employed for transcript profiling during postharvest ripening of both cultivars. Intriguingly, transcript levels of genes involved in ethylene biosynthesis, primarily 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate synthase, appeared to increase during the progress of 'Shiro' fruit ripening, following the same pattern as in 'Santa Rosa' plums. These data suggest that an induction of the ethylene biosynthetic pathway is present also in plum cultivars in which the burst of ethylene is not detectable. Expression levels of other genes implicated in auxin metabolism, antioxidant system and stress response followed the same pattern in both cultivars. Overall, this preliminary transcriptomic approach tried to elucidate the flow of events that accompany postharvest ripening of plum cultivars with diverse properties in relation to ethylene evolutio

The LARES mission: an opportunity to teach general relativity. Frame dragging and Lense-Thirring effect

LARES is an Italian Space Agency mission devoted to test frame-dragging, a prediction of general relativity. On February 2012 the satellite has been successfully put in orbit with the qualification flight of VEGA, the new European Space Agency launcher. Basic concepts of general relativity are becoming more and more familiar because of the part they play in science fiction movies. But frame-dragging (more formally known as the Lense-Thirring effect), is so peculiar that it is a relatively unknown effect. The idea of this paper is to start from the description of the experiment and then to push some parameters of the experiment to extreme values in order to magnify the effects of relativity. This approach will provide not only the students and general people but also professionals not strictly specialized in general relativity, with increased interest in gravitational theories

Effects of L\'evy noise on the dynamics of sine-Gordon solitons in long Josephson junctions

We numerically investigate the generation of solitons in current-biased long Josephson junctions in relation to the superconducting lifetime and the voltage drop across the device. The dynamics of the junction is modelled with a sine-Gordon equation driven by an oscillating field and subject to an external non-Gaussian noise. A wide range of $\alpha$-stable L\'evy distributions is considered as noise source, with varying stability index $\alpha$ and asymmetry parameter $\beta$. In junctions longer than a critical length, the mean switching time (MST) from superconductive to the resistive state assumes a values independent of the device length. Here, we demonstrate that such a value is directly related to the mean density of solitons which move into or from the washboard potential minimum corresponding to the initial superconductive state. Moreover, we observe: (i) a connection between the total mean soliton density and the mean potential difference across the junction; (ii) an inverse behavior of the mean voltage in comparison with the MST, with varying the junction length; (iii) evidences of non-monotonic behaviors, such as stochastic resonant activation and noise enhanced stability, of MST versus the driving frequency and noise intensity for different values of $\alpha$ and $\beta$; (iv) finally, these non-monotonic behaviors are found to be related to the mean density of solitons formed along the junction.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, submitted to J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.481

Donor/Acceptor Heterojunction Organic Solar Cells

The operation and the design of organic solar cells with donor/acceptor heterojunction structure and exciton blocking layer is outlined and results of their initial development and assessment are reported. Under halogen lamp illumination with 100 mW/cm2 incident optical power density, the devices exhibits an open circuit voltage VOC = 0.45 V, a short circuit current density JSC between 2 and 2.5 mA/cm2 with a fill factor FF ≈ 50%, an external quantum efficiency (electrons/s over incident photons/s) EQE ≈ 5% and a power conversion efficiency of about 0.5%. Measurements of the photoelectrical characteristics with time are also reported, confirming that non encapsulated organic solar cells have limited stability in ambient atmosphere

Thermodynamically consistent models of elastic-plastic materials

A three-dimensional thermodynamic setting for the modelling of elastic-plastic materials is established. The second law of thermodynamics is assumed in the Clausius-Duhem form with the entropy production being given by a constitutive function. An incremental stress strain relation is derived. In essence the free energy is found to describe the elastic behaviour while the hysteretic properties are a joint consequence of the entropy production and the free energ

Optimized Nonuniform FFTs and Their Application to Array Factor Computation

We deal with developing an optimized approach for implementing nonuniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) algorithms under a general and new perspective for 1-D transformations. The computations of nonequispaced results, nonequispaced data, and Type-3 nonuniform discrete Fourier transforms are tackled in a unified way. They exploit “uniformly sampled” exponentials to interpolate the “nonuniformly sampled” ones involved in the nonuniform discrete Fourier transforms (NUFDTs), so as to enable the use of standard fast Fourier transforms, and an optimized window. The computational costs and the memory requirements are analyzed, and their convenient performance is assessed also by comparing them with other approaches in the literature. Numerical results demonstrate that the method is more accurate and does not introduce any additional computational or memory burden. The computation of the window functions amounts to that of a Legendre polynomial expansion, i.e., a simple polynomial evaluation. This is convenient in terms of computational burden and of the proper arrangement of the calculations. A case study of electromagnetic interest has been carried out by applying the developed NUFFTs to the radiation of linear regular or irregular arrays onto a set of regular or irregular spectral points. Guidelines for multidimensional extension of the proposed approach are also presented

Anesthesiologic effects of transperitoneal versus extraperitoneal approach during robot-assisted radical prostatectomy: results of a prospective randomized study

To compare the effects of CO(2) insufflation on hemodynamics and oxygen levels and on acid-base level during Robot-Assisted Radical Prostatectomy (RARP) with transperitoneal (TP) versus extra-peritoneal (EP) accesses