Technical pre-analytical effects on the clinical biochemistry of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.)

Clinical biochemistry has long been utilized in human and veterinary medicine as a vital diagnostic tool, but despite occasional studies showing its usefulness in monitoring health status in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.), it has not yet been widely utilized within the aquaculture industry. This is due, in part, to a lack of an agreed protocol for collection and processing of blood prior to analysis. Moreover, while the analytical phase of clinical biochemistry is well controlled, there is a growing understanding that technical pre-analytical variables can influence analyte concentrations or activities. In addition, post-analytical interpretation of treatment effects is variable in the literature, thus making the true effect of sample treatment hard to evaluate. Therefore, a number of pre-analytical treatments have been investigated to examine their effect on analyte concentrations and activities. In addition, reference ranges for salmon plasma biochemical analytes have been established to inform veterinary practitioners and the aquaculture industry of the importance of clinical biochemistry in health and disease monitoring. Furthermore, a standardized protocol for blood collection has been proposed

Use of Peptide Libraries for Identification and Optimization of Novel Antimicrobial Peptides.

The increasing rates of resistance among bacteria and to a lesser extent fungi have resulted in an urgent need to find new molecules that hold therapeutic promise against multidrug-resistant strains. Antimicrobial peptides have proven very effective against a variety of multidrug-resistant bacteria. Additionally, the low levels of resistance reported towards these molecules are an attractive feature for antimicrobial drug development. Here we summarise information on diverse peptide libraries used to discover or to optimize antimicrobial peptides. Chemical synthesized peptide libraries, for example split and mix method, tea bag method, multi-pin method and cellulose spot method are discussed. In addition biological peptide library screening methods are summarized, like phage display, bacterial display, mRNA-display and ribosomal display. A few examples are given for small peptide libraries, which almost exclusively follow a rational design of peptides of interest rather than a combinatorial approach

CCAFS Gender Strategy

This Gender Strategy is intended to strengthen CCAFS’ development impact through the integration of gender issues into research in keeping with commitments in the CGIAR Strategy and Results Framework to ensure that rural women benefit from its contribution to poverty reduction, enhanced environmental resilience, improved food security, human health and nutrition. CCAFS plans to situate its gender strategy within a broader strategy addressing social inclusion for different social groups while bearing in mind that women are central to agriculture in developing countries. This Strategy was prepared following CGIAR Guidelines for CRP Gender Strategy1 that focus on showing how the CRP will address issues of gender in its research (as distinct from gender in the workplace which will be handled separately). Accordingly, the document is organized into seven sections that together provide an explanation of how the CRP will address gender issues relevant to its research outputs, activities and outcomes and against which the CRP will report in future, as part of the CGIAR annual monitoring process

Experimental characterization of thermally-activated artificial muscles based on coiled nylon fishing lines

The discovery of an innovative class of thermally activated actuators based on twisted polymeric fibres has opened new horizons toward the development of effective devices that can be easily manufactured using inexpensive materials such as fishing lines or sewing threads. These new devices show large deformations when heated together with promising performance in terms of energy and power densities. With the aim of providing information and data useful for the future engineering applications, we present the results of a thermo-mechanical characterization conducted on a specific type of twisted polymeric fibre (i.e. nylon-made coiled actuators) that is considered particularly promising. A custom experimental test-bench and procedure have been developed and employed to run isothermal and isometric tensile tests on a set of specimens that are fabricated with a simple and repeatable process. The results of the experiments highlight some important issues related to the response of these actuators such as hysteresis, repeatability, predictability and stored elastic energy

Euclid preparation. XXI. Intermediate-redshift contaminants in the search for z > 6 galaxies within the Euclid Deep Survey

Context. The Euclid mission is expected to discover thousands of z > 6 galaxies in three deep fields, which together will cover a ∼50 deg$^{2}$ area. However, the limited number of Euclid bands (four) and the low availability of ancillary data could make the identification of z > 6 galaxies challenging. Aims. In this work we assess the degree of contamination by intermediate-redshift galaxies (z = 1–5.8) expected for z > 6 galaxies within the Euclid Deep Survey. Methods. This study is based on ∼176 000 real galaxies at z = 1–8 in a ∼0.7 deg$^{2}$ area selected from the UltraVISTA ultra-deep survey and ∼96 000 mock galaxies with 25.3 ≤ H < 27.0, which altogether cover the range of magnitudes to be probed in the Euclid Deep Survey. We simulate Euclid and ancillary photometry from fiducial 28-band photometry and fit spectral energy distributions to various combinations of these simulated data. Results. We demonstrate that identifying z > 6 galaxies with Euclid data alone will be very effective, with a z > 6 recovery of 91% (88%) for bright (faint) galaxies. For the UltraVISTA-like bright sample, the percentage of z = 1–5.8 contaminants amongst apparent z > 6 galaxies as observed with Euclid alone is 18%, which is reduced to 4% (13%) by including ultra-deep Rubin (Spitzer) photometry. Conversely, for the faint mock sample, the contamination fraction with Euclid alone is considerably higher at 39%, and minimised to 7% when including ultra-deep Rubin data. For UltraVISTA-like bright galaxies, we find that Euclid (I$_{E}$ − Y$_{E}$) > 2.8 and (Y$_{E}$ − J$_{E}$)  6 galaxies, although these are applicable to only 54% of the contaminants as many have unconstrained (I$_{E}$ − Y$_{E}$) colours. In the best scenario, these cuts reduce the contamination fraction to 1% whilst preserving 81% of the fiducial z > 6 sample. For the faint mock sample, colour cuts are infeasible; we find instead that a 5σ detection threshold requirement in at least one of the Euclid near-infrared bands reduces the contamination fraction to 25%

CMS Software Distribution on the LCG and OSG Grids

The efficient exploitation of worldwide distributed storage and computing resources available in the grids require a robust, transparent and fast deployment of experiment specific software. The approach followed by the CMS experiment at CERN in order to enable Monte-Carlo simulations, data analysis and software development in an international collaboration is presented. The current status and future improvement plans are described.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, latex with hyperref

Star formation in galaxies at z~4-5 from the SMUVS survey: a clear starburst/main-sequence bimodality for Halpha emitters on the SFR-M* plane

We study a large galaxy sample from the Spitzer Matching Survey of the UltraVISTA ultra-deep Stripes (SMUVS) to search for sources with enhanced 3.6 micron fluxes indicative of strong Halpha emission at z=3.9-4.9. We find that the percentage of "Halpha excess" sources reaches 37-40% for galaxies with stellar masses log10(M*/Msun) ~ 9-10, and decreases to <20% at log10(M*/Msun) ~ 10.7. At higher stellar masses, however, the trend reverses, although this is likely due to AGN contamination. We derive star formation rates (SFR) and specific SFR (sSFR) from the inferred Halpha equivalent widths (EW) of our "Halpha excess" galaxies. We show, for the first time, that the "Halpha excess" galaxies clearly have a bimodal distribution on the SFR-M* plane: they lie on the main sequence of star formation (with log10(sSFR/yr^{-1})<-8.05) or in a starburst cloud (with log10(sSFR/yr^{-1}) >-7.60). The latter contains ~15% of all the objects in our sample and accounts for >50% of the cosmic SFR density at z=3.9-4.9, for which we derive a robust lower limit of 0.066 Msun yr^{-1} Mpc^{-3}. Finally, we identify an unusual >50sigma overdensity of z=3.9-4.9 galaxies within a 0.20 x 0.20 sq. arcmin region. We conclude that the SMUVS unique combination of area and depth at mid-IR wavelengths provides an unprecedented level of statistics and dynamic range which are fundamental to reveal new aspects of galaxy evolution in the young Universe.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, 1 table. Re-submitted to the ApJ, after addressing referee report. Main changes with respect to v1: a new section and a new appendix have been added to investigate further the origin and robustness of the sSFR bimodality. No conclusion change

Steady-State and Time-Resolved Spectroscopy of F420 Extracted from Methanogen Cells

The methanogen electron carrier F420 was extracted from a methanogen cell culture, Methanobrevibacter ruminantium, and separated from other cell components by a single anion exchange chromatographic process. The extent of separation was determined spectroscopically. The fluorescence lifetime of F420 at pH 7.5 is ~4.2 nanoseconds