Glycosidase activities in sound and rotten grapes in relation to hydrolysis of grape monoterpenyl glycosides

β-D-glucopyranosidase, α-L-arabinofuranosidase and α-L-rhamnopyranosidase activities were studied in grapes, both during maturation and in sound and rotten mature fruits. Enzymic activities increased during maturation. At maturity, in sound grapes, β-D-glucopyranosidase and α-L-arabinofuranosidase activities were the highest ones. Berry infection by fungi results in a decrease in β-glucosidase activity, while the others increase. The effect of an enzymic extract from a culture of Botrytis cinerea towards synthetic terpenyl glycosides showed that hydrolysis was strong for β-terpenyl rutinosides and weak for β-terpenyl 6-0-α-L-arabinofuranosyl-β-D-glucopyranosides

Normal sleep bouts are not essential for C. elegans survival and FoxO is important for compensatory changes in sleep

Additional file 6: Decreased lag-2 function does not slow vulval development. The progeny of wild type and lag-2(q420) animals raised at 25.5 °C were selected at the L4 stage, prior to lethargus entry. Vulval eversion was scored after 3 h; the percentage of animals completing vulval eversion was recorded. Significance was assessed by student’s two-tailed t-test p value < 0.5; error bars represents SEM from 3 trials. Total number of animals: wild type n = 45 and lag-2(q420) n = 42

Nanotechnology in Roman Opaque Red Glass from the 2nd Century AD. Archaeometric Investigation in Red Sectilia from the Decoration of the Lucius Verus Villa in Rome

PD/BD/135053/2017 UID/EAT/00729/2019This work aims to characterise the chemical composition of Roman opaque red glass sectilia dated to the 2nd century A.D and to shed light on Roman glassmaking production of different shades of red, from red to reddish-brown. Due to the lack of technical historical sources for this period many questions about technological aspects still remain. In this project a multi-disciplinary approach is in progress to investigate the red glass sectilia with several red hues from the Imperial Villa of Lucius Verus (161–169 A.D.) in Rome. First, colorimetric measurements were taken to identify the various red hues. The second step was chemical characterization of the samples and the identification of crystalline colouring phases. Particle Induced X-Ray Emission (PIXE) analysis was used to investigate the chemical composition of these glass samples, while the crystalline phases were identified by Raman Spectroscopy and Scanning Electrons Microscope with Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometry (SEM-EDS). Using SEM-EDS nanoparticles were detected as a colouring agent, the chemical composition and the morphology of which has been studied in depth. This information has been compared with the colorimetric analysis to establish any correlation with the different colour hues.publishersversionpublishe

Staphylococcus aureus nasal and pharyngeal carriage in Senegal

AbstractNasal and pharyngeal swabs were collected from 132 patients admitted to the Principal Hospital in Dakar (Senegal), in January and February 2012. The prevalence of Staphylococcus aureus carriage was 56.1% (n = 74): 40.2% for pharyngeal samples and 36.4% for nasal samples. None of the isolates was methicillin-resistant. Carriage was independently associated with being female (p <0.01) and large households (≥15 members) (p 0.04). The luk-PV genes encoding Panton–Valentine leukocidin (PVL) were present in 26.2% of the isolates. These data highlight the importance of the oropharynx as a site of colonization, and the high prevalence of PVL-positive isolates in Senegal as compared with industrialized countries

New Prospects for Research on Manipulation of Insect Vectors by Pathogens

International audienc

Analysis of Generalized Grover's Quantum Search Algorithms Using Recursion Equations

The recursion equation analysis of Grover's quantum search algorithm presented by Biham et al. [PRA 60, 2742 (1999)] is generalized. It is applied to the large class of Grover's type algorithms in which the Hadamard transform is replaced by any other unitary transformation and the phase inversion is replaced by a rotation by an arbitrary angle. The time evolution of the amplitudes of the marked and unmarked states, for any initial complex amplitude distribution is expressed using first order linear difference equations. These equations are solved exactly. The solution provides the number of iterations T after which the probability of finding a marked state upon measurement is the highest, as well as the value of this probability, P_max. Both T and P_max are found to depend on the averages and variances of the initial amplitude distributions of the marked and unmarked states, but not on higher moments.Comment: 8 pages, no figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Nested quantum search and NP-complete problems

A quantum algorithm is known that solves an unstructured search problem in a number of iterations of order $\sqrt{d}$, where $d$ is the dimension of the search space, whereas any classical algorithm necessarily scales as $O(d)$. It is shown here that an improved quantum search algorithm can be devised that exploits the structure of a tree search problem by nesting this standard search algorithm. The number of iterations required to find the solution of an average instance of a constraint satisfaction problem scales as $\sqrt{d^\alpha}$, with a constant $\alpha<1$ depending on the nesting depth and the problem considered. When applying a single nesting level to a problem with constraints of size 2 such as the graph coloring problem, this constant $\alpha$ is estimated to be around 0.62 for average instances of maximum difficulty. This corresponds to a square-root speedup over a classical nested search algorithm, of which our presented algorithm is the quantum counterpart.Comment: 18 pages RevTeX, 3 Postscript figure

The AMANDA Neutrino Telescope and the Indirect Search for Dark Matter

With an effective telescope area of order 10^4 m^2, a threshold of ~50 GeV and a pointing accuracy of 2.5 degrees, the AMANDA detector represents the first of a new generation of high energy neutrino telescopes, reaching a scale envisaged over 25 years ago. We describe its performance, focussing on the capability to detect halo dark matter particles via their annihilation into neutrinos.Comment: Latex2.09, 16 pages, uses epsf.sty to place 15 postscript figures. Talk presented at the 3rd International Symposium on Sources and Detection of Dark Matter in the Universe (DM98), Santa Monica, California, Feb. 199