Barley seed coating with free and immobilized alkaline phosphatase to improve P uptake and plant growth

Coating barley seeds with free and immobilized alkaline phosphatase was investigated as a potential means to enhance plant utilization of accumulated soil phosphorus (P). Two coating techniques were studied: film-coating and pelleting. The highest phosphatase activity retention in the coating layer, ranging from 0·48 to 0·67, was observed when seeds were film-coated with phosphatase–polyresorcinol complex (PPC). The germination of seeds film-coated or pelleted with alkaline phosphatase ranged from 0·84 to 0·97 or 0·14 to 0·25, respectively. Low germination of the pelleted seeds was attributed to freezing the seeds in liquid nitrogen (N) for the layer coating formation. Pelleted seeds were not used in the remainder of the studies. Under pot culture conditions, an increase in the soil inorganic P was detected when the seeds were film-coated with phosphatase. Moreover, the film-coating significantly increased the P uptake by plants (between 25 and 31% after 35 days after planting (DAP)). The present study showed that the seed film-coating with free and immobilized phosphatase increased the phosphatase activity in the rhizosphere and the P uptake by plants

La historia de Nūḥ (Noé) en textos aljamiado-moriscos

Na literatura aljamiado-mourisca, a história de Nūḥ (Noé) é mostrada em duas versões muito diferentes que constituem fenómenos distintos do sincretismo religioso. O Alhadiz (‘narração’), em prosa, supera o valor de ser uma mera tradução, referindo-se a um ḥadiṯ desconhecido em árabe, herdeiro de várias tradições favoráveis ao xiismo, ligadas à cidade de Kufa (Iraque) e intimamente vinculadas às interpretações surgidas nos meios cristã-sírios e judeus durante os dois primeiros séculos do Islã. O segundo é o canto em verso de Muhammad Rabadán, composto pouco antes de 1603, que é mostrado aqui como resultado de seu contexto católico e humanístico hispânico, em simbiose com a tradição muçulmana

ProtASR: an evolutionary framework for ancestral protein reconstruction with selection on folding stability

The computational reconstruction of ancestral proteins provides information on past biological events and has practical implications for biomedicine and biotechnology. Currently available tools for ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) are often based on empirical amino acid substitution models that assume that all sites evolve at the same rate and under the same process. However, this assumption is frequently violated because protein evolution is highly heterogeneous due to different selective constraints among sites. Here, we present ProtASR, a new evolutionary framework to infer ancestral protein sequences accounting for selection on protein stability. First, ProtASR generates site-specific substitution matrices through the structurally constrained mean-field (MF) substitution model, which considers both unfolding and misfolding stability. We previously showed that MF models outperform empirical amino acid substitution models, as well as other structurally constrained substitution models, both in terms of likelihood and correctly inferring amino acid distributions across sites. In the second step, ProtASR adapts a well-established maximum-likelihood (ML) ASR procedure to infer ancestral proteins under MF models. A known bias of ML ASR methods is that they tend to overestimate the stability of ancestral proteins by underestimating the frequency of deleterious mutations. We compared ProtASR under MF to two empirical substitution models (JTT and CAT), reconstructing the ancestral sequences of simulated proteins. ProtASR yields reconstructed proteins with less biased stabilities, which are significantly closer to those of the simulated proteins. Analysis of extant protein families suggests that folding stability evolves through time across protein families, potentially reflecting neutral fluctuation. Some families exhibit a more constant protein folding stability, while others are more variable. ProtASR is freely available from https://github.com/miguelarenas/protasr and includes detailed documentation and ready-to-use examples. It runs in seconds/minutes depending on protein length and alignment size

MEMPHYS:A large scale water Cerenkov detector at Fr\'ejus

A water \v{C}erenkov detector project, of megaton scale, to be installed in the Fr\'ejus underground site and dedicated to nucleon decay, neutrinos from supernovae, solar and atmospheric neutrinos, as well as neutrinos from a super-beam and/or a beta-beam coming from CERN, is presented and compared with competitor projects in Japan and in the USA. The performances of the European project are discussed, including the possibility to measure the mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ and the CP-violating phase $\delta$.Comment: 1+33 pages, 14 figures, Expression of Interest of MEMPHYS projec

Protein structure analysis of the interactions between SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and the human ACE2 receptor: from conformational changes to novel neutralizing antibodies

The recent severe acute respiratory syndrome, known as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread so much rapidly and severely to induce World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a state of emergency over the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. While several countries have chosen the almost complete lock-down for slowing down SARS-CoV-2 spread, the scientific community is called to respond to the devastating outbreak by identifying new tools for diagnosis and treatment of the dangerous COVID-19. With this aim, we performed an in silico comparative modeling analysis, which allows gaining new insights into the main conformational changes occurring in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, at the level of the receptor-binding domain (RBD), along interactions with human cells angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor, that favor human cell invasion. Furthermore, our analysis provides (1) an ideal pipeline to identify already characterized antibodies that might target SARS-CoV-2 spike RBD, aiming to prevent interactions with the human ACE2, and (2) instructions for building new possible neutralizing antibodies, according to chemical/physical space restraints and complementary determining regions (CDR) mutagenesis of the identified existing antibodies. The proposed antibodies show in silico high affinity for SARS-CoV-2 spike RBD and can be used as reference antibodies also for building new high-affinity antibodies against present and future coronaviruses able to invade human cells through interactions of their spike proteins with the human ACE2. More in general, our analysis provides indications for the set-up of the right biological molecular context for investigating spike RBD–ACE2 interactions for the development of new vaccines, diagnostic kits, and other treatments based on the targeting of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein

Photoionization in the time and frequency domain

Ultrafast processes in matter, such as the electron emission following light absorption, can now be studied using ultrashort light pulses of attosecond duration ($10^{-18}$s) in the extreme ultraviolet spectral range. The lack of spectral resolution due to the use of short light pulses may raise serious issues in the interpretation of the experimental results and the comparison with detailed theoretical calculations. Here, we determine photoionization time delays in neon atoms over a 40 eV energy range with an interferometric technique combining high temporal and spectral resolution. We spectrally disentangle direct ionization from ionization with shake up, where a second electron is left in an excited state, thus obtaining excellent agreement with theoretical calculations and thereby solving a puzzle raised by seven-year-old measurements. Our experimental approach does not have conceptual limits, allowing us to foresee, with the help of upcoming laser technology, ultra-high resolution time-frequency studies from the visible to the x-ray range.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure