Emotion understanding in preschool children with mild-to-severe hearing loss

Pathways through Adolescenc

Social skills in preschool children with unilateral and mild bilateral hearing loss

Pathways through Adolescenc

An assessment of the resolution limitation due to radiation-damage in x-ray diffraction microscopy

X-ray diffraction microscopy (XDM) is a new form of x-ray imaging that is being practiced at several third-generation synchrotron-radiation x-ray facilities. Although only five years have elapsed since the technique was first introduced, it has made rapid progress in demonstrating high-resolution threedimensional imaging and promises few-nm resolution with much larger samples than can be imaged in the transmission electron microscope. Both life- and materials-science applications of XDM are intended, and it is expected that the principal limitation to resolution will be radiation damage for life science and the coherent power of available x-ray sources for material science. In this paper we address the question of the role of radiation damage. We use a statistical analysis based on the so-called "dose fractionation theorem" of Hegerl and Hoppe to calculate the dose needed to make an image of a lifescience sample by XDM with a given resolution. We conclude that the needed dose scales with the inverse fourth power of the resolution and present experimental evidence to support this finding. To determine the maximum tolerable dose we have assembled a number of data taken from the literature plus some measurements of our own which cover ranges of resolution that are not well covered by reports in the literature. The tentative conclusion of this study is that XDM should be able to image frozen-hydrated protein samples at a resolution of about 10 nm with "Rose-criterion" image quality.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Spanning forests and the q-state Potts model in the limit q \to 0

We study the q-state Potts model with nearest-neighbor coupling v=e^{\beta J}-1 in the limit q,v \to 0 with the ratio w = v/q held fixed. Combinatorially, this limit gives rise to the generating polynomial of spanning forests; physically, it provides information about the Potts-model phase diagram in the neighborhood of (q,v) = (0,0). We have studied this model on the square and triangular lattices, using a transfer-matrix approach at both real and complex values of w. For both lattices, we have computed the symbolic transfer matrices for cylindrical strips of widths 2 \le L \le 10, as well as the limiting curves of partition-function zeros in the complex w-plane. For real w, we find two distinct phases separated by a transition point w=w_0, where w_0 = -1/4 (resp. w_0 = -0.1753 \pm 0.0002) for the square (resp. triangular) lattice. For w > w_0 we find a non-critical disordered phase, while for w < w_0 our results are compatible with a massless Berker-Kadanoff phase with conformal charge c = -2 and leading thermal scaling dimension x_{T,1} = 2 (marginal operator). At w = w_0 we find a "first-order critical point": the first derivative of the free energy is discontinuous at w_0, while the correlation length diverges as w \downarrow w_0 (and is infinite at w = w_0). The critical behavior at w = w_0 seems to be the same for both lattices and it differs from that of the Berker-Kadanoff phase: our results suggest that the conformal charge is c = -1, the leading thermal scaling dimension is x_{T,1} = 0, and the critical exponents are \nu = 1/d = 1/2 and \alpha = 1.Comment: 131 pages (LaTeX2e). Includes tex file, three sty files, and 65 Postscript figures. Also included are Mathematica files forests_sq_2-9P.m and forests_tri_2-9P.m. Final journal versio

Finite-Temperature Transport in Finite-Size Hubbard Rings in the Strong-Coupling Limit

We study the current, the curvature of levels, and the finite temperature charge stiffness, D(T,L), in the strongly correlated limit, U>>t, for Hubbard rings of L sites, with U the on-site Coulomb repulsion and t the hopping integral. Our study is done for finite-size systems and any band filling. Up to order t we derive our results following two independent approaches, namely, using the solution provided by the Bethe ansatz and the solution provided by an algebraic method, where the electronic operators are represented in a slave-fermion picture. We find that, in the U=\infty case, the finite-temperature charge stiffness is finite for electronic densities, n, smaller than one. These results are essencially those of spinless fermions in a lattice of size L, apart from small corrections coming from a statistical flux, due to the spin degrees of freedom. Up to order t, the Mott-Hubbard gap is \Delta_{MH}=U-4t, and we find that D(T) is finite for n<1, but is zero at half-filling. This result comes from the effective flux felt by the holon excitations, which, due to the presence of doubly occupied sites, is renormalized to \Phi^{eff}=\phi(N_h-N_d)/(N_d+N_h), and which is zero at half-filling, with N_d and N_h being the number of doubly occupied and empty lattice sites, respectively. Further, for half-filling, the current transported by any eigenstate of the system is zero and, therefore, D(T) is also zero.Comment: 15 pages and 6 figures; accepted for PR

Development of late blight resistant potatoes by cisgenic stacking

Background Phytophthora infestans, causing late blight in potato, remains one of the most devastating pathogens in potato production and late blight resistance is a top priority in potato breeding. The introduction of multiple resistance (R) genes with different spectra from crossable species into potato varieties is required. Cisgenesis is a promising approach that introduces native genes from the crops own gene pool using GM technology, thereby retaining favourable characteristics of established varieties. Results We pursued a cisgenesis approach to introduce two broad spectrum potato late blight R genes, Rpi-sto1 and Rpi-vnt1.1 from the crossable species Solanum stoloniferum and Solanum venturii, respectively, into three different potato varieties. First, single R gene-containing transgenic plants were produced for all varieties to be used as references for the resistance levels and spectra to be expected in the respective genetic backgrounds. Next, a construct containing both cisgenic late blight R genes (Rpi-vnt1.1 and Rpi-sto1), but lacking the bacterial kanamycin resistance selection marker (NPTII) was transformed to the three selected potato varieties using Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. Gene transfer events were selected by PCR among regenerated shoots. Through further analyses involving morphological evaluations in the greenhouse, responsiveness to Avr genes and late blight resistance in detached leaf assays, the selection was narrowed down to eight independent events. These cisgenic events were selected because they showed broad spectrum late blight resistance due to the activity of both introduced R genes. The marker-free transformation was compared to kanamycin resistance assisted transformation in terms of T-DNA and vector backbone integration frequency. Also, differences in regeneration time and genotype dependency were evaluated. Conclusions We developed a marker-free transformation pipeline to select potato plants functionally expressing a stack of late blight R genes. Marker-free transformation is less genotype dependent and less prone to vector backbone integration as compared to marker-assisted transformation. Thereby, this study provides an important tool for the successful deployment of R genes in agriculture and contributes to the production of potentially durable late blight resistant potatoes

A Whole-Genome Analysis Framework for Effective Identification of Pathogenic Regulatory Variants in Mendelian Disease

The interpretation of non-coding variants still constitutes a major challenge in the application of whole-genome sequencing in Mendelian disease, especially for single-nucleotide and other small non-coding variants. Here we present Genomiser, an analysis framework that is able not only to score the relevance of variation in the non-coding genome, but also to associate regulatory variants to specific Mendelian diseases. Genomiser scores variants through either existing methods such as CADD or a bespoke machine learning method and combines these with allele frequency, regulatory sequences, chromosomal topological domains, and phenotypic relevance to\ua0discover variants associated to specific Mendelian disorders. Overall, Genomiser is able to identify causal regulatory variants as the\ua0top candidate in 77% of simulated whole genomes, allowing effective detection and discovery of regulatory variants in Mendelian disease

Perspectives in visual imaging for marine biology and ecology: from acquisition to understanding

Durden J, Schoening T, Althaus F, et al. Perspectives in Visual Imaging for Marine Biology and Ecology: From Acquisition to Understanding. In: Hughes RN, Hughes DJ, Smith IP, Dale AC, eds. Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review. 54. Boca Raton: CRC Press; 2016: 1-72

Velocity-space sensitivity of the time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at JET

The velocity-space sensitivities of fast-ion diagnostics are often described by so-called weight functions. Recently, we formulated weight functions showing the velocity-space sensitivity of the often dominant beam-target part of neutron energy spectra. These weight functions for neutron emission spectrometry (NES) are independent of the particular NES diagnostic. Here we apply these NES weight functions to the time-of-flight spectrometer TOFOR at JET. By taking the instrumental response function of TOFOR into account, we calculate time-of-flight NES weight functions that enable us to directly determine the velocity-space sensitivity of a given part of a measured time-of-flight spectrum from TOFOR