6,981 research outputs found
Investigation of factors in improving Agrobacterium-mediated gene transfer in Ruellia tuberosa L. and evaluation of α-glucosidase inhibitory activity in established hairy roots
Ruellia tuberosa (family Acanthaceae) is widely known in traditional medicine in Asian countries for the treatment of diabetes and other diseases. Its roots were demonstrated to possess a hypoglycemic ability in diabetic animal models. In this study, an original induced procedure was investigated to establish hairy root (HR) from R. tuberosa. With the aim of increasing the transformation rate, some induced factors (acetosyringone (AS) dosage, type of explant, age, infection time, bacterial density, co-cultivation duration) were individually examined. As a result, an improved procedure was implemented: ten-day-old in vitro cotyledon explants were injured and then immersed in the bacterial suspension (OD600 nm = 0.4) added 200 µM AS during 10 min. The infected explants were co-cultivated for 4 days in the Murashige & Skoog (MS) medium before transferring to the medium containing cefotaxime for bacterial elimination. After thirty days of culture, the improved procedure revealed a synergistic effect by enhancing the rooting rate and number of secondary roots per explant up to 4.4- and 8.0-fold, respectively, in comparison with the original procedure. The R. tuberosa HR was then cultured in liquid MS medium and achieved the highest biomass production at the late exponential growth phase (3rd week). Its ethanol extract was also higher 2.0-fold in α-glucosidase inhibitory activity than that of the natural root. In conclusion, the α-glucosidase inhibitory activity of HR inducing by the improved procedure may offer an effective and reliable substitute for the utilization of this herbal plant
Learning Edge Representations via Low-Rank Asymmetric Projections
We propose a new method for embedding graphs while preserving directed edge
information. Learning such continuous-space vector representations (or
embeddings) of nodes in a graph is an important first step for using network
information (from social networks, user-item graphs, knowledge bases, etc.) in
many machine learning tasks.
Unlike previous work, we (1) explicitly model an edge as a function of node
embeddings, and we (2) propose a novel objective, the "graph likelihood", which
contrasts information from sampled random walks with non-existent edges.
Individually, both of these contributions improve the learned representations,
especially when there are memory constraints on the total size of the
embeddings. When combined, our contributions enable us to significantly improve
the state-of-the-art by learning more concise representations that better
preserve the graph structure.
We evaluate our method on a variety of link-prediction task including social
networks, collaboration networks, and protein interactions, showing that our
proposed method learn representations with error reductions of up to 76% and
55%, on directed and undirected graphs. In addition, we show that the
representations learned by our method are quite space efficient, producing
embeddings which have higher structure-preserving accuracy but are 10 times
smaller
Observable Optimal State Points of Sub-additive Potentials
For a sequence of sub-additive potentials, Dai [Optimal state points of the
sub-additive ergodic theorem, Nonlinearity, 24 (2011), 1565-1573] gave a method
of choosing state points with negative growth rates for an ergodic dynamical
system. This paper generalizes Dai's result to the non-ergodic case, and proves
that under some mild additional hypothesis, one can choose points with negative
growth rates from a positive Lebesgue measure set, even if the system does not
preserve any measure that is absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue
measure.Comment: 16 pages. This work was reported in the summer school in Nanjing
University. In this second version we have included some changes suggested by
the referee. The final version will appear in Discrete and Continuous
Dynamical Systems- Series A - A.I.M. Sciences and will be available at
http://aimsciences.org/journals/homeAllIssue.jsp?journalID=
Development of silicon interposer: towards an ultralow radioactivity background photodetector system
It is of great importance to develop a photodetector system with an ultralow
radioactivity background in rare event searches. Silicon photomultipliers
(SiPMs) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are two ideal
candidates for low background photosensors and readout electronics,
respectively, because they are mainly composed of silicon, which can achieve
good radio-purity without considerable extra effort. However, interposers, used
to provide mechanical support and signal routes between the photosensor and the
electronics, are a bottleneck in building ultralow background photodetectors.
Silicon and quartz are two candidates to construct the low background
interposer because of their good radio-purity; nevertheless, it is non-trivial
to produce through silicon vias (TSV) or through quartz vias (TQV) on the large
area silicon or quartz wafer. In this work, based on double-sided TSV
interconnect technology, we developed the first prototype of a silicon
interposer with a size of 10~cm10~cm and a thickness of 320~m. The
electrical properties of the interposer are carefully evaluated at room
temperature, and its performance is also examined at -110~C with an
integrated SiPM on the interposer. The testing results reveal quite promising
performance of the prototype, and the single photoelectron signals can be
clearly observed from the SiPM. The features of the observed signals are
comparable with those from the SiPM mounted on a normal FR4-based PCB. Based on
the success of the silicon interposer prototype, we started the follow-up
studies that aimed to further improve the performance and yield of the silicon
interposer, and eventually to provide a solution for building an ultralow
background photodetector system
Novel frataxin isoforms may contribute to the pathological mechanism of friedreich ataxia
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.Friedreich ataxia (FRDA) is an inherited neurodegenerative disease caused by frataxin (FXN) deficiency. The nervous system and heart are the most severely affected tissues. However, highly mitochondria-dependent tissues, such as kidney and liver, are not obviously affected, although the abundance of FXN is normally high in these tissues. In this study we have revealed two novel FXN isoforms (II and III), which are specifically expressed in affected cerebellum and heart tissues, respectively, and are functional in vitro and in vivo. Increasing the abundance of the heart-specific isoform III significantly increased the mitochondrial aconitase activity, while over-expression of the cerebellum-specific isoform II protected against oxidative damage of Fe-S cluster-containing aconitase. Further, we observed that the protein level of isoform III decreased in FRDA patient heart, while the mRNA level of isoform II decreased more in FRDA patient cerebellum compared to total FXN mRNA. Our novel findings are highly relevant to understanding the mechanism of tissue-specific pathology in FRDA.This work was supported by the intramural program of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, and in part by Friedreich ataxia research association; by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (No. 31071085), by the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry, and by State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology (No. ZZYJ-SN-201006). Zvonimir Marelja was supported by a grant from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst scholarship. Additional support was obtained from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Grant SL1171/5-3
Superconductivity up to 30 K in the vicinity of quantum critical point in BaFe(AsP)
We report bulk superconductivity induced by an isovalent doping of phosphorus
in BaFe(AsP). The P-for-As substitution results in
shrinkage of lattice, especially for the FeAs block layers. The resistivity
anomaly associated with the spin-density-wave (SDW) transition in the undoped
compound is gradually suppressed by the P doping. Superconductivity with the
maximum of 30 K emerges at =0.32, coinciding with a magnetic quantum
critical point (QCP) which is evidenced by the disappearance of SDW order and
the linear temperature-dependent resistivity in the normal state. The
values were found to decrease with further P doping, and no superconductivity
was observed down to 2 K for 0.77. The appearance of superconductivity
in the vicinity of QCP hints to the superconductivity mechanism in iron-based
arsenides.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures; more data; to appear in Journal of Physics:
Condensed Matte
Superconductivity in LaFeAsPO: effect of chemical pressures and bond covalency
We report the realization of superconductivity by an isovalent doping with
phosphorus in LaFeAsO. X-ray diffraction shows that, with the partial
substitution of P for As, the FeAs layers are squeezed while the
LaO layers are stretched along the c-axis. Electrical resistance and
magnetization measurements show emergence of bulk superconductivity at 10
K for the optimally-doped LaFeAsPO (). The upper
critical fields at zero temperature is estimated to be 27 T, much higher than
that of the LaFePO superconductor. The occurrence of superconductivity is
discussed in terms of chemical pressures and bond covalency.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, more data presente
Investigating Off-shell Stability of Anti-de Sitter Space in String Theory
We propose an investigation of stability of vacua in string theory by
studying their stability with respect to a (suitable) world-sheet
renormalization group (RG) flow. We prove geometric stability of (Euclidean)
anti-de Sitter (AdS) space (i.e., ) with respect to the simplest
RG flow in closed string theory, the Ricci flow. AdS space is not a fixed point
of Ricci flow. We therefore choose an appropriate flow for which it is a fixed
point, prove a linear stability result for AdS space with respect to this flow,
and then show this implies its geometric stability with respect to Ricci flow.
The techniques used can be generalized to RG flows involving other fields. We
also discuss tools from the mathematics of geometric flows that can be used to
study stability of string vacua.Comment: 29 pages, references added in this version to appear in Classical and
Quantum Gravit
Three heavy jet events at hadron colliders as a sensitive probe of the Higgs sector
Assuming that a non-standard neutral Higgs with an enhanced Yukawa coupling
to a bottom quark is observed at future hadron experiments, we propose a method
for a better understanding of the Higgs sector. Our procedure is based on
"counting" the number of events with heavy jets (where "heavy" stands for a c
or b jet) versus b jets, in the final state of processes in which the Higgs is
produced in association with a single high p_T c or b jet. We show that an
observed signal of the type proposed, at either the Tevatron or the LHC, will
rule out the popular two Higgs doublet model of type II as well as its
supersymmetric version - the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), and
may provide new evidence in favor of some more exotic multi Higgs scenarios. As
an example, we show that in a version of a two Higgs doublet model which
naturally accounts for the large mass of the top quark, our signal can be
easily detected at the LHC within that framework. We also find that such a
signal may be observable at the upgraded Tevatron RunIII, if the neutral Higgs
in this model has a mass around 100 GeV and \tan\beta > 50 and if the
efficiency for distinguishing a c jet from a light jet will reach the level of
50%.Comment: Revtex, 11 pages, 4 figures embedded in the text. Main changes with
respect to Version 1: Numerical results re-calculated using the CTEQ5L pdf,
improved discussion on the experimental consequences, new references added.
Conclusions remain unchanged. As will appear in Phys. Rev.
Constructing N-soliton solution for the mKdV equation through constrained flows
Based on the factorization of soliton equations into two commuting integrable
x- and t-constrained flows, we derive N-soliton solutions for mKdV equation via
its x- and t-constrained flows. It shows that soliton solution for soliton
equations can be constructed directly from the constrained flows.Comment: 10 pages, Latex, to be published in "J. Phys. A: Math. Gen.
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