Identification of biomarker volatile organic compounds released by three stored-grain insect pests in wheat

Monitoring and early detection of stored-grain insect infestation is essential to implement timely and effective pest management decisions to protect stored grains. We report a reliable analytical procedure based on headspace solid-phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (HS-SPME-GC-MS) to assess stored-grain infestation through the detection of volatile compounds emitted by insects. Four different fibre coatings were assessed; 85 µm CAR/PDMS had optimal efficiency in the extraction of analytes from wheat. The headspace profiles of volatile compounds produced by Tribolium castaneum (Herbst), Rhyzopertha dominica (Fabricius), and Sitophilus granarius (Linnaeus), either alone or with wheat, were compared with those of non-infested wheat grains. Qualitative analysis of chromatograms showed the presence of different volatile compound profiles in wheat with pest infestation compared with the wheat controls. Wheat-specific and insect-specific volatile compounds were identified, including the aggregation pheromones, dominicalure-1 and dominicalure-2, from R. dominica, and benzoquinones homologs from T. castaneum. For the first time, the presence of 3-hydroxy-2-butanone was reported from S. granarius, which might function as an alarm pheromone. These identified candidate biomarker compounds can be utilized in insect surveillance and monitoring in stored grain to safeguard our grain products in future

Augmentation of clozapine with ECT: a retrospective case analysis

Objective:We sought to assess the effectiveness of clozapine augmentation with ECT (C+ECT) in patients with clozapine-resistant schizophrenia. Methods:We conducted a retrospective review of electronic health records to identify patients treated with C+ECT. We determined the response to C+ECT and the rate of rehospitalisation over the year following treatment with C+ECT. Results:Forty-two patients were treated with C+ECT over a ten year period. The mean age of the patients at initiation of ECT was 46.3 (SD=8.2) years (range 27-62 years). The mean number of ECTs given was 10.6(SD = 5.3)(Range 3-25) with the majority receiving twice weekly ECT. Seventy six percent of patients (n=32) showed a Clinical Global Impression improvement score (CGI-I) of≤3 (at least minimally improved) following C+ECT. The mean number of ECT treatments was 10.6 (SD = 5.3) (range 3-25) with the majority receiving twice weekly ECT. Sixty four percent of patients experienced no adverse events. Response to C+ECT was not associated with gender, age, duration of illness, or duration of clozapine treatment.Seventy five percent of responders remained out of hospital over the course of one-year follow up, while 70% of those with no response to C+ECT were not admitted to hospital. Three patients received maintenance ECT, one of whom was rehospitalised. Conclusion:This study lends support to emerging evidence for the effectiveness of C+ECT in clozapine resistant schizophrenia. These results are consistent with the results of a meta-analysis and the only randomised controlled trial (RCT) of this intervention. Further RCTs are required before this treatment can be confidently recommended

Unification of Dark Matter and Dark Energy in a Modified Entropic Force Model

In Verlinde's entropic force scenario of gravity, Newton's laws and Einstein equations can be obtained from the first pinciples and general assumptions. However, the equipartition law of energy is invalid at very low temperatures. We show clearly that the threshold of the equipartition law of energy is related with horizon of the universe. Thus, a one-dimension Debye (ODD) model in the direction of radius of the modified entropic force (MEF) maybe suitable in description of the accelerated expanding universe. We present a Friedmann cosmic dynamical model in the ODD-MEF framework. We examine carefully constraints on the ODD-MEF model from the Union2 compilation of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) collaboration, the data from the observation of the large-scale structure (LSS) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB), i.e. SNe Ia+LSS+CMB. The combined numerical analysis gives the best-fit value of the model parameters $\zeta\simeq10^{-9}$ and $\Omega_{m0}=0.224$, with $\chi_{min}^2=591.156$. The corresponding age of the universe agrees with the result of D. Spergel {\it et al.}\cite{Spergel2003} at 95% confidence level. The numerical result also yields an accelerated expanding universe without invoking any kind of dark energy. Taking $\zeta(\equiv 2\pi \omega_D/H_0)$ as a running parameter associated with the structure scale $r$, we obtain a possible unified scenario of the asymptotic flatness of the radial velocity dispersion of spiral galaxies, the accelerated expanding universe and the Pioneer 10/11 anomaly in the entropic force framework of Verlinde.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Outstanding Thermal Conductivity of Single Atomic Layer Isotope-Modified Boron Nitride

Materials with high thermal conductivities (k) is valuable to solve the challenge of waste heat dissipation in highly integrated and miniaturized modern devices. Herein, we report the first synthesis of atomically thin isotopically pure hexagonal boron nitride (BN) and its one of the highest k among all semiconductors and electric insulators. Single atomic layer (1L) BN enriched with 11B has a k up to 1009 W/mK at room temperature. We find that the isotope engineering mainly suppresses the out-of-plane optical (ZO) phonon scatterings in BN, which subsequently reduces acoustic-optical scatterings between ZO and transverse acoustic (TA) and longitudinal acoustic (LA) phonons. On the other hand, reducing the thickness to single atomic layer diminishes the interlayer interactions and hence Umklapp scatterings of the out-of-plane acoustic (ZA) phonons, though this thickness-induced k enhancement is not as dramatic as that in naturally occurring BN. With many of its unique properties, atomically thin monoisotopic BN is promising on heat management in van der Waals (vdW) devices and future flexible electronics. The isotope engineering of atomically thin BN may also open up other appealing applications and opportunities in 2D materials yet to be explored

PLPD: reliable protein localization prediction from imbalanced and overlapped datasets

Subcellular localization is one of the key functional characteristics of proteins. An automatic and efficient prediction method for the protein subcellular localization is highly required owing to the need for large-scale genome analysis. From a machine learning point of view, a dataset of protein localization has several characteristics: the dataset has too many classes (there are more than 10 localizations in a cell), it is a multi-label dataset (a protein may occur in several different subcellular locations), and it is too imbalanced (the number of proteins in each localization is remarkably different). Even though many previous works have been done for the prediction of protein subcellular localization, none of them tackles effectively these characteristics at the same time. Thus, a new computational method for protein localization is eventually needed for more reliable outcomes. To address the issue, we present a protein localization predictor based on D-SVDD (PLPD) for the prediction of protein localization, which can find the likelihood of a specific localization of a protein more easily and more correctly. Moreover, we introduce three measurements for the more precise evaluation of a protein localization predictor. As the results of various datasets which are made from the experiments of Huh et al. (2003), the proposed PLPD method represents a different approach that might play a complimentary role to the existing methods, such as Nearest Neighbor method and discriminate covariant method. Finally, after finding a good boundary for each localization using the 5184 classified proteins as training data, we predicted 138 proteins whose subcellular localizations could not be clearly observed by the experiments of Huh et al. (2003)

Pairing symmetry and properties of iron-based high temperature superconductors

Pairing symmetry is important to indentify the pairing mechanism. The analysis becomes particularly timely and important for the newly discovered iron-based multi-orbital superconductors. From group theory point of view we classified all pairing matrices (in the orbital space) that carry irreducible representations of the system. The quasiparticle gap falls into three categories: full, nodal and gapless. The nodal-gap states show conventional Volovik effect even for on-site pairing. The gapless states are odd in orbital space, have a negative superfluid density and are therefore unstable. In connection to experiments we proposed possible pairing states and implications for the pairing mechanism.Comment: 4 pages, 1 table, 2 figures, polished versio

Consequences of a telomerase-related fitness defect and chromosome substitution technology in yeast synIX strains

We describe the complete synthesis, assembly, debugging, and characterization of a synthetic 404,963 bp chromosome, synIX (synthetic chromosome IX). Combined chromosome construction methods were used to synthesize and integrate its left arm (synIXL) into a strain containing previously described synIXR. We identified and resolved a bug affecting expression of EST3, a crucial gene for telomerase function, producing a synIX strain with near wild-type fitness. To facilitate future synthetic chromosome consolidation and increase flexibility of chromosome transfer between distinct strains, we combined chromoduction, a method to transfer a whole chromosome between two strains, with conditional centromere destabilization to substitute a chromosome of interest for its native counterpart. Both steps of this chromosome substitution method were efficient. We observed that wild-type II tended to co-transfer with synIX and was co-destabilized with wild-type IX, suggesting a potential gene dosage compensation relationship between these chromosomes. </p