Design and construction of the MicroBooNE detector

This paper describes the design and construction of the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber and associated systems. MicroBooNE is the first phase of the Short Baseline Neutrino program, located at Fermilab, and will utilize the capabilities of liquid argon detectors to examine a rich assortment of physics topics. In this document details of design specifications, assembly procedures, and acceptance tests are reported

Status And Prospects of the BaBar SVT

The BABAR Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) has been efficiently operated for five years since the start of data taking in 1999. It has met design requirements and no degradation in its performance has been observed thus far. However, because of higher than expected background levels, and anticipated further increases in luminosity and dose rates, we have done a thorough study to assess the viability of operating the SVT until the end of the decade

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Transferring potyvirus coat protein genes through hybridization of transgenic plants to produce plum pox virus resistant plums (Prunus domestica L.)

International audienc

Structure of 2,4-Diaminopyrimidine-Theobromine Alternate Base Pairs

We report the structure of dusters of 2,4-diaminopyrimidine with 3,7-dimethylxanthine (theobromine) in the gas phase determined by IR-UV double resonance spectroscopy in both the near-IR and mid-IR regions in combination with ab initio computations. These clusters represent potential alternate nucleobase pairs, geometrically equivalent to guanine cytosine. We have found the four lowest energy structures, which include the Watson Crick base pairing motif. This Watson Crick structure has not been observed by resonant two-photon ionization (R2PI) in the gas phase for the canonical DNA base pairs

Biotechnological advances in the genetic improvement of <em>Prunus domestica</em>

Plum producers world-wide are facing multiple challenges including climate change, reductions in available labor, the need for reduced chemical inputs, the spread of native and exotic pests and pathogens, and consumer demands for improved fruit quality and health benefits. Meeting these challenges will require innovation in many areas of science and technology and especially in plum breeding. In an effort to develop new approaches to plum improvement the USDA-ARS Appalachian Fruit Research Station fruit breeding program in collaboration with partners in the U. S. and Europe have developed a genetic engineering (GE) approach to target resistance to Plum pox virus (PPV) the causal agent of sharka, one of the most destructive diseases of plum. This program has resulted in the development of a GE plum cultivar 'HoneySweet' which has been tested for 15 years in the European Union and in the U. S. and is highly resistant to PPV. 'HoneySweet' has received full regulatory approval in the U. S. 'HoneySweet' represents a new source of PPV resistance for growers and it can be used by breeders to develop additional resistant cultivars and/or rootstocks. Rapidly incorporating important traits into improved plum cultivars requires new approaches to breeding that can reduce or eliminate breeding limitations such as long juvenility periods; the need for extensive and costly breeding plots; and yearly limitations on flowering and fruiting related to seasonal dormancy. To address these limitations the USDA group and partners in the U. S. have developed a system to shorten the breeding cycle of plum. We have overcome the juvenility and environmental limitations of flowering and fruiting by incorporating a gene that induces trees to flower early and continually. We have reduced the plum generation cycle from 3-7 years to less than one year. We call this rapid breeding system "FasTrack". The system allows for the rapid incorporation of important traits into plums and then in the final generation, when substantial improvements are clearly evident, only seedlings that do not contain the early flowering transgene are selected. The selected trees may then be used directly as new cultivars, or improved lines for further breeding. Genetic engineering of important traits, FasTrack breeding, and other approaches that are under development will allow the latest advances in biology to be applied to improving and sustaining plum production