Surveillance studies of Lymphocystis disease virus in farmed gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata) by real-time PCR

Lymphocystis disease (LCD) is the main viral infection reported to affect cultured gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata) in Southern Atlantic and Mediterranean aquaculture. Its etiological agent is the Lymphocystis disease virus (LCDV), a member of the family Iridoviridae (genus Lymphocystivirus). The only adequate measures for LCD prevention in the aquaculture systems are general prophylactic practices, such as the control of fish to be introduced in the farm facilities in order to detect carrier fish. These animals may pose a risk for the introduction of LCDV in fish farms, as direct contact between fish specimens is considered the main route of LCDV spreading. More recently, asymptomatic carrier breeders, as well as virus contaminated-live food, have been involved in LCDV transmission to fish larvae. The detection of subclinical viral infections in carrier fish requires the use of sensitive diagnostic methods. In this context, the objective of this study was to establish the applicability of a real-time PCR assay for LCDV diagnosis in surveillance studies. In addition, the assay has been evaluated with samples from a gilthead seabream hatchery, in order to prove its utility to trace the origin of LCDV in fish farms. Juvenile fish were collected at four farms with different background regarding to LCD. LCDV was detected in all farms, and 30 to 100% of fish were identified as LCDV-infected. Estimated viral load in caudal fin of asymptomatic fish was two to five orders of magnitude lower than in diseased fish. Carrier fish were also identified in the broodstock from a farm with LCD records by analysing caudal fin samples by qPCR. In this farm, the q-PCR assay developed in this study allowed the quantitative detection of LCDV in all samples collected in the hatchery, including fertilized eggs, larvae and fingerlings, and also rotifer cultures and artemia metanauplii and cysts used for larval rearing.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Course of infection with Lymphocystis disease virus in gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata)

Lymphocystis disease virus (LCDV) is the etiological agent of lymphocystis disease (LCD), a pathology that affects a wide variety of fish species. Data about LCDV pathogenesis are very short, and mainly limited to histopathological studies of skin lesions. Recent studies on viral genome detection (both by PCR or DNA-DNA in situ hybridization) suggest that LCDV establish a systemic and persistent infection in gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata), but further studies are necessary to prove if this infection is productive or not. In the present study viral quantification and viral mRNA detection (by qPCR and RT-qPCR) have been used to investigate LCDV multiplication in different organs of juvenile gilthead seabream. In addition, a histopathological study was carried out. Animals were collected from two commercial farms in Southwestern Spain. In one farm, where no LCD outbreaks have been recorded, apparently healthy fish were collected, whereas in the other farm, diseased and recovered (two months after LCD symptoms disappearance) fish were sampled. All the animals were LCDV-infected, and viral gene expression was detected in every organ analysed (caudal fin, intestine, liver, spleen, kidney and brain). In asymptomatic animals, both apparently healthy and recovered, a low-titre infection was observed, with the highest viral copy numbers detected in brain and kidney. In diseased fish, viral loads were significantly higher than in subclinical infected animals, being maximal in caudal fin, where lymphocysts were present in the dermis. Different histological alterations were observed in the internal organs from diseased fish analysed, although no hypertrophied cells were detected in any of them. In recovered fish, most of the organs examined presented similar histological features to those in healthy animals. Thus, pathological changes were only detected in the intestine and liver, although they were less severe than those observed in diseased fish. The results presented showed that LCDV establishes a systemic infection in juvenile gilthead seabream, which can be subclinical. In addition, although the disease is self-limiting, the virus is not removed after disease recovery, but produces a persistent infection.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Spatial chaos of an extensible conducting rod in a uniform magnetic field

The equilibrium equations for the isotropic Kirchhoff rod are known to form an integrable system. It is also known that the effects of extensibility and shearability of the rod do not break the integrable structure. Nor, as we have shown in a previous paper does the effect of a magnetic field on a conducting rod. Here we show, by means of Mel'nikov analysis, that, remarkably, the combined effects do destroy integrability; that is, the governing equations for an extensible current-carrying rod in a uniform magnetic field are nonintegrable. This result has implications for possible configurations of electrodynamic space tethers and may be relevant for electromechanical devices

Water demand estimation and outlier detection from smart meter data using classification and Big Data methods

Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) systems are being deployed in many cities to obtain insight into the status and the behavior of District Metering Area (DMA) with more granularity. Until now, the water consumption readings of the population were taken one per month or one each two-months. In contrast, AMR systems provide hourly readings for households and more frequent readings for big consumers. On the one hand, this paper aims at predicting water demand and detect suspicious behaviors – e.g. a leak, a smart meter break down or even a fraud – by extracting water consumption patterns. On the other hand, the main contribution of this paper, a software framework, based on Big Data techniques, is presented to tackle the barriers of traditional data storage and data analysis since the volume of AMR data collected by Water Utilities is enormous and it is continuously growing because this technology is expanding .Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Can Andean Potato be agronomically biofortified with iron and zinc fertilizers?

This field research shows that application of Zn fertilizers or Zn-enriched NPK fertilizers offers a prompt solution to increasing the Zn concentration in Andean potato tubers, and represents a useful complementary approach to on-going breeding programs. The diploid Chaucha cultivars that showed high tuber Zn concentrations in the absence of Zn fertilization also showed correspondingly higher Zn concentration in tubers following foliar and soil applied Zn. High levels of Zn in potato tubers may significantly improve the diets of Zn-deficient populations with high intake of potato and contribute to better nutritio

Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Cardiovascular MR Segmentation in Congenital Heart Disease

We propose an automatic method using dilated convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for segmentation of the myocardium and blood pool in cardiovascular MR (CMR) of patients with congenital heart disease (CHD). Ten training and ten test CMR scans cropped to an ROI around the heart were provided in the MICCAI 2016 HVSMR challenge. A dilated CNN with a receptive field of 131x131 voxels was trained for myocardium and blood pool segmentation in axial, sagittal and coronal image slices. Performance was evaluated within the HVSMR challenge. Automatic segmentation of the test scans resulted in Dice indices of 0.80$\pm$0.06 and 0.93$\pm$0.02, average distances to boundaries of 0.96$\pm$0.31 and 0.89$\pm$0.24 mm, and Hausdorff distances of 6.13$\pm$3.76 and 7.07$\pm$3.01 mm for the myocardium and blood pool, respectively. Segmentation took 41.5$\pm$14.7 s per scan. In conclusion, dilated CNNs trained on a small set of CMR images of CHD patients showing large anatomical variability provide accurate myocardium and blood pool segmentations

Ubiquitin carboxyl-terminal hydrolases are required for period maintenance of the circadian clock at high temperature in Arabidopsis

Protein ubiquitylation participates in a number of essential cellular processes including signal transduction and transcription, often by initiating the degradation of specific substrates through the 26S proteasome. Within the ubiquitin-proteasome system, deubiquitylating enzymes (DUBs) not only help generate and maintain the supply of free ubiquitin monomers, they also directly control functions and activities of specific target proteins by modulating the pool of ubiquitylated species. Ubiquitin carboxyl-terminal hydrolases (UCHs) belong to an enzymatic subclass of DUBs, and are represented by three members in Arabidopsis, UCH1, UCH2 and UCH3. UCH1 and UCH2 influence auxin-dependent developmental pathways in Arabidopsis through their deubiquitylation activities, whereas biological and enzymatic functions of UCH3 remain unclear. Here, we demonstrate that Arabidopsis UCH3 acts to maintain the period of the circadian clock at high temperatures redundantly with UCH1 and UCH2. Whereas single uch1, uch2 and uch3 mutants have weak circadian phenotypes, the triple uch mutant displays a drastic lengthening of period at high temperatures that is more extreme than the uch1 uch2 double mutant. UCH3 also possesses a broad deubiquitylation activity against a range of substrates that link ubiquitin via peptide and isopeptide linkages. While the protein target(s) of UCH1-3 are not yet known, we propose that these DUBs act on one or more factors that control period length of the circadian clock through removal of their bound ubiquitin moieties, thus ensuring that the clock oscillates with a proper period even at elevated temperature

Theoretical study of neutrino-induced coherent pion production off nuclei at T2K and MiniBooNE energies

We have developed a model for neutrino-induced coherent pion production off nuclei in the energy regime of interest for present and forthcoming neutrino oscillation experiments. It is based on a microscopic model for pion production off the nucleon that, besides the dominant Delta pole contribution, takes into account the effect of background terms required by chiral symmetry. Moreover, the model uses a reduced nucleon-to-Delta resonance axial coupling, which leads to coherent pion production cross sections around a factor two smaller than most of the previous theoretical estimates. In the coherent production, the main nuclear effects, namely medium corrections on the Delta propagator and the final pion distortion, are included. We have improved on previous similar models by taking into account the nucleon motion and employing a more sophisticated optical potential. As found in previous calculations the modification of the Delta self-energy inside the nuclear medium strongly reduces the cross section, while the final pion distortion mainly shifts the peak position to lower pion energies. The angular distribution profiles are not much affected by nuclear effects. Nucleon motion increases the cross section by 15% at neutrino energies of 650 MeV, while Coulomb effects on charged pions are estimated to be small. Finally, we discuss at length the deficiencies of the Rein-Sehgal pion coherent production model for neutrino energies below 2 GeV, and in particular for the MiniBooNE and T2K experiments. We also predict flux averaged cross sections for these two latter experiments and K2K.Comment: 19 latex pages, 10 figures, 2 tables. Minor changes. Version accepted for publication in Physical Review

Integrability of a conducting elastic rod in a magnetic field

We consider the equilibrium equations for a conducting elastic rod placed in a uniform magnetic field, motivated by the problem of electrodynamic space tethers. When expressed in body coordinates the equations are found to sit in a hierarchy of non-canonical Hamiltonian systems involving an increasing number of vector fields. These systems, which include the classical Euler and Kirchhoff rods, are shown to be completely integrable in the case of a transversely isotropic rod; they are in fact generated by a Lax pair. For the magnetic rod this gives a physical interpretation to a previously proposed abstract nine-dimensional integrable system. We use the conserved quantities to reduce the equations to a four-dimensional canonical Hamiltonian system, allowing the geometry of the phase space to be investigated through Poincar\'e sections. In the special case where the force in the rod is aligned with the magnetic field the system turns out to be superintegrable, meaning that the phase space breaks down completely into periodic orbits, corresponding to straight twisted rods.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur