Europe, listen and respond. Enhancing the European Commission´s online public consultation tool.

Fac. de Ciencias de la InformaciónFALSEpu

Covid-19 Impact on higher education. Comparative analysis of the Europaeum member universities. Report 2020.

Fac. de Ciencias de la InformaciónFALSEpu

Current status of the Spectrograph System for the SuMIRe/PFS

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a new facility instrument for Subaru Telescope which will be installed in around 2017. It is a multi-object spectrograph fed by about 2400 fibers placed at the prime focus covering a hexagonal field-of-view with 1.35 deg diagonals and capable of simultaneously obtaining data of spectra with wavelengths ranging from 0.38 um to 1.26 um. The spectrograph system is composed of four identical modules each receiving the light from 600 fibers. Each module incorporates three channels covering the wavelength ranges 0.38-0.65 mu ("Blue"), 0.63-0.97 mu ("Red"), and 0.94-1.26 mu ("NIR") respectively; with resolving power which progresses fairly smoothly from about 2000 in the blue to about 4000 in the infrared. An additional spectral mode allows reaching a spectral resolution of 5000 at 0.8mu (red). The proposed optical design is based on a Schmidt collimator facing three Schmidt cameras (one per spectral channel). This architecture is very robust, well known and documented. It allows for high image quality with only few simple elements (high throughput) at the expense of the central obscuration, which leads to larger optics. Each module has to be modular in its design to allow for integration and tests and for its safe transport up to the telescope: this is the main driver for the mechanical design. In particular, each module will be firstly fully integrated and validated at LAM (France) before it is shipped to Hawaii. All sub-assemblies will be indexed on the bench to allow for their accurate repositioning. This paper will give an overview of the spectrograph system which has successfully passed the Critical Design Review (CDR) in 2014 March and which is now in the construction phase.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, submitted to "Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, Suzanne K. Ramsay, Ian S. McLean, Hideki Takami, Editors, Proc. SPIE 9147 (2014)

Fast automated placement of polar hydrogen atoms in protein-ligand complexes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Hydrogen bonds play a major role in the stabilization of protein-ligand complexes. The ability of a functional group to form them depends on the position of its hydrogen atoms. An accurate knowledge of the positions of hydrogen atoms in proteins is therefore important to correctly identify hydrogen bonds and their properties. The high mobility of hydrogen atoms introduces several degrees of freedom: Tautomeric states, where a hydrogen atom alters its binding partner, torsional changes where the position of the hydrogen atom is rotated around the last heavy-atom bond in a residue, and protonation states, where the number of hydrogen atoms at a functional group may change. Also, side-chain flips in glutamine and asparagine and histidine residues, which are common crystallographic ambiguities must be identified before structure-based calculations can be conducted.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have implemented a method to determine the most probable hydrogen atom positions in a given protein-ligand complex. Optimality of hydrogen bond geometries is determined by an empirical scoring function which is used in molecular docking. This allows to evaluate protein-ligand interactions with an established model. Also, our method allows to resolve common crystallographic ambiguities such as as flipped amide groups and histidine residues. To ensure high speed, we make use of a dynamic programming approach.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results were checked against selected high-resolution structures from an external dataset, for which the positions of the hydrogen atoms have been validated manually. The quality of our results is comparable to that of other programs, with the advantage of being fast enough to be applied on-the-fly for interactive usage or during score evaluation.</p

Slx8 removes Pli1-dependent protein-SUMO conjugates including SUMOylated Topoisomerase I to promote genome stability

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

SUBARU prime focus spectrograph: integration, testing and performance for the first spectrograph

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) of the Subaru Measurement of Images and Redshifts (SuMIRe) project for Subaru telescope consists in four identical spectrographs fed by 600 fibers each. Each spectrograph is composed by an optical entrance unit that creates a collimated beam and distributes the light to three channels, two visibles and one near infrared. This paper presents the on-going effort for the tests & integration process for the first spectrograph channel: we have developed a detailed Assembly Integration and Test (AIT) plan, as well as the methods, detailed processes and I&T tools. We describe the tools we designed to assemble the parts and to test the performance of the spectrograph. We also report on the thermal acceptance tests we performed on the first visible camera unit. We also report on and discuss the technical difficulties that did appear during this integration phase. Finally, we detail the important logistic process that is require to transport the components from other country to Marseille

Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) for the Subaru Telescope: Overview, recent progress, and future perspectives

PFS (Prime Focus Spectrograph), a next generation facility instrument on the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope, is a very wide-field, massively multiplexed, optical and near-infrared spectrograph. Exploiting the Subaru prime focus, 2394 reconfigurable fibers will be distributed over the 1.3 deg field of view. The spectrograph has been designed with 3 arms of blue, red, and near-infrared cameras to simultaneously observe spectra from 380nm to 1260nm in one exposure at a resolution of ~1.6-2.7A. An international collaboration is developing this instrument under the initiative of Kavli IPMU. The project is now going into the construction phase aiming at undertaking system integration in 2017-2018 and subsequently carrying out engineering operations in 2018-2019. This article gives an overview of the instrument, current project status and future paths forward.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures. Proceeding of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 201

Paving the way for research findings: writers' rhetorical choices in education and applied linguistics

Notwithstanding the existence of previous investigations into how research results are presented in different academic disciplines, fewer studies have looked into how authors pave the way for their results, the interdisciplinary differences in ‘result pavements’, and the interconnections between their communicative functions and linguistic choices. Using the techniques of genre analysis, I have analyzed two corpora of research reports in applied linguistics and education in order to identify the possible ways in which experienced writers schematically pave the way for their findings. Using evidence based on authentic research articles, this study demonstrates how writers set the stage for their research results by (i) demonstrating their control of the structure and flow of result-related information, (ii) connecting past research with a current finding while furnishing pertinent background elements that lead the readership progressively to specific findings, (iii) regenerating readers’ interest in their initial research purposes, and (iv) deploying locatives to embed results in a ‘space-saving strategy’ aimed at presenting an abridged Results section. I have also analyzed interdisciplinary differences in the frequencies of these rhetorical steps and the range of intricate linguistic mechanisms employed by authors as communicative resources in each step to establish a smooth rhetorical transition that sets the stage for their research results

Histone Variants and Their Post-Translational Modifications in Primary Human Fat Cells

Epigenetic changes related to human disease cannot be fully addressed by studies of cells from cultures or from other mammals. We isolated human fat cells from subcutaneous abdominal fat tissue of female subjects and extracted histones from either purified nuclei or intact cells. Direct acid extraction of whole adipocytes was more efficient, yielding about 100 µg of protein with histone content of 60% –70% from 10 mL of fat cells. Differential proteolysis of the protein extracts by trypsin or ArgC-protease followed by nanoLC/MS/MS with alternating CID/ETD peptide sequencing identified 19 histone variants. Four variants were found at the protein level for the first time; particularly HIST2H4B was identified besides the only H4 isoform earlier known to be expressed in humans. Three of the found H2A potentially organize small nucleosomes in transcriptionally active chromatin, while two H2AFY variants inactivate X chromosome in female cells. HIST1H2BA and three of the identified H1 variants had earlier been described only as oocyte or testis specific histones. H2AFX and H2AFY revealed differential and variable N-terminal processing. Out of 78 histone modifications by acetylation/trimethylation, methylation, dimethylation, phosphorylation and ubiquitination, identified from six subjects, 68 were found for the first time. Only 23 of these modifications were detected in two or more subjects, while all the others were individual specific. The direct acid extraction of adipocytes allows for personal epigenetic analyses of human fat tissue, for profiling of histone modifications related to obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome, as well as for selection of individual medical treatments