Sorption hysteresis in wood and its coupling to swelling: a new modelling approach

Sorption hysteresis of amorphous cellulose is studied. Cellulose, as a renewable organic biopolymer, is an essential component of various natural composites such as wood. A coupling process between sorption and deformation leads to the hysteresis as observed in sorption and swelling, both experimental and simulated for cellulose and wood in general

Current Estimates of Soil Organic Carbon Stocks Are Not Four to Six Times Underestimated. Comment on "Non-Flat Earth Recalibrated for Terrain and Topsoil. Soil Syst. 2018, 2, 64"

In the interesting paper "Non-Flat Earth Recalibrated for Terrain and Topsoil" published in Soil Systems [...

Understanding swelling of wood through multiscale modeling

Wood is a well-used building material where the capacity of wood to absorb water leads to swelling and reduced mechanical properties, and also to questions of durability. The origin of the hygroscopic behavior of wood lies at the nanoscale material that composes its cell walls. Using atomistic modeling, we study the hygromechanical behavior of the different polymeric components of wood, separately and in aggregate configurations. We report the coupled effects of water sorption on the hygric and mechanical properties of the S2 cell wall layer and we upscale the findings using a poromechanical framework

UBP12 and UBP13 negatively regulate the activity of the ubiquitin-dependent peptidases DA1, DAR1 and DAR2

Protein ubiquitination is a very diverse post-translational modification leading to protein degradation or delocalization, or altering protein activity. In Arabidopsis thaliana, two E3 ligases, BIG BROTHER (BB) and DA2, activate the latent peptidases DA1, DAR1 and DAR2 by mono-ubiquitination at multiple sites. Subsequently, these activated peptidases destabilize various positive regulators of growth. Here, we show that two ubiquitin-specific proteases, UBP12 and UBP13, deubiquitinate DA1, DAR1 and DAR2, hence reducing their peptidase activity. Overexpression of UBP12 or UBP13 strongly decreased leaf size and cell area, and resulted in lower ploidy levels. Mutants in which UBP12 and UBP13 were downregulated produced smaller leaves that contained fewer and smaller cells. Remarkably, neither UBP12 nor UBP13 were found to be cleavage substrates of the activated DA1. Our results therefore suggest that UBP12 and UBP13 work upstream of DA1, DAR1 and DAR2 to restrict their protease activity and hence fine-tune plant growth and development

An efficient interpolation for calculation of the response of composite layered material and its implementation in MUSIC imaging

2 pagesInternational audienceThere is always the need to calculate the response of a layered composite material to a source that is not close to the domain of interest when dealing with the imaging of an anomaly that might be affecting such a background medium. If this medium is anisotropic, the availability of an efficient and accurate method to calculate this response becomes essential. A novel interpolation and integration method that is taking care of fast oscillating spectral response due to a source that is not close to the domain of interest is proposed herein. The implementation of such a technique to the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) imaging method is presented also

Numerical simulation of spreading drops

We consider a liquid drop that spreads on a wettable surface. Different time evolutions have been observed for the base radius r depending of the relative role played by inertia, viscosity, surface tension and the wetting condition. Numerical simulations were performed to discuss the relative effect of these parameters on the spreading described by the evolution of the base radius r(t) and the spreading time tS. Different power law evolutions r(t) ∝ tⁿ have been observed when varying the parameters. At the early stage of the spreading, the power law t½ (n = 1/2) is observed as long as capillarity is balanced by inertia at the contact line. When increasing the viscosity contribution, the exponent n is found to increase despite the increase of the spreading time. The effect of the surface wettability is observed for liquids more viscous than water. For a small contact angle, the power law t½ is then followed by the famous Tanner law t1/10 once the drop shape has reached a spherical cap

From oblique accretion to transpression in the evolution of the Altaid collage: New insights from West Junggar, northwestern China

International audienceAlong active margins, tectonic features that develop in response to plate convergence are strongly controlled by subduction zone geometry. In West Junggar, a segment of the giant Palaeozoic collage of Central Asia, the West Karamay Unit represents a Carboniferous accretionary complex composed of fore-arc sedimentary rocks and ophiolitic mélanges. The occurrence of quasi-synchronous upright folds and folds with vertical axes suggests that transpression plays a significant role in the tectonic evolution of the West Junggar. Latest Carboniferous (ca. 300 Ma) alkaline plutons postdate this early phase of folding, which was synchronous with accretion of the Carboniferous complex. The Permian Dalabute sinistral fault overprints Carboniferous ductile shearing and split the West Karamay Unit ca. 100 km apart. Oblique convergence may have been provoked by the buckling of the Kazakh orocline and relative rotations between its segments. Depending upon the shape of the convergence zone, either upright folds and fold with vertical axes, or alternatively, strike-slip brittle faults developed in response to strain partitioning. Sinistral brittle faulting may account for the lateral imbrication of units in the West Junggar accretionary complex

A Graph-Theoretic Barcode Ordering Model for Linked-Reads

Considering a set of intervals on the real line, an interval graph records these intervals as nodes and their intersections as edges. Identifying (i.e. merging) pairs of nodes in an interval graph results in a multiple-interval graph. Given only the nodes and the edges of the multiple-interval graph without knowing the underlying intervals, we are interested in the following questions. Can one determine how many intervals correspond to each node? Can one compute a walk over the multiple-interval graph nodes that reflects the ordering of the original intervals? These questions are closely related to linked-read DNA sequencing, where barcodes are assigned to long molecules whose intersection graph forms an interval graph. Each barcode may correspond to multiple molecules, which complicates downstream analysis, and corresponds to the identification of nodes of the corresponding interval graph. Resolving the above graph-theoretic problems would facilitate analyses of linked-reads sequencing data, through enabling the conceptual separation of barcodes into molecules and providing, through the molecules order, a skeleton for accurately assembling the genome. Here, we propose a framework that takes as input an arbitrary intersection graph (such as an overlap graph of barcodes) and constructs a heuristic approximation of the ordering of the original intervals