Drought Effects on Proanthocyanidins in Sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia Scop.) Are Dependent on the Plant’s Ontogenetic Stage

Sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia Scop.) is a forage legume, which improves animal health and the environmental impact of livestock farming due to its proanthocyanidin content. To identify the impact of drought on acetone/water-extractable proanthocyanidin (PA) concentration and composition in the generative and vegetative stages, a rain exclosure experiment was established. Leaves of 120 plants from 5 different sainfoin accessions were sampled repeatedly and analyzed by UPLC-ESI-MS/MS. The results showed distinct differences in response to drought between vegetative and generative plants. Whereas vegetative plants showed a strong response to drought in growth (−56%) and leaf PA concentration (+46%), generative plants showed no response in growth (−2%) or PA concentration (−9%). The PA composition was stable across environments. The five accessions varied in PA concentrations and composition but showed the same pattern of response to the experimental treatments. These results show that the ontogenetic stage at which drought occurs significantly affects the plant’s response

Leakage current effects on C-V plots of high-k metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitors

With the employment of ultrathin, high dielectric constant gate materials in advanced semiconductor technology, the conventional capacitance-voltage measurement technique exhibits a series of anomalies. In particular, a nonsaturating increase in the accumulation capacitance with reducing measurement frequency is frequently observed, which has not been adequately explained to our knowledge. In this article, the authors provide an explanation for this anomaly and hence set a criterion for the lower bound on measurement frequency. We then present a model which allows the easy extraction of the required parameters and apply it to an experimental set of data

Systematic evaluation of spliced alignment programs for RNA-seq data

High-throughput RNA sequencing is an increasingly accessible method for studying gene structure and activity on a genome-wide scale. A critical step in RNA-seq data analysis is the alignment of partial transcript reads to a reference genome sequence. To assess the performance of current mapping software, we invited developers of RNA-seq aligners to process four large human and mouse RNA-seq data sets. In total, we compared 26 mapping protocols based on 11 programs and pipelines and found major performance differences between methods on numerous benchmarks, including alignment yield, basewise accuracy, mismatch and gap placement, exon junction discovery and suitability of alignments for transcript reconstruction. We observed concordant results on real and simulated RNA-seq data, confirming the relevance of the metrics employed. Future developments in RNA-seq alignment methods would benefit from improved placement of multimapped reads, balanced utilization of existing gene annotation and a reduced false discovery rate for splice junctions