Key Physiological Parameters Related to Differences in Biomass Production of Maize and Four Sorghum Cultivars Under Drought and Free Air CO2 Enrichment

AbstractGiven the future increase in temperature and the decrease in summer precipitation, in temperate regions sorghum could be an alternative energy crop besides maize due its better drought tolerance. However, it remains open how future elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations ([CO2]) may affect these interactions. To address this question four sorghum cultivars and one maize cultivar were grown at moderate climate condition in Germany under different levels of water (WET and DRY) and CO2 supply (385ppm and 600ppm) using free air CO2 enrichment (FACE) technique combined with rain shelters. The objectives of the study were to investigate whether there is genetic variation among sorghum cultivars and whether sorghum cultivars perform better than maize under drought and elevated [CO2]. Following results were achieved: DRY plots received half as much water as compared to WET. Sorghum had higher stomatal density and transpiration rate at very high light as compared to maize. Maize had a higher biomass yield than sorghum under all growth conditions. Sorghum cultivars differed in their growth response to the treatments. Leaf growth of sorghum was delayed in early summer as compared to maize and thus caused differences in seasonal light absorption. Radiation (RUE) and water use efficiency (WUE) of biomass production under WET were highest for maize and varied among sorghum cultivars. CO2 enrichment enhanced RUE and WUE under drought in all plants. Variation of RUE among sorghum cultivars seemed to be related to differences in cold tolerance. Consequently, maize is better adapted to the prevailing German weather conditions and thus has a higher biomass yield under drought and present or future [CO2] than current cultivars of sorghum

Review of the Performance of Residential PV systems in Belgium

The main objective of this paper is to review the state of the art of residential PV systems in Belgium by the analysis of the operational data of 993 installations. For that, three main questions are posed: how much energy do they produce? What level of performance is associated to their production? Which are the key parameters that most influence their quality? This work brings answers to these questions. A middling commercial PV system, optimally oriented, produces a mean annual energy of 892 kWh/kWp. As a whole, the orientation of PV generators causes energy productions to be some 6% inferior to optimally oriented PV systems. The mean performance ratio is 78% and the mean performance index is 85%. That is to say, the energy produced by a typical PV system in Belgium is 15% inferior to the energy produced by a very high quality PV system. Finally, on average, the real power of the PV modules falls 5% below its corresponding nominal power announced on the manufacturer's datasheet. Differences between real and nominal power of up to 16% have been detected

Classification of current anticancer immunotherapies

© 2014. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.During the past decades, anticancer immunotherapy has evolved from a promising therapeutic option to a robust clinical reality. Many immunotherapeutic regimens are now approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency for use in cancer patients, and many others are being investigated as standalone therapeutic interventions or combined with conventional treatments in clinical studies. Immunotherapies may be subdivided into "passive" and "active" based on their ability to engage the host immune system against cancer. Since the anticancer activity of most passive immunotherapeutics (including tumor-targeting monoclonal antibodies) also relies on the host immune system, this classification does not properly reflect the complexity of the drug-host-tumor interaction. Alternatively, anticancer immunotherapeutics can be classified according to their antigen specificity. While some immunotherapies specifically target one (or a few) defined tumor-associated antigen(s), others operate in a relatively non-specific manner and boost natural or therapy-elicited anticancer immune responses of unknown and often broad specificity. Here, we propose a critical, integrated classification of anticancer immunotherapies and discuss the clinical relevance of these approaches.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Wikipedia Text Segmentation

For corpus generation, we extracted top-level sections of featured articles and concatenated their textual contents to a pure-text corpus file. The content of a section is constituted by the concatenation of the text of its paragraph elements and the content of contained sections. Particularly, other elements such as tables and image captions are ignored during generating the text for a section because text segmentation is meant to be applied to prose and not to pieces of information such as table fields. Furthermore, sections with one of the titles ``See also'', ``References'', and ``External links'' are skipped as they do not contain information where segmentation makes sense