Alternative Marketing Strategies for Corn and Soybeans

Three questions outlined the scope of this study: 1. What marketing strategies might be used by South Dakota producers to cope with changing market conditions? 2. What marketing strategies maximized net returns for the crop years from 1972 through 1977? 3. How does basis work in marketing strategy

Albumin Microspheres as “Trans-ferry-beads” for Easy Cell Passaging in Cell Culture Technology

Protein hydrogels represent ideal materials for advanced cell culture applications, including 3D-cultivation of even fastidious cells. Key properties of fully functional and, at the same time, economically successful cell culture materials are excellent biocompatibility and advanced fabrication processes allowing their easy production even on a large scale based on affordable compounds. Chemical crosslinking of bovine serum albumin (BSA) with N-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)-N’-ethylcarbodiimide hydrochloride (EDC) in a water-in-oil emulsion with isoparaffinic oil as the continuous phase and sorbitan monooleate as surfactant generates micro-meter-scale spherical particles. They allow a significant simplification of an indispensable and laborious step in traditional cell culture workflows. This cell passaging (or splitting) to fresh culture vessels/flasks conventionally requires harsh trypsinization, which can be omitted by using the “trans-ferry-beads” presented here. When added to different pre-cultivated adherent cell lines, the beads are efficiently boarded by cells as passengers and can be easily transferred afterward for the embarkment of novel flasks. After this procedure, cells are perfectly viable and show normal growth behavior. Thus, the trans-ferry-beads not only may become extremely affordable as a final product but also may generally replace trypsinization in conventional cell culture, thereby opening new routes for the establishment of optimized and resource-efficient workflows in biological and medical cell culture laboratories

Semi-automatic identification of punching areas for tissue microarray building: the tubular breast cancer pilot study

Background: Tissue MicroArray technology aims to perform immunohistochemical staining on hundreds of different tissue samples simultaneously. It allows faster analysis, considerably reducing costs incurred in staining. A time consuming phase of the methodology is the selection of tissue areas within paraffin blocks: no utilities have been developed for the identification of areas to be punched from the donor block and assembled in the recipient block.Results: The presented work supports, in the specific case of a primary subtype of breast cancer (tubular breast cancer), the semi-automatic discrimination and localization between normal and pathological regions within the tissues. The diagnosis is performed by analysing specific morphological features of the sample such as the absence of a double layer of cells around the lumen and the decay of a regular glands-and-lobules structure. These features are analysed using an algorithm which performs the extraction of morphological parameters from images and compares them to experimentally validated threshold values. Results are satisfactory since in most of the cases the automatic diagnosis matches the response of the pathologists. In particular, on a total of 1296 sub-images showing normal and pathological areas of breast specimens, algorithm accuracy, sensitivity and specificity are respectively 89%, 84% and 94%.Conclusions: The proposed work is a first attempt to demonstrate that automation in the Tissue MicroArray field is feasible and it can represent an important tool for scientists to cope with this high-throughput technique

COSMOS-Europe: a European network of cosmic-ray neutron soil moisture sensors

[EN] Climate change increases the occurrence and severity of droughts due to increasing temperatures, altered circulation patterns, and reduced snow occurrence. While Europe has suffered from drought events in the last decade unlike ever seen since the beginning of weather recordings, harmonized long-term datasets across the continent are needed to monitor change and support predictions. Here we present soil moisture data from 66 cosmic-ray neutron sensors (CRNSs) in Europe (COSMOS-Europe for short) covering recent drought events. The CRNS sites are distributed across Europe and cover all major land use types and climate zones in Europe. The raw neutron count data from the CRNS stations were provided by 24 research institutions and processed using state-of-the-art methods. The harmonized processing included correction of the raw neutron counts and a harmonized methodology for the conversion into soil moisture based on available in situ information. In addition, the uncertainty estimate is provided with the dataset, information that is particularly useful for remote sensing and modeling applications. This paper presents the current spatiotemporal coverage of CRNS stations in Europe and describes the protocols for data processing from raw measurements to consistent soil moisture products. The data of the presented COSMOS-Europe network open up a manifold of potential applications for environmental research, such as remote sensing data validation, trend analysis, or model assimilation The dataset could be of particular importance for the analysis of extreme climatic events at the continental scale. Due its timely relevance in the scope of climate change in the recent years, we demonstrate this potential application with a brief analysis on the spatiotemporal soil moisture variability. The dataset, entitled "Dataset of COSMOS-Europe: A European network of Cosmic-Ray Neutron Soil Moisture Sensors", is shared via Forschungszentrum Julich: https://doi.org/10.34731/x9s3-kr48 (Bogena and Ney, 2021).We thank TERENO (Terrestrial Environmental Observatories), funded by the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft for the financing and maintenance of CRNS stations. We acknowledge financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) of the research unit FOR 2694 Cosmic Sense (grant no. 357874777) and by the German Federal Ministry of Education of the Research BiookonomieREVIER, Digitales Geosystem -Rheinisches Revier project (grant no. 031B0918A). COSMOS-UK has been supported financially by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (grant no. NE/R016429/1). The Olocau experimental watershed is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the research project TETISCHANGE (grant no. RTI2018-093717-BI00). The Calderona experimental site is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the research projects CEHYRFO-MED (grant no. CGL2017-86839C3-2-R) and SILVADAPT.NET (grant no. RED2018-102719-T) and the LIFE project RESILIENT FORESTS (grant no. LIFE17 CCA/ES/000063). The University of Bristol's Sheepdrove sites have been supported by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council through a number of projects (grant nos. NE/M003086/1, NE/R004897/1, and NE/T005645/1) and by the International Atomic Energy Agency of the United Nations (grant no. CRP D12014).Bogena, HR.; Schrön, M.; Jakobi, J.; Ney, P.; Zacharias, S.; Andreasen, M.; Baatz, R.... (2022). COSMOS-Europe: a European network of cosmic-ray neutron soil moisture sensors. Earth System Science Data. 14(3):1125-1151. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1125-20221125115114

Novel standards in the measurement of rat insulin granules combining electron microscopy, high-content image analysis and in silico modelling

Knowledge of number, size and content of insulin secretory granules is pivotal for understanding the physiology of pancreatic beta cells. Here we re-evaluated key structural features of rat beta cells, including insulin granule size, number and distribution as well as cell size

Impact of the HIV-1 env Genetic Context outside HR1–HR2 on Resistance to the Fusion Inhibitor Enfuvirtide and Viral Infectivity in Clinical Isolates

Resistance mutations to the HIV-1 fusion inhibitor enfuvirtide emerge mainly within the drug's target region, HR1, and compensatory mutations have been described within HR2. The surrounding envelope (env) genetic context might also contribute to resistance, although to what extent and through which determinants remains elusive. To quantify the direct role of the env context in resistance to enfuvirtide and in viral infectivity, we compared enfuvirtide susceptibility and infectivity of recombinant viral pairs harboring the HR1–HR2 region or the full Env ectodomain of longitudinal env clones from 5 heavily treated patients failing enfuvirtide therapy. Prior to enfuvirtide treatment onset, no env carried known resistance mutations and full Env viruses were on average less susceptible than HR1–HR2 recombinants. All escape clones carried at least one of G36D, V38A, N42D and/or N43D/S in HR1, and accordingly, resistance increased 11- to 2800-fold relative to baseline. Resistance of full Env recombinant viruses was similar to resistance of their HR1–HR2 counterpart, indicating that HR1 and HR2 are the main contributors to resistance. Strictly X4 viruses were more resistant than strictly R5 viruses, while dual-tropic Envs featured similar resistance levels irrespective of the coreceptor expressed by the cell line used. Full Env recombinants from all patients gained infectivity under prolonged drug pressure; for HR1–HR2 viruses, infectivity remained steady for 3/5 patients, while for 2/5 patients, gains in infectivity paralleled those of the corresponding full Env recombinants, indicating that the env genetic context accounts mainly for infectivity adjustments. Phylogenetic analyses revealed that quasispecies selection is a step-wise process where selection of enfuvirtide resistance is a dominant factor early during therapy, while increased infectivity is the prominent driver under prolonged therapy