PATENT LICENSING BY MEANS OF AN AUCTION: INTERNAL VS. EXTERNAL PATENTEE

An independent research laboratory owns a patented process innovation that can be licensed by means of an auction to two Cournot duopolists producing differentiated goods. For large innovations and close enough substitute goods the patentee auctions o¤ only one license, preventing the full diffusion of the innovation. For this range of parameters, however, if the laboratory merged with one of the firms in the industry, full technology diffusion would be implemented as the merged entity would always license the innovation to the rival firm. This explains that, in this context, a vertical merger is both profitable and welfare improving.Patent licensing, two-part tariff contracts, vertical mergers

A Taxonomically-informed Mass Spectrometry Search Tool for Microbial Metabolomics Data

MicrobeMASST, a taxonomically-informed mass spectrometry (MS) search tool, tackles limited microbial metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics experiments. Leveraging a curated database of >60,000 microbial monocultures, users can search known and unknown MS/MS spectra and link them to their respective microbial producers via MS/MS fragmentation patterns. Identification of microbial-derived metabolites and relative producers, without a priori knowledge, will vastly enhance the understanding of microorganisms’ role in ecology and human health

Drawing

A drawing is the result of the production of marks on a surface with suitable means to represent a scene, concrete or abstract objects for technological, scientific, artistic, communicative aims. Some theories claimed that drawing is founded on symbolic systems that are culture-dependent. Evidence has been found that the ability of recognizing what drawings represent is widespread across ages, cultures and species. Drawing may be founded on shared cognitive capacities. These capacities can be abstractly described as the graphic and the denotation system

The tactile depiction of visual conventions : the advantage of explicit cues.

The introduction of representational standards for tactile diagrams might improve their use. Two elements central to the design of visual diagrams are the relative positioning and movement of the objects yet no standard convention for representing either of these in tactile form has been established. Consequently, systems representing the movement and relative positioning of objects were developed with the intention of producing design conventions for these elements. The method of depicting the element of movement was based on the concept that an object's movement is defined by changes between its initial and final positions while the method of depicting relative positioning was based on a number of the principals underlying linear perspective, along with an additional texture-based cue. Tactile diagrams making use of these systems of representation were designed and produced for exploration by eight blind participants. They were confident and accurate in their interpretations of diagrams that depicted relative positioning of objects and, on the basis of their comments on the diagrams depicting movement, a convention for the depiction of movement was proposedPeer reviewe

Adaptive defence-related changes in the metabolome of Sorghum bicolor cells in response to lipopolysaccharides of the pathogen Burkholderia andropogonis

Plant cell suspension culture systems are valuable for the study of complex biological systems such as inducible defence responses and aspects of plant innate immunity. Perturbations to the cellular metabolome can be investigated using metabolomic approaches in order to reveal the underlying metabolic mechanism of cellular responses. Lipopolysaccharides from the sorghum pathogen, Burkholderia andropogonis (LPSB.a.), were purified, chemically characterised and structurally elucidated. The lipid A moiety consists of tetra- and penta-acylated 1,4’-bis-phosphorylated disaccharide backbone decorated by aminoarabinose residues, while the O-polysaccharide chain consists of linear trisaccharide repeating units of [?2)-a-Rha3CMe-(1 ? 3)-a-Rha-(1 ? 3)-a-Rha-(1 ?]. The effect of LPSB.a. in triggering metabolic reprogramming in Sorghum bicolor cells were investigated using untargeted metabolomics with liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry detection. Cells were treated with LPSB.a. and the metabolic changes monitored over a 30 h time period. Alterations in the levels of phytohormones (jasmonates, zeatins, traumatic-, azelaic- and abscisic acid), which marked the onset of defence responses and accumulation of defence-related metabolites, were observed. Phenylpropanoids and indole alkaloids as well as oxylipins that included di- and trihydroxyoctadecedienoic acids were identified as signatory biomarkers, with marked secretion into the extracellular milieu. The study demonstrated that sorghum cells recognise LPSB.a. as a ‘microbe-associated molecular pattern’, perturbing normal cellular homeostasis. The molecular features of the altered metabolome were associated with phytohormone-responsive metabolomic reconfiguration of primary and secondary metabolites originating from various metabolic pathways, in support of defence and immunity