Shotgun proteomics of Aspergillus niger microsomes upon D-xylose induction

Protein secretion plays an eminent role in cell maintenance and adaptation to the extracellular environment of microorganisms. Although protein secretion is an extremely efficient process in filamentous fungi, the mechanisms underlying protein secretion have remained largely uncharacterized in these organisms. In this study, we analyzed the effects of the d-xylose induction of cellulase and hemicellulase enzyme secretion on the protein composition of secretory organelles in Aspergillus niger. We aimed to systematically identify the components involved in the secretion of these enzymes via mass spectrometry of enriched subcellular microsomal fractions. Under each condition, fractions enriched for secretory organelles were processed for tandem mass spectrometry, resulting in the identification of peptides that originate from 1,081 proteins, 254 of which-many of them hypothetical proteins-were predicted to play direct roles in the secretory pathway. d-Xylose induction led to an increase in specific small GTPases known to be associated with polarized growth, exocytosis, and endocytosis. Moreover, the endoplasmic-reticulum-associated degradation (ERAD) components Cdc48 and all 14 of the 20S proteasomal subunits were recruited to the secretory organelles. In conclusion, induction of extracellular enzymes results in specific changes in the secretory subproteome of A. niger, and the most prominent change found in this study was the recruitment of the 20S proteasomal subunits to the secretory organelle

Monitoring fish passes using infrared beaming: a case study in an Iberian river

An application of a new automated fish counting device – the Riverwatcher System (RW) – was used to monitor upstream fish movements in a pool-and-weir fish pass in the River Zeˆ zere, Portugal, for 141 days from June 2002 to May 2003. Fish populations were also collected downstream using multimesh gillnets (5 different mesh sizes ranging from 30 mm to 85 mm knot to knot; ratio between mesh sizes of about 1.30) and electrofishing for comparison with fish records produced by the RW. More than 3000 individual Iberian nase Chondrostoma polylepis ascended the fish pass and moved through the RW during the study period. However, only 18% of the records produced by the RW contained silhouettes similar to fish; no individual smaller than 15 cm TL was recorded by the counter. Most seasonal movements (73.9%) occurred in spring and were associated with reproduction. Displacements seemed to occur independently of time of day. Water temperature (range: 12–22 C) was the only significant environmental variable (P < 0.01) influencing upstream movements of this species. Further development of hardware and software will be necessary to improve performance of the counter, particularly in Mediterranean rivers, where more turbid waters and a greater proportion of small-size species are presen

Symmetries of generalized soliton models and submodels on target space S2S^2

Some physically relevant non-linear models with solitons, which have target space $S^2$, are known to have submodels with infinitly many conservation laws defined by the eikonal equation. Here we calculate all the symmetries of these models and their submodels by the prolongation method. We find that for some models, like the Baby Skyrme model, the submodels have additional symmetries, whereas for others, like the Faddeev--Niemi model, they do not.Comment: 18 pages, one Latex fil

A qualidade das bases de dados como factor crucial em estudos ambientais: condições de referência e tipologia com base piscícola para rios portugueses

Com base num conjunto superior a 1000 amostragens piscícolas em rios portugueses (troços vadeáveis) realizadas por diversas entidades nacionais nos últimos 10 anos, seleccionou-se um grupo de 459 locais que cumprem critérios de normalização de amostragem, procedimentos no terreno, e acuidade nas identificações taxonómicas. Estes locais representam a diversidade de condições naturais e de impactos humanos em Portugal Continental. Para caracterizar a magnitude e tipo de perturbação humana em cada local foram aplicadas 15 variáveis de pressão – ao nível do troço, segmento e bacia – classificadas de acordo com o desvio às condições naturais (de 1 para ausência de desvio, até 5 para forte degradação). Este passo envolveu um longo período de trabalho e baseou-se na análise de várias fontes de informação geográfica e documental, em inquéritos e no conhecimento do terreno. Durante as fases de selecção de locais e construção das bases de dados ambientais e biológicas, toda a informação foi sujeita a procedimentos de controle de qualidade de dados. É proposta uma metodologia para a selecção de sítios de referência; desta forma, foram incluídos neste grupo os locais com pontuação 1 ou 2 em, pelo menos, 80% das variáveis, permitindo a classificação 3 em 20% (três variáveis), excepto para a variável “abundância de indivíduos exóticos”, que obrigatoriamente correspondeu à pontuação 1 ou 2. Uma abordagem estatística multivariada suportou os dois passos seguintes: a definição da tipologia com base nas ictiocomunidades e a alocação de todos os locais num tipo. Utilizando os sítios de referência, e com base na classificação de grupos funcionais piscícolas, foram estabelecidos 6 tipos (t.): t. salmonícola da região norte; t. transição salmonícola-ciprinícola da região norte; t. ciprinícola de pequena dimensão das regiões norte interior e sul; t. ciprinícola de média dimensão da região norte; t. ciprinícola de média dimensão da região sul e t. ciprinícola da região norte litoral. A análise discriminante múltipla (ADM) suportou a tipologia piscícola, alocando correctamente 71 a 93% dos locais para os seis grupos; temperatura média em Julho, área de drenagem, altitude, precipitação média anual e uma variável categórica de enquadramento geográfico foram as variáveis retidas pelo modelo final. A ADM evidenciou elevada robustez ao classificar a maioria dos locais de não referência num dos tipos da respectiva região geográfica e ao detectar variações longitudinais das comunidades piscícolas ao longo de vários rios

Analysis of Neighbourhoods in Multi-layered Dynamic Social Networks

Social networks existing among employees, customers or users of various IT systems have become one of the research areas of growing importance. A social network consists of nodes - social entities and edges linking pairs of nodes. In regular, one-layered social networks, two nodes - i.e. people are connected with a single edge whereas in the multi-layered social networks, there may be many links of different types for a pair of nodes. Nowadays data about people and their interactions, which exists in all social media, provides information about many different types of relationships within one network. Analysing this data one can obtain knowledge not only about the structure and characteristics of the network but also gain understanding about semantic of human relations. Are they direct or not? Do people tend to sustain single or multiple relations with a given person? What types of communication is the most important for them? Answers to these and more questions enable us to draw conclusions about semantic of human interactions. Unfortunately, most of the methods used for social network analysis (SNA) may be applied only to one-layered social networks. Thus, some new structural measures for multi-layered social networks are proposed in the paper, in particular: cross-layer clustering coefficient, cross-layer degree centrality and various versions of multi-layered degree centralities. Authors also investigated the dynamics of multi-layered neighbourhood for five different layers within the social network. The evaluation of the presented concepts on the real-world dataset is presented. The measures proposed in the paper may directly be used to various methods for collective classification, in which nodes are assigned to labels according to their structural input features.Comment: 16 pages, International Journal of Computational Intelligence System

The role of interfaces and morphology on silver diffusion in hard coatings

One of the main approaches to increase the tool lifetime during dry machining of “hard-to-machine” aerospace alloys is self-lubrication by the incorporation of noble metals in hard matrixes with good mechanical and diffusion barrier properties. In this paper, the diffusion of an Ag-rich layer sandwiched between two layers of either TiN or TiSiN is studied by transmission electron microscopy and in situ Rutherford backscattering spectrometry. The layer stacks were subjected to annealing treatments at 600 ◦C and 800 ◦C for 2 hours. Three processes were found to control the diffusion of silver: the morphology of the “sandwich” layers, the formation of small voids in the involved interfaces and the sublimation of Ag in the surface at temperatures near the melting point. The study revealed that the dense TiSiN matrix allowed a significantly better control of Ag diffusion than the more open TiN matrix.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A New Cosmological Model of Quintessence and Dark Matter

We propose a new class of quintessence models in which late times oscillations of a scalar field give rise to an effective equation of state which can be negative and hence drive the observed acceleration of the universe. Our ansatz provides a unified picture of quintessence and a new form of dark matter we call "Frustrated Cold Dark Matter" (FCDM). FCDM inhibits gravitational clustering on small scales and could provide a natural resolution to the core density problem for disc galaxy halos. Since the quintessence field rolls towards a small value, constraints on slow-roll quintessence models are safely circumvented in our model.Comment: Revised. Important new results added in response to referees comment

Backpropagation training in adaptive quantum networks

We introduce a robust, error-tolerant adaptive training algorithm for generalized learning paradigms in high-dimensional superposed quantum networks, or \emph{adaptive quantum networks}. The formalized procedure applies standard backpropagation training across a coherent ensemble of discrete topological configurations of individual neural networks, each of which is formally merged into appropriate linear superposition within a predefined, decoherence-free subspace. Quantum parallelism facilitates simultaneous training and revision of the system within this coherent state space, resulting in accelerated convergence to a stable network attractor under consequent iteration of the implemented backpropagation algorithm. Parallel evolution of linear superposed networks incorporating backpropagation training provides quantitative, numerical indications for optimization of both single-neuron activation functions and optimal reconfiguration of whole-network quantum structure.Comment: Talk presented at "Quantum Structures - 2008", Gdansk, Polan

The new automated daily mortality surveillance system in Portugal

The experience reported in an earlier Eurosurveillance issue on a fast method to evaluate the impact of the 2003 heatwave on mortality in Portugal, generated a daily mortality surveillance system (VDM) that has been operating ever since jointly with the Portuguese Heat Health Watch Warning System. This work describes the VDM system and how it evolved to become an automated system operating year-round, and shows briefly its potential using mortality data from January 2006 to June 2009 collected by the system itself. The new system has important advantages such as: rapid information acquisition, completeness (the entire population is included), lightness (very little information is exchanged, date of death, age, sex, place of death registration). It allows rapid detection of impacts (within five days) and allows a quick preliminary quantification of impacts that usually took several years to be done. These characteristics make this system a powerful tool for public health action. The VDM system also represents an example of inter-institutional cooperation, bringing together organisations from two different ministries, Health and Justice, aiming at improving knowledge about the mortality in the population

From bound states to resonances: analytic continuation of the wave function

Single-particle resonance parameters and wave functions in spherical and deformed nuclei are determined through analytic continuation in the potential strength. In this method, the analyticity of the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Schroedinger equation with respect to the coupling strength is exploited to analytically continue the bound-state solutions into the positive-energy region by means of Pade' approximants of the second kind. The method is here applied to single-particle wave functions of the $^{154}Sm$ and $^{131}Eu$ nuclei. A comparison of the results with the direct solution of the Schroedinger equation shows that the method can be confidently applied also in coupled-channel situations requiring high numerical accuracy.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure