254 research outputs found
Revolutionizing scientific communication and collaboration
This presentation introduces new web-based ways of scientific communication and collaboration. It focuses on wikis and the _First Online EMBL PhD Symposium_ as an example of an online conference
A quick trip through openness, freedom and transparency
This talk aims to give scientists an introduction to the concepts of openness, freedom and transparency and their applications (not only) for science. It covers the topics of open source, open formats, Creative Commons, open access, and open science/knowledge. A video of the talk is available on the author's website.

The What, Why and How of openness in science
We give a short introduction to open science followed by an overview of Creative Commons and open source licenses
Assessing of channel roughness and temperature variations on wastewater quality parameters using numerical modeling
Nowadays, problems and barriers to supply adequate water and addressenvironmental issues have caused wastewater treatment (WWT) to be considered a high priority. In light of high costs of WWT, using natural capacities to reduce pollution could be potentially economically significant. In this paper, the impact of varying temperature and channel roughness has been investigated on the wastewater quality parameters using theQUAL2K (Q2K) Numerical Model. The results show, as temperature increases, the reduction rate of Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) is more than the Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD). Also, organic nitrogen (ON), organic phosphorus (P), coliforms, total organic carbon (C), total suspended solids (TSS) and total nitrogen (TN) decrease; but nitrate concentration (NO3) increases. This numerical assessment indicates that the purification rate is greater as temperature rises above 30°C. The results show that by increasing channel roughness, BOD, COD, Particle Organic Matter (POM), organic nitrogen, phosphorus and coliforms havedescending trends while inorganic phosphorus and ammonium concentrations have ascending trends. According to the obtained results, nitrate (NO3) has a decreasing trend when the Manning Roughness Coefficient (N) is higher than 0.04 along the channel, but is reducedwhen “N” is less than 0.04. © JASE
Gene autoregulation by 3' UTR-derived bacterial small RNAs
Negative feedback regulation, that is the ability of a gene to repress its own synthesis, is the most abundant regulatory motif known to biology. Frequently reported for transcriptional regulators, negative feedback control relies on binding of a transcription factor to its own promoter. Here, we report a novel mechanism for gene autoregulation in bacteria relying on small regulatory RNA (sRNA) and the major endoribonuclease, RNase E. TIER-seq analysis (transiently-inactivating-an-endoribonuclease-followed-by-RNA-seq) revealed similar to 25,000 RNase E-dependent cleavage sites in Vibrio cholerae, several of which resulted in the accumulation of stable sRNAs. Focusing on two examples, OppZ and CarZ, we discovered that these sRNAs are processed from the 3' untranslated region (3' UTR) of the oppABCDF and carAB operons, respectively, and basepair with their own transcripts to inhibit translation. For OppZ, this process also triggers Rho-dependent transcription termination. Our data show that sRNAs from 3' UTRs serve as autoregulatory elements allowing negative feedback control at the post-transcriptional level
Feature evaluation for building facade images - an empirical study
The classification of building facade images is a challenging problem that receives a great deal of attention in the photogrammetry community. Image classification is critically dependent on the features. In this paper, we perform an empirical feature evaluation task for building facade images. Feature sets we choose are basic features, color features, histogram features, Peucker features, texture features, and SIFT features. We present an approach for region-wise labeling using an efficient randomized decision forest classifier and local features. We conduct our experiments with building facade image classification on the eTRIMS dataset, where our focus is the object classes building, car, door, pavement, road, sky, vegetation, and window
A computational screen for type I polyketide synthases in metagenomics shotgun data
BACKGROUND: Polyketides are a diverse group of biotechnologically important secondary metabolites that are produced by multi domain enzymes called polyketide synthases (PKS). METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We have estimated frequencies of type I PKS (PKS I) – a PKS subgroup – in natural environments by using Hidden-Markov-Models of eight domains to screen predicted proteins from six metagenomic shotgun data sets. As the complex PKS I have similarities to other multi-domain enzymes (like those for the fatty acid biosynthesis) we increased the reliability and resolution of the dataset by maximum-likelihood trees. The combined information of these trees was then used to discriminate true PKS I domains from evolutionary related but functionally different ones. We were able to identify numerous novel PKS I proteins, the highest density of which was found in Minnesota farm soil with 136 proteins out of 183,536 predicted genes. We also applied the protocol to UniRef database to improve the annotation of proteins with so far unknown function and identified some new instances of horizontal gene transfer. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The screening approach proved powerful in identifying PKS I sequences in large sequence data sets and is applicable to many other protein families
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