Sustainable agricultural residue removal for bioenergy: A spatially comprehensive US national assessment

This study provides a spatially comprehensive assessment of sustainable agricultural residue removal potential across the United States for bioenergy production. Earlier assessments determining the quantity of agricultural residue that could be sustainably removed for bioenergy production at the regional and national scale faced a number of computational limitations. These limitations included the number of environmental factors, the number of land management scenarios, and the spatial fidelity and spatial extent of the assessment. This study utilizes integrated multi-factor environmental process modeling and high fidelity land use datasets to perform the sustainable agricultural residue removal assessment. Soil type represents the base spatial unit for this study and is modeled using a national soil survey database at the 10–100 m scale. Current crop rotation practices are identified by processing land cover data available from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service Cropland Data Layer database. Land management and residue removal scenarios are identified for each unique crop rotation and crop management zone. Estimates of county averages and state totals of sustainably available agricultural residues are provided. The results of the assessment show that in 2011 over 150 million metric tons of agricultural residues could have been sustainably removed across the United States. Projecting crop yields and land management practices to 2030, the assessment determines that over 207 million metric tons of agricultural residues will be able to be sustainably removed for bioenergy production at that time. This biomass resource has the potential for producing over 68 billion liters of cellulosic biofuels

A Robust and Universal Metaproteomics Workflow for Research Studies and Routine Diagnostics Within 24 h Using Phenol Extraction, FASP Digest, and the MetaProteomeAnalyzer

The investigation of microbial proteins by mass spectrometry (metaproteomics) is a key technology for simultaneously assessing the taxonomic composition and the functionality of microbial communities in medical, environmental, and biotechnological applications. We present an improved metaproteomics workflow using an updated sample preparation and a new version of the MetaProteomeAnalyzer software for data analysis. High resolution by multidimensional separation (GeLC, MudPIT) was sacrificed to aim at fast analysis of a broad range of different samples in less than 24 h. The improved workflow generated at least two times as many protein identifications than our previous workflow, and a drastic increase of taxonomic and functional annotations. Improvements of all aspects of the workflow, particularly the speed, are first steps toward potential routine clinical diagnostics (i.e., fecal samples) and analysis of technical and environmental samples. The MetaProteomeAnalyzer is provided to the scientific community as a central remote server solution at www.mpa.ovgu.de.Peer Reviewe

Breeding for resistance to nematode infections in organic goat production in Germany – A way forward?

Organic goat production in Germany could benefit from genetic improvement strategies that take the resistance of goats to nematode infestations and the resilience and tolerance for infections into consideration. However, there still is an immense research need before such traits can be incorporated in a breeding program

Housing prices and multiple employment nodes: is the relationship nonmonotonic?

Standard urban economic theory predicts that house prices will decline with distance from the central business district. Empirical results have been equivocal, however. Disjoints between theory and empirics may be due to a nonmonotonic relationship between house prices and access to employment arising from the negative externalities associated with proximity to multiple centres of employment. Based on data from Glasgow (Scotland), we use gravity-based measures of accessibility estimated using a flexible functional form that allows for nonmonotonicity. The results are thoroughly tested using recent advances in spatial econometrics. We find compelling evidence of a nonmonotonic effect in the accessibility measure and discuss the implications for planning and housing policy

Spatio-temporal Fermionization of Strongly Interacting 1D Bosons

Building on the recent experimental achievements obtained with scanning electron microscopy on ultracold atoms, we study one-dimensional Bose gases in the crossover between the weakly (quasi-condensate) and the strongly interacting (Tonks-Girardeau) regime. We measure the temporal two-particle correlation function and compare it with calculations performed using the Time Evolving Block Decimation algorithm. More pronounced antibunching is observed when entering the more strongly interacting regime. Even though this mimics the onset of a fermionic behavior, we highlight that the exact and simple duality between 1D bosons and fermions does not hold when such dynamical response is probed. The onset of fermionization is also reflected in the density distribution, which we measure \emph{in situ} to extract the relevant parameters and to identify the different regimes. Our results show agreement between experiment and theory and give new insight into the dynamics of strongly correlated many-body systems

DeNovoGUI: an open source graphical user interface for de novo sequencing of tandem mass spectra

De novo sequencing is a popular technique in proteomics for identifying peptides from tandem mass spectra without having to rely on a protein sequence database. Despite the strong potential of de novo sequencing algorithms, their adoption threshold remains quite high. We here present a user-friendly and lightweight graphical user interface called DeNovoGUI for running parallelized versions of the freely available de novo sequencing software PepNovo+, greatly simplifying the use of de novo sequencing in proteomics. Our platform-independent software is freely available under the permissible Apache2 open source license. Source code, binaries, and additional documentation are available at http://denovogui.googlecode.com.acceptedVersio

What would an 'ideal' glaucoma examination be like? - A conjoint analysis of patients' and physicians' preferences

PURPOSE To structurally determine patients' and physicians' preferences for glaucoma diagnostic methods in order to improve glaucoma patient care and improve patient compliance with follow-up visits. METHODS Forty-one patients with glaucoma and 32 ophthalmologists were included in this cross-sectional study. Profiles representing glaucoma examinations were created using conjoint analysis (CA). The following factors of a glaucoma examination method were evaluated: (1) examination comfort, (2) examination frequency, (3) follow-up examination necessary in case of suspicious result, (4) cost for the patient, (5) travel time to examination site, (6) sensitivity and (7) specificity of the examination method. RESULTS Preferences were highest in both groups for examination sensitivity, followed by cost and specificity for the patient group. For the physician group, specificity was second most important, followed by cost. Least important was travel time for the patients and follow-up examinations for the physicians. CONCLUSIONS Participants would rather pay more and travel longer to get a highly sensitive examination. This form of care is present in university eye hospitals. Consequently, it would be advisable to enhance capacities of these centers. Outpatient practices that offer glaucoma service should be fully equipped and should employ a glaucoma specialist