Interspecific and intraspecific phenotypic diversity for drought adaptation in bioenergy Arundo species

Biomass crops are commonly grown in low-grade land and selection of drought tolerant accessions is of major importance to sustain productivity. In this work, we assess phenotypic variation under different environmental scenarios in a series of accessions of Arundo donax, and contrast it with two closely related species, Arundo donaciformis and Arundo plinii. Gas-exchange and stomatal anatomy analysis showed an elevated photosynthetic capacity in A. plinii compared to A. donax and A. donaciformis with a significant intraspecific variation in A. donax. The three species showed significantly contrasting behavior of transpiration under developing water stress and increasing vapour pressure deficit (VPD), with A. donax being the most conservative while A. plinii showed an elevated degree of insensitivity to environmental cues. Under optimal conditions, A. donax had the highest estimated leaf area (PLA) and plant dry weight although a significant reduction under water stress was observed for A. donax and A. donaciformis accessions, while no differences were recorded for A. plinii between optimal growing conditions (WW) and reduced soil water availability (WS). A. donax displayed a markedly conservative WU behavior but elevated sensitivity of biomass accumulation under stress conditions. By contrast, in A. plinii biomass and transpiration were largely insensitive to WS and increasing VPD, though biomass dry weight under optimal conditions was significantly lower than A. donax. We provide evidence of interspecific phenotypic variation within the Arundo genus while the intraspecific phenotypic plasticity may be exploited for further selection of superior clones under disadvantageous environmental conditions. The extensive trade-off between water use and biomass accumulation present in the three species under stress conditions provides a series of novel traits to be exploited in the selection of superior clones adapted to different environmental scenarios. Non-destructive approaches are provided to screen large populations for water stress tolerant A. donax clones

Differential Pulse-Width Pair Brillouin Optical Time-Domain Analysis Employing Raman Amplification and Optical Pulse Coding

We report on an advanced optical fiber sensing implementation enabling submeter resolution over long distance exploiting Brillouin optical time-domain analysis with differential pulse-width pair. Long sensing distances have been attained thanks to the combined use of distributed Raman amplification of optical signals together with optical pulse coding. We experimentally demonstrate strain–temperature sensing capabilities with a spatial resolution better than 50 cm throughout 93 km standard single-mode fiber, attaining accuracy in terms of measured strain and temperature smaller than 1.7 °C and 34 με, respectively

Relativistic Structure of the Deuteron: 1.Electro-disintegration and y-scaling

Realistic solutions of the spinor-spinor Bethe-Salpeter equation for the deuteron with realistic interaction kernel including the exchange of pi, sigma, omega, rho, eta and delta mesons, are used to systematically investigate relativistic effects in inclusive quasi-elastic electron-deuteron scattering within the relativistic impulse approximation. Relativistic y-scaling is considered by generalising the non relativistic scaling function to the relativistic case, and it is shown that y-scaling does occur in the usual relativistic scaling variable resulting from the energy conservation in the instant form of dynamics. The present approach of y-scaling is fully covariant, with the deuteron being described by eight components, viz. the 3S_1^{++}, 3S_1^{--}, 3D_1^{++}, 3D_1^{--}, 3P_1^{+-}, 3P_1^{-+}, 1P_1^{+-}, 1P_1^{-+} waves. It is demonstrated that if the negative relative energy states 1P_1, 3P_1 are disregarded, the concept of covariant momentum distributions N(p_0,p), with p_0=M_D/2-\sqrt{p^2+m^2}, can be introduced, and that calculations of lectro-disintegration cross section in terms of these distributions agree within few percents with the exact calculations which include the 1P_1, 3P_1 states, provided the nucleon three momentum |p|\<= 1 GeV/c; in this momentum range, the asymptotic relativistic scaling function is shown to coincide with the longitudinal covariant momentum distribution.Comment: 32 LaTeX pages, 18 eps-figures. Final version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Electron and Photon Scattering on Three-Nucleon Bound States

A big spectrum of processes induced by real and virtual photons on the 3He and 3H nuclei is theoretically investigated through many examples based on nonrelativistic Faddeev calculations for bound and continuum states. The modern nucleon-nucleon potential AV18 together with the three-nucleon force UrbanaIX is used. The single nucleon current is augmented by explicit pi- and rho-like two-body currents which fulfill the current continuity equation together with the corresponding parts of the AV18 potential. We also employ the Siegert theorem, which induces many-body contributions to the current operator. The interplay of these different dynamical ingredients in the various electromagnetic processes is studied and the theory is compared to the experimental data. Overall we find fair to good agreement but also cases of strong disagreement between theory and experiment, which calls for improved dynamics. In several cases we refer the reader to the work of other groups and compare their results with ours. In addition we list a number of predictions for observables in different processes which would challenge this dynamical scenario even more stringently and systematically.Comment: 154 pages, 80 figures includes as ps files, 21 additional figures as jpeg file

Automatic Gloss Finding for a Knowledge Base using Ontological Constraints

While there has been much research on automatically construct-ing structured Knowledge Bases (KBs), most of it has focused on generating facts to populate a KB. However, a useful KB must go beyond facts. For example, glosses (short natural language defi-nitions) have been found to be very useful in tasks such as Word Sense Disambiguation. However, the important problem of Auto-matic Gloss Finding, i.e., assigning glosses to entities in an ini-tially gloss-free KB, is relatively unexplored. We address that gap in this paper. In particular, we propose GLOFIN, a hierarchical semi-supervised learning algorithm for this problem which makes effective use of limited amounts of supervision and available onto-logical constraints. To the best of our knowledge, GLOFIN is the first system for this task. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demon-strate GLOFIN’s effectiveness. It is encouraging to see that GLOFIN outperforms other state-of-the-art SSL algorithms, especially in low supervision settings. We also demonstrate GLOFIN’s robustness to noise through experiments on a wide variety of KBs, ranging from user contributed (e.g., Freebase) to automatically constructed (e.g., NELL). To facilitate further research in this area, we have already made the datasets and code used in this paper publicly available. 1

Consensus Recommendation for Mouse Models of Ocular Hypertension to Study Aqueous Humor Outflow and Its Mechanisms.

Due to their similarities in anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology to humans, mice are a valuable model system to study the generation and mechanisms modulating conventional outflow resistance and thus intraocular pressure. In addition, mouse models are critical for understanding the complex nature of conventional outflow homeostasis and dysfunction that results in ocular hypertension. In this review, we describe a set of minimum acceptable standards for developing, characterizing, and utilizing mouse models of open-angle ocular hypertension. We expect that this set of standard practices will increase scientific rigor when using mouse models and will better enable researchers to replicate and build upon previous findings

Consensus recommendation for mouse models of ocular hypertension to study aqueous humor outflow and its mechanisms

Due to their similarities in anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology to humans, mice are a valuable model system to study the generation and mechanisms modulating conventional outflow resistance and thus intraocular pressure. In addition, mouse models are critical for understanding the complex nature of conventional outflow homeostasis and dysfunction that results in ocular hypertension. In this review, we describe a set of minimum acceptable standards for developing, characterizing, and utilizing mouse models of open-angle ocular hypertension. We expect that this set of standard practices will increase scientific rigor when using mouse models and will better enable researchers to replicate and build upon previous findings

Cross-evaluation of entity linking and disambiguation systems for clinical text annotation

In this paper we study whether state-of-the-art techniques for multi-domain and multilingual entity linking can be ported to the clinical domain. To do so, we compare two known entity linking systems, BabelFly and TagMe, that leverage on Wikipedia and DBpedia, with the standard clinical semantic annotation and disambiguation system, MetaMap, over the SemRep clinical word sense disambiguation gold standard. We show that BabelFly and especially TagMe, while achieving decent precision on clinical annotation, outmatch MetaMap's F 1-score