One year of spectroscopic high-frequency measurements of atmospheric CO2, CH4, H2O and δ13C-CO2 at an Australian Savanna site

We provide a 1-year dataset of atmospheric surface CO2, CH4 and H2O concentrations and δ13C-CO2 values from an Australian savanna site. These semi-arid ecosystems act as carbon sinks in wet years but the persistence of the sink in dry years is uncertain. The dataset can be used to constrain uncertainties in modelling of greenhouse gas budgets, improve algorithms for satellite measurements and characterize the role of vegetation and soil in modulating atmospheric CO2 concentrations. We found pronounced seasonal variations in daily mean CO2 concentrations with an increase (by 5–7 ppmv) after the first rainfall of the wet season in early December with peak concentrations maintained until late January. The CO2 increase reflected the initiation of rapid microbial respiration from soil and vegetation sources upon initial wetting. As the wet season progressed, daily CO2 concentrations were variable, but generally decreased back to dry season levels as CO2 assimilation by photosynthesis increased. Mean daily concentrations of CH4 increased in the wet season by up to 0.2 ppmv relative to dry season levels as the soil profile became waterlogged after heavy rainfall events. During the dry season there was regular cycling between maximum CO2/minimum δ13C-CO2 at night and minimum CO2/maximum δ13C-CO2 during the day. In the wet season diel patterns were less regular in response to variable cloud cover and rainfall. CO2 isotope data showed that in the wet season, surface CO2 was predominantly a two-component mixture influenced by C3 plant assimilation (day) and soil/plant respiration (night), while regional background air from higher altitudes represented an additional CO2 source in the dry season. Higher wind speeds during the dry season increased vertical mixing compared to the wet season. In addition, night-time advection of high-altitude air during low temperature conditions also promoted mixing in the dry season

A Search for Molecular Gas in GHz Peaked Spectrum Radio Sources

We present searches for molecular gas (CO, OH, CS, and Ammonia) in six GHz Peaked Spectrum (GPS) radio sources. We do not detect gas in any source and place upper limits on the mass of molecular gas which are generally in the range 1E9 to a few times 1E10 solar masses. These limits are consistent with the following interpretations: (1) GPS sources do not require very dense gas in their hosts, and (2) The GPS sources are unlikely to be confined by dense gas and will evolve to become larger radio sources

Design of a framework for the deployment of collaborative independent rare disease-centric registries: Gaucher disease registry model

Orphan drug clinical trials often are adversely affected by a lack of high quality treatment efficacy data that can be reliably compared across large patient cohorts derived from multiple governmental and country jurisdictions. It is critical that these patient data be captured with limited corporate involvement. For some time, there have been calls to develop collaborative, non-proprietary, patient-centric registries for post-market surveillance of aspects related to orphan drug efficacy. There is an urgent need for the development and sustainable deployment of these ‘independent’ registries that can capture comprehensive clinical, genetic and therapeutic information on patients with rare diseases. We therefore extended an open-source registry platform, the Rare Disease Registry Framework (RDRF) to establish an Independent Rare Disease Registry (IRDR). We engaged with an established rare disease community for Gaucher disease to determine system requirements, methods of data capture, consent, and reporting. A non-proprietary IRDR model is presented that can serve as autonomous data repository, but more importantly ensures that the relevant data can be made available to appropriate stakeholders in a secure, timely and efficient manner to improve clinical decision-making and the lives of those with a rare diseas

Design of a framework for the deployment of collaborative independent rare disease-centric registries: Gaucher disease registry model

Orphan drug clinical trials often are adversely affected by a lack of high quality treatment efficacy data that can be reliably compared across large patient cohorts derived from multiple governmental and country jurisdictions. It is critical that these patient data be captured with limited corporate involvement. For some time, there have been calls to develop collaborative, non-proprietary, patient-centric registries for post-market surveillance of aspects related to orphan drug efficacy. There is an urgent need for the development and sustainable deployment of these ‘independent’ registries that can capture comprehensive clinical, genetic and therapeutic information on patients with rare diseases. We therefore extended an open-source registry platform, the Rare Disease Registry Framework (RDRF) to establish an Independent Rare Disease Registry (IRDR). We engaged with an established rare disease community for Gaucher disease to determine system requirements, methods of data capture, consent, and reporting. A non-proprietary IRDR model is presented that can serve as autonomous data repository, but more importantly ensures that the relevant data can be made available to appropriate stakeholders in a secure, timely and efficient manner to improve clinical decision-making and the lives of those with a rare disease

‘Dead people don’t claim’: A psychopolitical autopsy of UK austerity suicides

One of the symptoms of post financial crisis austerity in the UK has been an increase in the numbers of suicides, especially by people who have experienced welfare reform. This article develops and utilises an analytic framework of psychopolitical autopsy to explore media coverage of ‘austerity suicide’ and to take seriously the psychic life of austerity (internalisation, shame, anxiety), embedding it in a context of social dis-ease. Drawing on three distinct yet interrelated areas of literature (the politics of affect and psychosocial dynamics of welfare, post and anti-colonial psychopolitics, and critical suicidology), the article aims to better understand how austerity ‘kills’. Key findings include understanding austerity suicides as embedded within an affective economy of the anxiety caused by punitive welfare retrenchment, the stigmatisation of being a recipient of benefits, and the internalisation of market logic that assigns value through ‘productivity’ and conceptualises welfare entitlement as economic ‘burden’. The significance of this approach lies in its ability to widen analytic framing of suicide from an individual and psychocentric focus, to illuminate culpability of government reforms while still retaining the complexity of suicide, and thus to provide relevant policy insights about welfare reform

The Structure of Rapidly Rotating Late-Type Spiral Galaxies: I. Photometry, HI and Optical Kinematics

We present I-band photometry, long-slit optical spectroscopy, and new aperture synthesis HI observations for eight late-type spirals with rotation velocities in the range 243 km/s < V_{rot} < 308 km/s. The sample will be used to study the structure and angular momentum of disks at the high-mass end of the spiral galaxy population; here we discuss the basic properties of these ``fast rotators'', and derive hybrid optical/HI rotation curves for each. Despite the presence of HI warps and low-mass companions in many systems, their kinematics are regular and there is excellent agreement between optical and HI tracers near the optical radius r_{opt}. At high inclinations at which projection effects are negligible, the sample galaxies exhibit flat, featureless rotation curves out to their last measured points at 1.7r_{opt}--3.5 r_{opt}. The intermediate inclination systems are also consistent with a constant rotation amplitude for r > 0.5 r_{opt}. We therefore find no evidence for declining rotation curves at the high-mass end of the late-type spiral galaxy population. Combining our data with the compilation of spirals with reliable outer HI kinematics from the work of Casertano & van Gorkom, we find no convincing trends between logarithmic outer rotation curve slopes and rotation amplitudes or surface brightnesses for galaxies with V_{rot} > 220 km/s. Correlations between these slopes and morphological types or disk scale lengths are also marginal in this regime.Comment: v2: minor changes to match proofs. 23 pages, 15 figures, AJ in press. For version with high resolution figures, see http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~spekkens/papers/fast1.pd

Adipocytes Activate Mitochondrial Fatty Acid Oxidation and Autophagy to Promote Tumor Growth in Colon Cancer

Obesity has been associated with increased incidence and mortality of a wide variety of human cancers including colorectal cancer. However, the molecular mechanism by which adipocytes regulate the metabolism of colon cancer cells remains elusive. In this study, we showed that adipocytes isolated from adipose tissues of colon cancer patients have an important role in modulating cellular metabolism to support tumor growth and survival. Abundant adipocytes were found in close association with invasive tumor cells in colon cancer patients. Co-culture of adipocytes with colon cancer cells led to a transfer of free fatty acids that released from the adipocytes to the cancer cells. Uptake of fatty acids allowed the cancer cells to survive nutrient deprivation conditions by upregulating mitochondrial fatty acid β-oxidation. Mechanistically, co-culture of adipocytes or treating cells with fatty acids induced autophagy in colon cancer cells as a result of AMPK activation. Inhibition of autophagy attenuated the ability of cancer cells to utilize fatty acids and blocked the growth-promoting effect of adipocytes. In addition, we found that adipocytes stimulated the expression of genes associated with cancer stem cells and downregulated genes associated with intestinal epithelial cell differentiation in primary colon cancer cells and mouse tumor organoids. Importantly, the presence of adipocytes promoted the growth of xenograft tumors in vivo. Taken together, our results show that adipocytes in the tumor microenvironment serve as an energy provider and a metabolic regulator to promote the growth and survival of colon cancer cells

On the investigations of galaxy redshift periodicity

In this article we present a historical review of study of the redshift periodicity of galaxies, starting from the first works performed in the seventies of the twentieth century until the present day. We discuss the observational data and methods used, showing in which cases the discretization of redshifts was observed. We conclude that galaxy redshift periodisation is an effect which can really exist. We also discussed the redshift discretization in two different structures: the Local Group of galaxies and the Hercules Supercluster. Contrary to the previous studies we consider all galaxies which can be regarded as a structure member disregarding the accuracy of velocity measurements. We applied the power spectrum analysis using the Hann function for weighting, together with the jackknife error estimator. In both the structures we found weak effects of redshift periodisation.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Part. and Nucl. Lett. 200

Expression of auxin-binding protein1 during plum fruit ontogeny supports the potential role of auxin in initiating and enhancing climacteric ripening

Auxin-binding protein1 (ABP1) is an active element involved in auxin signaling and plays critical roles in auxin-mediated plant development. Here, we report the isolation and characterization of a putative sequence from Prunus salicina L., designated PslABP1. The expected protein exhibits a similar molecular structure to that of well-characterized maize-ABP1; however, PslABP1 displays more sequence polarity in the active-binding site due to substitution of some crucial amino-acid residues predicted to be involved in auxin-binding. Further, PslABP1 expression was assessed throughout fruit ontogeny to determine its role in fruit development. Comparing the expression data with the physiological aspects that characterize fruit-development stages indicates that PslABP1 up-regulation is usually associated with the signature events that are triggered in an auxin-dependent manner such as floral induction, fruit initiation, embryogenesis, and cell division and elongation. However, the diversity in PslABP1 expression profile during the ripening process of early and late plum cultivars seems to be due to the variability of endogenous auxin levels among the two cultivars, which consequently can change the levels of autocatalytic ethylene available for the fruit to co-ordinate ripening. The effect of auxin on stimulating ethylene production and in regulating PslABP1 was investigated. Our data suggest that auxin is involved in the transition of the mature green fruit into the ripening phase and in enhancing the ripening process in both auxin- and ethylene-dependent manners thereafter

Oleaginous crops as integrated production platforms for food, feed, fuel and renewable industrial feedstock

The world faces considerable challenges including how to produce more biomass for food, feed, fuel and industrial feedstock without significantly impacting on our environment or increasing our consumption of limited resources such as water or petroleum-derived carbon. This has been described as sustainable intensification. Oleaginous crops have the potential to provide renewable resources for all these commodities, provided they can be engineered to meet end-use requirements, and that they can be produced on sufficient scale to meet current growing world population and industrial demand. Although traditional breeding methods have been used successfully to modify the fatty acid composition of oils, metabolic engineering provides a more rapid and direct method for manipulating plant lipid composition. Recent advances in our understanding of the biochemical mechanisms of seed oil biogenesis and the cloning of genes involved in fatty acid and oil metabolic pathways, have allowed the generation of oilseed crops that produce ‘designer oils’ tailored for specific applications and the conversion of high biomass crops into novel oleaginous crops. However, improvement of complex quantitative traits in oilseed crops remains more challenging as the underlying genetic determinants are still poorly understood. Technological advances in sequencing and computing have allowed the development of an association genetics method applicable to crops with complex genomes. Associative transcriptomics approaches and high throughput lipidomic profiling can be used to identify the genetic components controlling quantitative variation for lipid related traits in polyploid crops like oilseed rape and provide molecular tools for marker assisted breeding. In this review we are citing examples of traits with potential for bio-refining that can be harvested as co-products in seeds, but also in non-harvested biomass