Genetic diversity among some blackberry cultivars and their relationship with Boysenberry assessed by AFLP Markers

Blackberry cultivation has increased its popularity in Turkey due to the use of more blackberries in Turkish cuisine. To provide farmers with well adapted blackberry cultivars, some blackberry cultivars including a Boysenberry genotype from North America has been planted to various geographical regions in Turkey. In this study, genetic diversity among these blackberry cultivars and their genetic relationship with Boysenberry and raspberry were analyzed using AFLP markers. Our results indicated that Blackberry cultivars from North America had narrow genetic background which can pose a problem for future breeding programs. Blackberry genotypes selected from Bursa province of Turkey shared all AFLP markers with the cultivar Chester, which suggests that they were not unique genotypes. Although genetic similarity between Boysenberry and blackberry was low, Boysenberry wasgenetically related to common blackberry cultivars. On the other hand, AFLP analysis was unable to detect any genetic relationship between Boysenberry and common raspberry cultivars from North America in this study

A Dinner Story: A feast on tableness and visceral hands

This story has emerged as an outcome of a hybrid workshop entitled “A Feast on Tableness and Visceral Hands”, conducted both online and face-to-face in a physical environment as a response to the Covid-19 precautions, between August 16th-27th, 2021 with fourteen participants. Rather than splitting the group into two distinct groups, we aimed to create a hybrid collaboration between the two seemingly separate realms through several projective montage techniques, with the hope to set a critical drawing practice in architecture. The workshop invited the participants to venture into a dream of consecutive feasts and its tables, exploring ‘a spatial viscerality’ through variegated experiments on obscure relations between eating, speaking and drawing. Commencing with challenging the dilemma between eating and speaking, which reflects the traditional opposition between the bodily realm of food and the intellectual realm of the ‘word’, the workshop critically suggested exploring the liberating modes of macaronic speaking: speaking while eating, misreading texts and transcribing the visceral sound of the mouth. As Manuela Antoniu (2017) draws our attention, that although macaronic languages - or more specifically macaronic Latin is closely related with kitchen Latin, ars macaronica could be interpreted as another quest for a “non-Latin Latin” (p.38). She (2017) writes, “exploiting the etymological proximity between Latin and Italian, macaronic Latin poured the former into the mold of the latter while also using words common to both languages, yet perverting them semantically, to comic effect.” (p.39) Thus, this “macaronic inventiveness”, plays with the fixed-form of a language and transforms it into a playful, unconfined narrative that encourages several delays in understanding the text. This ‘delayful’ act dissolves simultaneously authorial boundaries and opens a variety of interpretive acts of mis-reading and mis-writing. The feasts as gatherings became the spatiotemporal set for these inventive acts. As Jeanneret (1991) points out, “The symposiac ideal reconciles the angel and the beast in the human, and it renews the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks.” (p.2) Extending the macaronic actions into the realm of architectural drawing, we open a playful exchange between the material and the immaterial through hands-on speculations on the viscerality of drawings, hands, tables and table talks. With these intentions, foods, mouths, texts, drawings, tablecloths, fridges, hands and bellies are blended together. Thus, as we proceed with each feast, all these aforementioned ingredients appear in the hybrid workshop-studio sometimes as sites, sometimes as tools and sometimes as materials to bear visceral explorations of the macaronic speaking with regard to architectural drawing. The question of visceral hands is posed in an allegorical skillset in ambition to challenge our modes of making and drawing in architectural design practice. Acquiring a simultaneity of multiple meanings (Haralambidou, 2007) and playing with the construction of text (Bloomer, 1993), allegory calls for an indecisive multiplication, a re-narration and mis-construction in its critical nature. Following personal explorations in macaronic experience, the participants looked for a multiplication of possible authors, readers and texts of a drawing by re-narrating their macaronic personas embodying the mis-constructed double of their hands through a macaronically-skilled tool. Exploring the possibilities of macaronic inventiveness also through the projective audio-visual, haptic juxtapositions of online and face-to-face participation, the set transforms into a spatiotemporal act that welcomes polyphony with no systematic order: moving cameras, moving projectors, delayed network connections critically challenge the boundaries of drawing, hand, body and table. Thereby the feasts become a venture for a ‘non-Table Table’ that breaks the fixed-form of architectural drawing set into a playful, delayful dinner story. Entailing a dinner story as a magical mis-construction that “escapes the possibility of narration” (Cixous, 2013), the feasts open space for possibilities of a non-Table and call for a critical drawing practice

Self-Supervised CSF Inpainting with Synthetic Atrophy for Improved Accuracy Validation of Cortical Surface Analyses

Accuracy validation of cortical thickness measurement is a difficult problem due to the lack of ground truth data. To address this need, many methods have been developed to synthetically induce gray matter (GM) atrophy in an MRI via deformable registration, creating a set of images with known changes in cortical thickness. However, these methods often cause blurring in atrophied regions, and cannot simulate realistic atrophy within deep sulci where cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is obscured or absent. In this paper, we present a solution using a self-supervised inpainting model to generate CSF in these regions and create images with more plausible GM/CSF boundaries. Specifically, we introduce a novel, 3D GAN model that incorporates patch-based dropout training, edge map priors, and sinusoidal positional encoding, all of which are established methods previously limited to 2D domains. We show that our framework significantly improves the quality of the resulting synthetic images and is adaptable to unseen data with fine-tuning. We also demonstrate that our resulting dataset can be employed for accuracy validation of cortical segmentation and thickness measurement.Comment: Accepted at Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL) 202

From Sandbox to Pandemic: Agile Reform of Canadian Drug Regulation

Public health urgency for emerging COVID-19 treatments and vaccines challenges regulators worldwide to ensure safety and efficacy while expediting approval. In Canada, legislative amendments by 2019 Om- nibus Bill C-97 created a new agile licensing framework known as the Advanced Therapeutic Pathway (ATPathway) and modernized the regulation of clinical trials of drugs, vaccines, and medical devices. Bill C-97′s amendments are worthy of attention in Canada and globally, as health product regulation bends to COVID-19. The amendments follow reforms elsewhere to accommodate health product innovation, how- ever, the Canadian ATPathway is broader and more flexible than its counterparts in other jurisdictions. In addition, Bill C-97 informed Canada’s COVID-19 response in important ways, particularly in relation to clinical trials. The measures adopted by the drug regulatory authority, Health Canada (HC) during COVID- 19 may become the new norm in Canadian regulatory practice insofar as they help achieve the amend- ments introduced by Bill C-97. Finally, despite government rhetoric of transparency, the agenda-setting, formulation, and implementation of the amendments have occurred with little opportunity for scrutiny or public engagement

Genetic relationships among olive (Olea europaea L.) cultivars native to Croatia and Turkey

The aim of the study is to determine genetic diversity and relationships among olive cultivars native to Croatia and Turkey. A total of twenty olive (Olea europaea L.) cultivars including fourteen from Croatia and six common cultivars from Turkey were analyzed for genetic diversity and relationships by using six microsatellite markers (DCA05, DCA09, DCA18, GAPU71B, GAPU101, UDO43). The number of polymorphic alleles ranged from 2 (UDO43) to 5 (DCA09), with an average of 3.6  fragments per marker. UPGMA cluster analysis based on simple matching similarity matrix grouped cultivars into three main clusters. Two pairs of cultivars from Croatia ("Buža muška" and Levantinka"; "VLMD6" and "Drobnica") were thought to be different, although they produced identical SSR profi les. Cluster analysis points to some genetic relationships between Croatian and Turkish olive cultivars. The results also indicate effi ciency of SSR markers to evaluate genetic diversity in olive and identify misnamed or synonym individuals

Quantum phases in entropic dynamics

In the Entropic Dynamics framework the dynamics is driven by maximizing entropy subject to appropriate constraints. In this work we bring Entropic Dynamics one step closer to full equivalence with quantum theory by identifying constraints that lead to wave functions that remain single-valued even for multi-valued phases by recognizing the intimate relation between quantum phases, gauge symmetry, and charge quantization.Comment: Presented at MaxEnt 2017, the 37th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering (July 9-14, 2017, Jarinu, Brazil