Stress Response to Long Distance Transportation of Common Carp (Cyprinus carpio L.)

The stress responses and changes in biochemical and haematological indices were investigated in three-year-old common carp (Cyprinus carpio L.) during a long-distance transportation in special truck tanks. Twelve-hour transportation caused a significant increase in ammonia (p < 0.01), mean corpuscular volume MCV (p < 0.01), metamyelocytes ( p < 0.05) and band neutrophils (p < 0.01), and a significant decrease in Cl- (p < 0.05), lactate (p < 0.05), ALT (p < 0.05) and ALP (p < 0.01) levels. The values of LDH (p < 0.01), AST (p < 0.05), CK (p < 0.01) and haematocrit PCV (p < 0.05) were also significantly influenced by the transportation, but no time-dependent relation was found. On the contrary, the levels of cortisol, glucose and total protein in the biochemical profile, and the values of erythrocyte count (RBC), haemoglobin (Hb), mean corpuscular haemoglobin (MCH), mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration (MCHC), leukocyte counts (WBC) and leukogram (except for metamyelocytes and band neutrophils) in the haematological profile were not significantly influenced by the transportation. Results showed that pre-transport fish manipulation (hauling, netting, handling, loading) was found to be an important stressor for fish. Long-distance transportation itself was relatively considerate for the common carp tested

Influence of Sowing, Nitrogen Nutrition and Weather Conditions on Stand Structure and Yield of Spring Barley

The processes of stand structure and yield formation of spring barley were studied under different weather conditions and crop management. The multifactorial small-plot trials focused on the combined effect of variety, sowing density and nitrogen nutrition were carried out in two years with contrast weather conditions for yield formation (2011 and 2013). Evaluation of the above-ground biomass and the segmentation of tillers into three groups was conducted in four growth stages (BBCH 25, 31, 39 and 75). The performed analyses confirmed that for effective use of inputs and high yield, it is important to create a sufficient number of strong tillers at the beginning of vegetation. In year with low proportion of strong tillers at the end of tillering (2013), the differentiation of tillers is delayed and their productivity decreases. In this year therefore, yield formation is shifted from the number of spikes to the number of grains in a spike. The comparison of barley genotypes revealed that high yield plasticity can be obtained especially in the variety Bojos, which is able to compensate effectively the changes in spike number by increased grain number in a spike. This variety is also able to create a high proportion of strong tillers even under unfavourable conditions. This knowledge could help to improve the breeding and management strategy in spring barley for the expected weather conditions in the near future, especially higher temperatures in early spring

SiteBinder: an improved approach for comparing multiple protein structural motifs.

There is a paramount need to develop new techniques and tools that will extract as much information as possible from the ever growing repository of protein 3D structures. We report here on the development of a software tool for the multiple superimposition of large sets of protein structural motifs. Our superimposition methodology performs a systematic search for the atom pairing that provides the best fit. During this search, the RMSD values for all chemically relevant pairings are calculated by quaternion algebra. The number of evaluated pairings is markedly decreased by using PDB annotations for atoms. This approach guarantees that the best fit will be found and can be applied even when sequence similarity is low or does not exist at all. We have implemented this methodology in the Web application SiteBinder, which is able to process up to thousands of protein structural motifs in a very short time, and which provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface. Our benchmarking analysis has shown the robustness, efficiency, and versatility of our methodology and its implementation by the successful superimposition of 1000 experimentally determined structures for each of 32 eukaryotic linear motifs. We also demonstrate the applicability of SiteBinder using three case studies. We first compared the structures of 61 PA-IIL sugar binding sites containing nine different sugars, and we found that the sugar binding sites of PA-IIL and its mutants have a conserved structure despite their binding different sugars. We then superimposed over 300 zinc finger central motifs and revealed that the molecular structure in the vicinity of the Zn atom is highly conserved. Finally, we superimposed 12 BH3 domains from pro-apoptotic proteins. Our findings come to support the hypothesis that there is a structural basis for the functional segregation of BH3-only proteins into activators and enablers

Effects of Metazachlor on Vitellogenin Induction in Zebrafish (Danio rerio)

The influence of metazachlor on vitellogenesis in juvenile (20 days old) zebrafish (Danio rerio) was investigated after ambient water exposure to concentrations of 0.1, 1.0 and 5.0 mg l-1 of the chloroacetanilide herbicide Butisan 400 SC containing approximately 35.6% (w/w) metazachlor. After 20 days of exposure, vitellogenin concentrations in whole-body homogenates of the fish were measured by direct sandwich ELISA. The results were compared to vitellogenin concentrations in fish from both negative (no exposure) and positive (exposed to natural oestrogen 17β-oestradiol) control groups. Exposure to Butisan 400 SC at a concentration of 5.0 mg l-1 induced vitellogenin synthesis significantly compared to the control fish (p < 0.05). The oestrogenic effect of 17β-oestradiol was confirmed