6,944 research outputs found
GAL4 Drivers Specific for Type Ib and Type Is Motor Neurons in Drosophila.
The Drosophila melanogaster larval neuromuscular system is extensively used by researchers to study neuronal cell biology, and Drosophila glutamatergic motor neurons have become a major model system. There are two main Types of glutamatergic motor neurons, Ib and Is, with different structural and physiological properties at synaptic level at the neuromuscular junction. To generate genetic tools to identify and manipulate motor neurons of each Type, we screened for GAL4 driver lines for this purpose. Here we describe GAL4 drivers specific for examples of neurons within each Type, Ib or Is. These drivers showed high expression levels and were expressed in only few motor neurons, making them amenable tools for specific studies of both axonal and synapse biology in identified Type I motor neurons.This work was supported by grant BB/L021706/1 from the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to CJO’K, and Marie Sklodowska-Curie 19 fellowship 745007 from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme to JJPM
Beach Nourishment: A 21st Century Review
Long-term erosion is experienced by most of the coastlines worldwide, and it is usually attributed not only to sea level rise but also to the retention of sand in dams, the occupation of dry beaches by urbanized areas, the disturbance of the natural patterns of longshore drift, the mining of sand as building material for construction, and so on. Beach nourishment has evolved as the favored erosion-mitigation strategy in many areas of the world. The increasing number of people living on the coast, the safety of those people, and the high values of coastal property are all factors that have made beach nourishment a cost-effective strategy for managing erosion in many locations. However, a new scenario of sand scarcity and environmental care has arisen in recent decades. There have been a number of different and interesting cases of various aspects of beach nourishment in the last years. The purpose of this Special Issue has been to publish the different experiences and research related to this topic.
After a careful review process, nine papers were included. Their thematic contributions include the use of field methods such as the use of remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) or un-manned aerial vehicles (UAV) for faster and automated mapping of the coastal area or the acquisition of geomagnetic data in marine environments; the use of multi-approach methodologies to assess the interaction between coastal structures and beaches and in particular of submerged pipelines; the need to adopt a plan for the optimal use of limited resources of available sediment from a regional perspective and the assessment of the effectiveness of beach nourishments; the understanding of the role of submerged geological control of beach profiles together with the implementation of innovative beach nourishment strategies while facing the non-trivial challenge of visualizing and communicating mesoscale modeling assumptions, uncertainties and outcomes to both coastal specialists and decision makers; and the influence of sea-level rise and erosion on diminution of beach habitats
Visual Spike-based Convolution Processing with a Cellular Automata Architecture
this paper presents a first approach for
implementations which fuse the Address-Event-Representation
(AER) processing with the Cellular Automata using FPGA and
AER-tools. This new strategy applies spike-based convolution
filters inspired by Cellular Automata for AER vision
processing. Spike-based systems are neuro-inspired circuits
implementations traditionally used for sensory systems or
sensor signal processing. AER is a neuromorphic
communication protocol for transferring asynchronous events
between VLSI spike-based chips. These neuro-inspired
implementations allow developing complex, multilayer,
multichip neuromorphic systems and have been used to design
sensor chips, such as retinas and cochlea, processing chips, e.g.
filters, and learning chips. Furthermore, Cellular Automata is a
bio-inspired processing model for problem solving. This
approach divides the processing synchronous cells which
change their states at the same time in order to get the solution.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TEC2006-11730-C03-02Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2009-10639-C04-02Junta de Andalucía P06-TIC-0141
Maximizing the hyperpolarizability of one-dimensional systems
Previous studies have used numerical methods to optimize the
hyperpolarizability of a one-dimensional quantum system. These studies were
used to suggest properties of one-dimensional organic molecules, such as the
degree of modulation of conjugation, that could potentially be adjusted to
improve the nonlinear-optical response. However, there were no conditions set
on the optimized potential energy function to ensure that the resulting
energies were consistent with what is observed in real molecules. Furthermore,
the system was placed into a one-dimensional box with infinite walls, forcing
the wavefunctions to vanish at the ends of the molecule. In the present work,
the walls are separated by a distance much larger than the molecule's length;
and, the variations of the potential energy function are restricted to levels
that are more typical of a real molecule. In addition to being a more
physically-reasonable model, our present approach better approximates the bound
states and approximates the continuum states - which are usually ignored. We
find that the same universal properties continue to be important for optimizing
the nonlinear-optical response, though the details of the wavefunctions differ
from previous result.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure
New Insights Into Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) FatA and FatB Thioesterases, Their Regulation, Structure and Distribution
Sunflower seeds (Helianthus annuus L.) accumulate large quantities of triacylglycerols (TAG) between 12 and 28 days after flowering (DAF). This is the period of maximal acyl-acyl carrier protein (acyl-ACP) thioesterase activity in vitro, the enzymes that terminate the process of de novo fatty acid synthesis by catalyzing the hydrolysis of the acyl-ACPs synthesized by fatty acid synthase. Fatty acid thioesterases can be classified into two families with distinct substrate specificities, namely FatA and FatB. Here, some new aspects of these enzymes have been studied, assessing how both enzymes contribute to the acyl composition of sunflower oil, not least through the changes in their expression during the process of seed filling. Moreover, the binding pockets of these enzymes were modeled based on new data from plant thioesterases, revealing important differences in their volume and geometry. Finally, the subcellular location of the two enzymes was evaluated and while both possess an N-terminal plastid transit peptide, only in FatB contains a hydrophobic sequence that could potentially serve as a transmembrane domain. Indeed, using in vivo imaging and organelle fractionation, H. annuus thioesterases, HaFatA and HaFatB, appear to be differentially localized in the plastid stroma and membrane envelope, respectively. The divergent roles fulfilled by HaFatA and HaFatB in oil biosynthesis are discussed in the light of our data.España MINECO y FEDER Projects AGL2014- 53537-R y AGL2017-83449-
Free Form of the Foldy-Wouthuysen Transformation in External Electromagnetic Fields
We derive the exact Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation for Dirac fermions in a
time independent external electromagnetic field in the basis of the Ritus
eigenfunctions, namely the eigenfunctions of the operator , with . In this basis, the transformation
acquires a free form involving the dynamical quantum numbers induced by the
field.Comment: 8 pages. Accepted in J. Phys. A: Math. and Theo. (Fast Track
Communication
Quantitative weighted mixed weak-type inequalities for classical operators
We improve on several mixed weak-type inequalities both for the Hardy-Littlewood maximal function and for Calderón-Zygmund operators. These types of inequalities were considered by Muckenhoupt and Wheeden and later on by Sawyer estimating the L1,∞(uv) norm of v −1T (f v) for special cases. The emphasis is made in proving new and more precise quantitative
estimates involving the Ap or A∞ constants of the weights involved.Ministerio de Economía y CompetitividadUniversidad Nacional del SurConsejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Argentina
Weak type estimates for singular integrals related to a dual problem of Muckenhoupt-Wheeden
A well known open problem of Muckenhoupt-Wheeden says that any Calderón-Zygmund singular integral operator T is of weak type (1, 1) with respect to a couple of weights (w, Mw). In this paper we consider a somewhat “dual” problem: sup λ>0 λw x ∈ R n : |T f(x)| Mw > λ ≤ c Z Rn |f| dx. We prove a weaker version of this inequality with M3w instead of Mw. Also we study a related question about the behavior of the constant in terms of the A1 characteristic of w.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci
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