RNA-viromics reveals diverse communities of soil RNA viruses with the potential to affect grassland ecosystems across multiple trophic levels

The distribution and diversity of RNA viruses in soil ecosystems are largely unknown, despite their significant impact on public health, ecosystem functions, and food security. Here, we characterise soil RNA viral communities along an altitudinal productivity gradient of peat, managed grassland and coastal soils. We identified 3462 viral contigs in RNA viromes from purified virus-like-particles in five soil-types and assessed their spatial distribution, phylogenetic diversity and potential host ranges. Soil types exhibited minimal similarity in viral community composition, but with >10-fold more viral contigs shared between managed grassland soils when compared with peat or coastal soils. Phylogenetic analyses predicted soil RNA viral communities are formed from viruses of bacteria, plants, fungi, vertebrates and invertebrates, with only 12% of viral contigs belonging to the bacteria-infecting Leviviricetes class. 11% of viral contigs were found to be most closely related to members of the Ourmiavirus genus, suggesting that members of this clade of plant viruses may be far more widely distributed and diverse than previously thought. These results contrast with soil DNA viromes which are typically dominated by bacteriophages. RNA viral communities, therefore, have the potential to exert influence on inter-kingdom interactions across terrestrial biomes

Evaluation Techniques for the Corrosion Resistance of Self-Healing Coatings

Self-healing coatings, materials that autonomically repair damage, are a method of extending the life of corrosion prevention coatings. The different types of self-healing coatings are briefly outlined. A review of the evaluation methods of the performance of self-healing coatings using electrochemical, surface and microscopy techniques are provided. Both global and local evaluation techniques are reviewed with emphasis on the most used electrochemical techniques as well as suggestions for alternative electrochemical techniques for self-healing coating evaluation

Semi-supervised prediction of protein interaction sentences exploiting semantically encoded metrics

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) identification is an integral component of many biomedical research and database curation tools. Automation of this task through classification is one of the key goals of text mining (TM). However, labelled PPI corpora required to train classifiers are generally small. In order to overcome this sparsity in the training data, we propose a novel method of integrating corpora that do not contain relevance judgements. Our approach uses a semantic language model to gather word similarity from a large unlabelled corpus. This additional information is integrated into the sentence classification process using kernel transformations and has a re-weighting effect on the training features that leads to an 8% improvement in F-score over the baseline results. Furthermore, we discover that some words which are generally considered indicative of interactions are actually neutralised by this process

Rapid invasion of anthropogenic CO2 into the deep circulation of the Weddell Gyre

Data are presented for total carbon dioxide (TCO2), oxygen and nutrients from 14 cruises covering two repeat sections across the Weddell Gyre, from 1973 to 2010. Assessments of the rate of increase in anthropogenic CO2 (Cant) are made at three locations. Along the Prime Meridian, TCO2 is observed to steadily increase in the bottom water. Accompanying changes in silicate, nitrate and oxygen confirm the non-steady state of the Weddell circulation. The rate of increase in TCO2 of +0.12±0.05?µmol?kg-1?yr-1 therefore poses an upper limit to the rate of increase in Cant. By contrast, the bottom water located in the central Weddell Sea exhibits no significant increase in TCO2, suggesting that this water is less well ventilated at the southern margins of the Weddell Sea. At the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula (i.e. the formation region of the bottom water found at the Prime Meridian), the high rate of increase in TCO2 over time observed at the lowest temperatures suggests that nearly full equilibration occurs with the anthropogenic CO2 of the atmosphere. This observation constitutes rare evidence for the possibility that ice cover is not a major impediment for uptake of Cant in this prominent deep water formation region

Rapid acidification of mode and intermediate waters in the southwestern Atlantic Ocean

Observations along the southwestern Atlantic WOCE A17 line made during the Dutch GEOTRACES-NL programme (2010–2011) were compared with historical data from 1994 to quantify the changes in the anthropogenic component of the total pool of dissolved inorganic carbon (?Cant). Application of the extended multi-linear regression (eMLR) method shows that the ?Cant from 1994 to 2011 has largely remained confined to the upper 1000 dbar. The greatest changes occur in the upper 200 dbar in the Subantarctic Zone (SAZ), where a maximum increase of 37 µmol kg-1 is found. South Atlantic Central Water (SACW) experienced the highest rate of increase in Cant, at 0.99 ± 0.14 µmol kg-1 yr-1, resulting in a maximum rate of decrease in pH of 0.0016 yr-1. The highest rates of acidification relative to ?Cant, however, were found in Subantarctic Mode Water (SAMW) and Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW). The low buffering capacity of SAMW and AAIW combined with their relatively high rates of Cant, increase of 0.53 ± 0.11 and 0.36 ± 0.06 µmol kg-1 yr-1, respectively, has lead to rapid acidification in the SAZ, and will continue to do so whilst simultaneously reducing the chemical buffering capacity of this significant CO2 sink

Tunable cw UV laser with <35 kHz absolute frequency instability for precision spectroscopy of Sr Rydberg states

We present a solid-state laser system that generates over 200 mW of continuous-wave, narrowband light, tunable from 316.3 nm – 317.7 nm and 318.0 nm – 319.3 nm. The laser is based on commercially available fiber amplifiers and optical frequency doubling technology, along with sum frequency generation in a periodically poled stoichiometric lithium tantalate crystal. The laser frequency is stabilized to an atomic-referenced high finesse optical transfer cavity. Using a GPS-referenced optical frequency comb we measure a long term frequency instability of < 35 kHz for timescales between 10−3 s and 103 s. As an application we perform spectroscopy of Sr Rydberg states from n = 37 – 81, demonstrating mode-hop-free scans of 24 GHz. In a cold atomic sample we measure Doppler-limited linewidths of 350 kHz

Towards a Formal Verification Methodology for Collective Robotic Systems

We introduce a UML-based notation for graphically modeling systems’ security aspects in a simple and intuitive way and a model-driven process that transforms graphical specifications of access control policies in XACML. These XACML policies are then translated in FACPL, a policy language with a formal semantics, and the resulting policies are evaluated by means of a Java-based software tool

Tackling Systematic Errors in Quantum Logic Gates with Composite Rotations

We describe the use of composite rotations to combat systematic errors in single qubit quantum logic gates and discuss three families of composite rotations which can be used to correct off-resonance and pulse length errors. Although developed and described within the context of NMR quantum computing these sequences should be applicable to any implementation of quantum computation.Comment: 6 pages RevTex4 including 4 figures. Will submit to Phys. Rev.

The leading particle effect from light quark fragmentation in charm hadroproduction

The asymmetry of $D^-$ and $D^+$ meson production in $\pi^-N$ scattering observed by the E791 experiment is a typical phenomenon known as the leading particle effect in charm hadroproducton. We show that the phenomenon can be explained by the effect of light quark fragmentation into charmed hadrons (LQF). Meanwhile, the size of the LQF effect is estimated from data of the E791 experiment. A comparison is made with the estimate of the LQF effect from prompt like-sign dimuon rate in neutrino experiments. The influence of the LQF effect on the measurement of nucleon strange distribution asymmetry from charged current charm production processes is briefly discussed.Comment: 6 latex pages, 1 figure, to appear in EPJ