Rust-Bio - a fast and safe bioinformatics library

We present Rust-Bio, the first general purpose bioinformatics library for the innovative Rust programming language. Rust-Bio leverages the unique combination of speed, memory safety and high-level syntax offered by Rust to provide a fast and safe set of bioinformatics algorithms and data structures with a focus on sequence analysis

A Python based automated tracking routine for myosin II filaments

The study of motor protein dynamics within cytoskeletal networks is of high interest to physicists and biologists to understand how the dynamics and properties of individual motors lead to cooperative effects and control of overall network behaviour. Here, we report a method to detect and track muscular myosin II filaments within an actin network tethered to supported lipid bilayers. Based on the characteristic shape of myosin II filaments, this automated tracking routine allowed us to follow the position and orientation of myosin II filaments over time, and to reliably classify their dynamics into segments of diffusive and processive motion based on the analysis of displacements and angular changes between time steps. This automated, high throughput method will allow scientists to efficiently analyse motor dynamics in different conditions, and will grant access to more detailed information than provided by common tracking methods, without any need for time consuming manual tracking or generation of kymographs

CAVIAR: Climate variability of the Baltic Sea area and the response of the general circulation of the Baltic Sea to climate variability

The warming trend for the entire globe (1850-2005) is 0.04°C per decade. A specific warming period started around 1980 and continues at least until 2005, with a temperature increase of about 0.17°C per decade. This trend is equally well evident for many areas on the globe, especially on the northern hemisphere in observations and climate simulations. For the Baltic Sea catchment, which lies between maritime temperate and continental sub-Arctic climate zones, an even stronger warming of about 0.4°C per decade appeared since 1980. The annual mean air temperature increased by about 1°C until 2004. A similar warming trend could be observed for the sea surface temperature of the Baltic Sea. Even the annual mean water temperatures averaged spatially and vertically for the deep basins of the Baltic Sea show similar trends. We provide a detailed analysis of the climate variability and associated changes in the Baltic Sea catchment area as well as in the Baltic Sea itself for the period 1958-2009, in which the recent acceleration of the climate warming happened. Changes in the atmospheric conditions causes corresponding changes in the Baltic Sea, not only for temperature and salinity but also for currents and circulation. These changes in the physical conditions have strong impact on the marine ecosystem structure and processes

Effect of Age and Food Novelty on Food Memory

The influence of age of the consumer and food novelty on incidentally learned food memory was investigated by providing a meal containing novel and familiar target items under the pretense of a study on hunger feelings to 34 young and 36 older participants in France and to 24 young and 20 older participants in Denmark and testing them a day later on recognition of the targets among a set of distractors that were variations of the target made by adding or subtracting taste (sour or sweet) or aroma (orange or red berry flavor). Memory was also tested by asking participants to indicate whether the target and the distractors were equal to or less or more intense than the remembered target in sourness sweetness and aroma. The results showed that when novelty is defined as whether people know or not a given product, it has a strong influence on memory performance, but that age did not, the elderly performing just as well as the young. The change in the distractors was more readily detected with familiar than with novel targets where the participants were still confused by the target itself. Special attention is given to the influence of the incidental learning paradigm on the outcome and to the ways in which it differs from traditional recognition experiments

Local Nature of Coset Models

The local algebras of the maximal Coset model C_max associated with a chiral conformal subtheory A\subset B are shown to coincide with the local relative commutants of A in B, provided A contains a stress energy tensor. Making the same assumption, the adjoint action of the unique inner-implementing representation U^A associated with A\subset B on the local observables in B is found to define net-endomorphisms of B. This property is exploited for constructing from B a conformally covariant holographic image in 1+1 dimensions which proves useful as a geometric picture for the joint inclusion A\vee C_max \subset B. Immediate applications to the analysis of current subalgebras are given and the relation to normal canonical tensor product subfactors is clarified. A natural converse of Borchers' theorem on half-sided translations is made accessible.Comment: 33 pages, no figures; typos, minor improvement