Hybrid R&D

We develop a model of R&D competition and collaboration in which individual firms carry out independent in-house research and also undertake joint research projects with other firms. We examine the impact of collaboration on in-house research and explore the circumstances under which a hybrid organization of R&D which combines the two is optimal for firms and society. We find that investments in independent research and in joint research are complementary. Firm profits are highest under a hybrid organization if the number of firms is small; otherwise they are highest with pure in-house research. However, social welfare is maximized under a hybrid organization of R&D in all cases. Our analysis also yields new results on the role of cooperative R&D. Non-cooperative firm decision making leads to more R&D and higher social welfare than fully cooperative decision making. However, bilateral cooperation in joint projects and non-cooperative decision making in in-house research yields the highest level of welfare in concentrated industries

Simulation of the Pneumatic System of a Seed Drill with a Vertical Flow Direction

The purpose of the work is to reveal the influence of conical directing agents on the speed and trajectory of particles movement in the vertical pneumatic conduit of the sowing machine and to establish their rational parameters. With the help of numerical modeling the particle flight trajectories in the air flow were obtained. The carried out researches have shown expediency of application of the conical directing agent, allowing to take away a longitudinal stream of particles from walls of a pneumatic conduit and to centre their trajectories of movement along an axis of a pneumatic conduit. Particles are focused to the center of the distributor when the distributor covers the area of pneumatic conduit cross-section close to 25%

Innovative project “U-sport” as part of the implementation of the discipline “Applied physical culture and sports” in the Siberian Federal University

The number of people systematically engaged in physical culture and sports, by decree of the President of the Russian Federation, should increase up to 85% by 2024. In this regard, one of the main and urgent tasks of the departments of physical education (culture) is the involvement of modern youth in physical education and sports classes of a different content or in technologies of managing this process, as well as maintaining motivation for a systematic approach to classes. Universities with a large contingent of students try to solve this problem in different ways and implement disciplines in physical culture and sports at a high professional level. The national program Digital Economy of the Russian Federation and rapidly changing information technologies urged the Institute and the University on the whole to conduct this experiment. The purpose of the work was testing of the effectiveness of the original digital board-form “U-sport” for getting the students involved in practical classes in the discipline “Applied Physical Culture and Sports” at the Department of Physical Culture of the Institute of Physical Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Siberian Federal University and considering the registration of students in all areas and specialties of full-time education. The working hypothesis was the assumption that the proposed solution would increase the motivation of students due to their choosing a physical education and sports specialization, an object and a territorial unit. The number of participants in the experiment of the Siberian Federal University, amounting to 12,880 people from 20 institutes and 125 teachers, shows that this is the largest study in the framework of one university in the field of physical culture and sports in recent years

Screening, identification, and antibiotic activity of secondary metabolites of Penicillium sp. LPB2019K3-2 isolated from endemic amphipods of Lake Baikal

This study aimed to assess the influence of nutrient media content on the production of antibiotics and the ability of water fungi isolated from lake Baikal to synthesize novel natural products. Interest in this topic stems from the high demand for new drugs, and studies are carried out via the screening of new natural products with biological activity produced by unstudied or extremophilic microorganisms. For this study, a strain of Penicillium sp. was isolated from endemic Baikal phytophagous amphipod species. Here, we identified natural products using the following classical assays: biotechnological cultivation, MALDI identification of the strain, natural product extraction, antimicrobial activity determination, and modern methods such as HPLC-MS for the dereplication and description of natural products. It was found that many detected metabolites were not included in the most extensive database. Most of the identified metabolites were characterized by their biological activity and demonstrated antibiotic activity against model Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. The isolated strain of water fungus produced penicolinate B, meleagrin A, austinoneol A, andrastin A, and other natural products. Additionally, we show that the synthesis of low-molecular-weight natural products depends on the composition of the microbiological nutrient media used for cultivation. Thus, although the golden age of antibiotics ended many years ago and microscopic fungi are well studied producers of known antibiotics, the water fungi of the Lake Baikal ecosystem possess great potential in the search for new natural products for the development of new drugs. These natural products can become new pharmaceuticals and can be used in therapy to treat new diseases such as SARS, MERS, H5N1, etc

FIRST REPORT ON TRUFFLE-INHABITING FUNGI AND METAGENOMIC COMMUNITIES OF TUBER AESTIVUM COLLECTED IN RUSSIA

Truffles are one of the least studied groups of fungi in terms of their biological and biotechnological aspects. This study aimed to isolate truffle-inhabiting fungi and assess the metagenomic communities of the most common Russian summer truffle, Tuber aestivum. This study is the first to characterize the biodiversity of prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms living in the truffle T. aestivum using molecular analysis and sequencing. Plant pathogens involved in a symbiotic relationship with truffles were identified by sequencing the hypervariable fragments of the 16S rRNA and 18S rRNA genes. In addition, some strains of fungal symbionts and likely pathogens were isolated and recognized for the first time from the truffles. This study also compared and characterized the general diversity and distribution of microbial taxa of T. aestivum collected in Russia and Europe. The results revealed that the Russian and European truffle study materials demonstrated high similarity. In addition to the truffles, representatives of bacteria, fungi, and protists were found in the fruiting bodies. Many of these prokaryotic and eukaryotic species inhabiting truffles might influence them, help them form mycorrhizae with trees, and regulate biological processes. Thus, truffles are interesting and promising sources for modern biotechnological and agricultural studies

Novel self-assembling system based on resorcinarene and cationic surfactant

Mixed association of calix[4]resorcinarene with ethyl sulfonate groups on the lower rim and dimethylaminomethyl groups on the upper rim (CR) and cationic surfactant 4-aza-1-hexadecyl-azoniabicyclo[2.2.2]octane bromide (DABCO-16) is studied by methods of tensiometry, conductometry, potentiometry and NMR spectroscopy at fixed CR concentration and varied surfactant concentration. Beyond ca. 0.4 mM of DABCO-16, mixed aggregates enriched by CR are proved to be formed due to electrostatic forces, while beyond ca. 5 mM, aggregates enriched by surfactant occur due to the hydrophobic effect. Spectrophotometry monitoring of the solubilization of a hydrophobic dye, Orange OT, demonstrated that only the second type of mixed aggregate enriched by DABCO-16 is capable of binding the organic probe, while the mixed system where the surfactant is a minor component shows no binding capacity towards Orange OT. This finding can be used for the design of nanocontainers with controllable binding/release properties.Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich

Ten Simple Rules for Taking Advantage of Git and GitHub.

Bioinformatics is a broad discipline in which one common denominator is the need to produce and/or use software that can be applied to biological data in different contexts. To enable and ensure the replicability and traceability of scientific claims, it is essential that the scientific publication, the corresponding datasets, and the data analysis are made publicly available [1,2]. All software used for the analysis should be either carefully documented (e.g., for commercial software) or, better yet, openly shared and directly accessible to others [3,4]. The rise of openly available software and source code alongside concomitant collaborative development is facilitated by the existence of several code repository services such as SourceForge, Bitbucket, GitLab, and GitHub, among others. These resources are also essential for collaborative software projects because they enable the organization and sharing of programming tasks between different remote contributors. Here, we introduce the main features of GitHub, a popular web-based platform that offers a free and integrated environment for hosting the source code, documentation, and project-related web content for open-source projects. GitHub also offers paid plans for private repositories (see Box 1) for individuals and businesses as well as free plans including private repositories for research and educational use.Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research CouncilThis is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Public Library of Science via https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004947

Analysis of meteorology-chemistry interactions during air pollution episodes using online coupled models within AQMEII Phase-2

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).This study reviews the top ranked meteorology and chemistry interactions in online coupled models recommended by an experts’ survey conducted in COST Action EuMetChem and examines the sensitivity of those interactions during two pollution episodes: the Russian forest fires 25 Jul -15 Aug 2010 and a Saharan dust transport event from 1 Oct -31 Oct 2010 as a part of the AQMEII phase-2 exercise. Three WRF-Chem model simulations were performed for the forest fire case for a baseline without any aerosol feedback on meteorology, a simulation with aerosol direct effects only and a simulation including both direct and indirect effects. For the dust case study, eight WRF-Chem and one WRF-CMAQ simulations were selected from the set of simulations conducted in the framework of AQMEII. Of these two simulations considered no feedbacks, two included direct effects only and five simulations included both direct and indirect effects. The results from both episodes demonstrate that it is important to include the meteorology and chemistry interactions in online-coupled models. Model evaluations using routine observations collected in AQMEII phase-2 and observations from a station in Moscow show that for the fire case the simulation including only aerosol direct effects has better performance than the simulations with no aerosol feedbacks or including both direct and indirect effects. The normalized mean biases are significantly reduced by 10-20% for PM10 when including aerosol direct effects. The analysis for the dust case confirms that models perform better when including aerosol direct effects, but worse when including both aerosol direct and indirect effects, which suggests that the representation of aerosol indirect effects needs to be improved in the model.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Standalone vertex finding in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

A dedicated reconstruction algorithm to find decay vertices in the ATLAS muon spectrometer is presented. The algorithm searches the region just upstream of or inside the muon spectrometer volume for multi-particle vertices that originate from the decay of particles with long decay paths. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using both a sample of simulated Higgs boson events, in which the Higgs boson decays to long-lived neutral particles that in turn decay to bbar b final states, and pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2011

Measurements of Higgs boson production and couplings in diboson final states with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements are presented of production properties and couplings of the recently discovered Higgs boson using the decays into boson pairs, H →γ γ, H → Z Z∗ →4l and H →W W∗ →lνlν. The results are based on the complete pp collision data sample recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at centre-of-mass energies of √s = 7 TeV and √s = 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 25 fb−1. Evidence for Higgs boson production through vector-boson fusion is reported. Results of combined fits probing Higgs boson couplings to fermions and bosons, as well as anomalous contributions to loop-induced production and decay modes, are presented. All measurements are consistent with expectations for the Standard Model Higgs boson