Literature review of physical and chemical pretreatment processes for lignocellulosic biomass

Different pretreatment technologies published in public literature are described in terms of the mechanisms involved, advantages and disadvantages, and economic assessment. Pretreatment technologies for lignocellulosic biomass include biological, mechanical, chemical methods and various combinations thereof. The choice of the optimum pretreatment process depends very much on the objective of the biomass pretreatment, its economic assessment and environmental impact. Only a small number of pretreatment methods has been reported as being potentially cost-effective thus far. These include steam explosion, liquid hot water, concentrated acid hydrolysis and dilute acid pretreatments

Strong Modification of the Nonlinear Optical Response of Metallic Subwavelength Hole Arrays

The influence of hole shape on the nonlinear optical properties of metallic subwavelength hole arrays is investigated. It is found that the amount of second harmonics generated can be enhanced by changing the hole shape. In part this increase is a direct result of the effect of hole shape on the linear transmission properties. Remarkably, in addition to enhancements that follow directly from the linear properties of the array, we find a hot hole shape. For rectangular holes the effective nonlinear response is enhanced by more than 1 order of magnitude for one particular aspect ratio. This enhancement can be attributed to slow propagation of the fundamental wavelength through the holes which occurs close to the hole cutoff

Using continuous-time spatial capture–recapture models to make inference about animal activity patterns

This work was part‐funded by EPSRC Grant EP/I000917/1, by the research fellowship RF‐2018‐213/9, and the fieldwork was funded by the Summerlee Foundation and Panthera.1. Quantifying the distribution of daily activity is an important component of behavioral ecology. Historically, it has been difficult to obtain data on activity patterns, especially for elusive species. However, the development of affordable camera traps and their widespread usage has led to an explosion of available data from which activity patterns can be estimated. 2. Continuous-time spatial capture?recapture (CT SCR) models drop the occasion structure seen in traditional spatial and nonspatial capture?recapture (CR) models and use the actual times of capture. In addition to estimating density, CT SCR models estimate expected encounters through time. Cyclic splines can be used to allow flexible shapes for modeling cyclic activity patterns, and the fact that SCR models also incorporate distance means that space-time interactions can be explored. This method is applied to a jaguar dataset. 3. Jaguars in Belize are most active and range furthest in the evening and early morning and when they are located closer to the network of trails. There is some evidence that females have a less variable pattern than males. The comparison between sexes demonstrates how CT SCR can be used to explore hypotheses about animal behavior within a formal modeling framework. 4. SCR models were developed primarily to estimate and model density, but the models can be used to explore processes that interact across space and time, especially when using the CT SCR framework that models the temporal dimension at a finer resolution.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Open population maximum likelihood spatial capture-recapture

Funding: Part-funded by UK EPSRC grant EP/K041061/1 (DB); Richard Glennie was funded by the Carnegie Trust.Open population capture‐recapture models are widely used to estimate population demographics and abundance over time. Bayesian methods exist to incorporate open population modeling with spatial capture‐recapture (SCR), allowing for estimation of the effective area sampled and population density. Here, open population SCR is formulated as a hidden Markov model (HMM), allowing inference by maximum likelihood for both Cormack‐Jolly‐Seber and Jolly‐Seber models, with and without activity center movement. The method is applied to a 12‐year survey of male jaguars (Panthera onca) in the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, Belize, to estimate survival probability and population abundance over time. For this application, inference is shown to be biased when assuming activity centers are fixed over time, while including a model for activity center movement provides negligible bias and nominal confidence interval coverage, as demonstrated by a simulation study. The HMM approach is compared with Bayesian data augmentation and closed population models for this application. The method is substantially more computationally efficient than the Bayesian approach and provides a lower root‐mean‐square error in predicting population density compared to closed population models.PostprintPeer reviewe

Studies on the Induction of Antigen-Specific Antibody in Anti-CD40 Cultured Human B Lymphocytes

Costimulatory signals provided by T cells are required for B cells to produce specific antibody to T-dependent antigen. We have investigated the suitability of using the CD40 culture system for the proliferation and differentiation of Ag-specific human B cells using cytomegalovirus (CMV) or tetanus toxoid (TT) as antigen. We modified the CD40 culture system (CD32- transfected L cells, anti-CD40, and IL-4) by applying a sequential cytokine stimulation and compared total B-cell cultures with antigen-specific B cells preselected by panning. The detection of specific antibody became possible when antigen-selected B cells were cultured for 7 days in the CD40 system to induce clonal expansion, followed by the addition of IL-2 and IL10 for an additional 7 days to induce plasma-cell differentiation. We conclude that our intial inability to detect specific antibody in the CD40 system is due to overgrowth of nonspecific B cell clones and that selection of antigen-specific B cells by panning overcomes this problem. Induction of antigen-specific antibody production was found to be optimal when the initial contact with antigen during panning was limited to between 1 to 24 hours

CD4 Effector T Cell Subsets in the Response to Influenza: Heterogeneity, Migration, and Function

The immune response of naive CD4 T cells to influenza virus is initiated in the draining lymph nodes and spleen, and only after effectors are generated do antigen-specific cells migrate to the lung which is the site of infection. The effector cells generated in secondary organs appear as multiple subsets which are a heterogeneous continuum of cells in terms of number of cell divisions, phenotype and function. The effector cells that migrate to the lung constitute the more differentiated of the total responding population, characterized by many cell divisions, loss of CD62L, down-regulation of CCR7, stable expression of CD44 and CD49d, and transient expression of CCR5 and CD25. These cells also secrete high levels of interferon γ and reduced levels of interleukin 2 relative to those in the secondary lymphoid organs. The response declines rapidly in parallel with viral clearance, but a spectrum of resting cell subsets reflecting the pattern at the peak of response is retained, suggesting that heterogeneous effector populations may give rise to corresponding memory populations. These results reveal a complex response, not an all-or-none one, which results in multiple effector phenotypes and implies that effector cells and the memory cells derived from them can display a broad spectrum of functional potentials