Iodine biofortification in tomato

Iodine is an essential element in the human diet, and iodine deficiency is a significant health problem. No attempts to increase iodine content in plant-derived food (biofortification) have so far been particularly effective. We studied iodine uptake in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) to evaluate whether it is possible to increase the iodine concentration in its fruits. Iodine translocation and storage inside tomato tissues were studied using radioactive iodine. Potassium iodide was also supplied at different concentrations to tomato plants to evaluate the resulting iodide concentration both in the vegetative tissues and the fruits. The results indicate that iodine was taken up better when supplied to the roots using hydroponically grown plants. However, a considerable amount of iodine was also stored after leaf treatment, suggesting that iodine transport through phloem also occurred. We found that tomato plants can tolerate high levels of iodine, stored both in the vegetative tissues and fruits at concentrations that are more than sufficient for the human diet. We conclude that tomato is an excellent crop for iodine-biofortification programs

The Economic Advantage of Preventative Health Care in Prisons

The Economic Advantage of Preventative Health Care in Prison

Sub-Doppler laser cooling of potassium atoms

We investigate sub-Doppler laser cooling of bosonic potassium isotopes, whose small hyperfine splitting has so far prevented cooling below the Doppler temperature. We find instead that the combination of a dark optical molasses scheme that naturally arises in this kind of systems and an adiabatic ramping of the laser parameters allows to reach sub-Doppler temperatures for small laser detunings. We demonstrate temperatures as low as 25(3)microK and 47(5)microK in high-density samples of the two isotopes 39K and 41K, respectively. Our findings will find application to other atomic systems.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figure

Continuing data analysis of the AS/E grazing incidence X-ray telescope experiment on the OSO-4 satellite

The work to correct and extend the calculation of the theoretical solar X-ray spectrum produced during earlier OSO-4 data analysis is reported along with the work to formulate models of active regions, and compare these models with the experimental values. An atlas of solar X-ray photographs is included, and solar X-ray observations are correlated with the solar wind

Ontological Levels in Histological Imaging

Paper presented at the 9th edition of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems conference, FOIS 2016, July 6–9, 2016, Annecy, FranceThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IOS Press via the DOI in this record.In this paper we present an ontological perspective on ongoing work in histological and histopathological imaging involving the quantitative and algorithmic analysis of digitised images of cells and tissues. We present the derivation of consistent histological models from initially captured images of prepared tissue samples as a progression through a number of ontological levels, each populated by its distinctive classes of entities related in systematic ways to entities at other levels. We see this work as contributing to ongoing efforts to provide a consistent and widely accepted suite of ontological resources such as those currently constituting the OBO Foundry, and where possible we draw links between our work and existing ontologies within that suite.This research is supported by EPSRC through funding under grant EP/M023869/1 “Novel context-based segmentation algorithms for intelligent microscopy”