Miocene Shift of European Atmospheric Circulation From Trade Wind to Westerlies

The modern European climatic regime is peculiar, due to its unitary winter but diverse summer climates and a pronounced Mediterranean climate in the south. However, little is known on its evolution in the deep time. Here we reconstruct the European summer climate conditions in the Tortonian (11.62-7.246 Ma) using plant fossil assemblages from 75 well-dated sites across Europe. Our results clearly show that the Tortonian Europe mainly had humid to subhumid summers and no arid climate has been conclusively detected, indicating that the summer-dry Mediterranean-type climate has not yet been established along most of the Mediterranean coast at least by the Tortonian. More importantly, the reconstructed distribution pattern of summer precipitation reveals that the Tortonian European must have largely been controlled by westerlies, resulting in higher precipitation in the west and the lower in the east. The Tortonian westerly wind field appears to differ principally from the trade wind pattern of the preceding Serravallian (13.82-11.62 Ma), recently deduced from herpetofaunal fossils. Such a shift in atmospheric circulation, if ever occurred, might result from the development of ice caps and glaciers in the polar region during the Late Miocene global cooling, the then reorganization of oceanic circulation, and/or the Himalayan-Tibetan uplift

Miocene shift of European atmospheric circulation from trade wind to westerlies

The modern European climatic regime is peculiar, due to its unitary winter but diverse summer climates and a pronounced Mediterranean climate in the south. However, little is known on its evolution in the deep time. Here we reconstruct the European summer climate conditions in the Tortonian (11.62–7.246 Ma) using plant fossil assemblages from 75 well-dated sites across Europe. Our results clearly show that the Tortonian Europe mainly had humid to subhumid summers and no arid climate has been conclusively detected, indicating that the summer-dry Mediterranean-type climate has not yet been established along most of the Mediterranean coast at least by the Tortonian. More importantly, the reconstructed distribution pattern of summer precipitation reveals that the Tortonian European must have largely been controlled by westerlies, resulting in higher precipitation in the west and the lower in the east. The Tortonian westerly wind field appears to differ principally from the trade wind pattern of the preceding Serravallian (13.82–11.62 Ma), recently deduced from herpetofaunal fossils. Such a shift in atmospheric circulation, if ever occurred, might result from the development of ice caps and glaciers in the polar region during the Late Miocene global cooling, the then reorganization of oceanic circulation, and/or the Himalayan-Tibetan uplift.Peer reviewe

Novel Genetic Variants of ALG6 and GALNTL4 of the Glycosylation Pathway Predict Cutaneous Melanoma-Specific Survival

Because aberrant glycosylation is known to play a role in the progression of melanoma, we hypothesize that genetic variants of glycosylation pathway genes are associated with the survival of cutaneous melanoma (CM) patients. To test this hypothesis, we used a Cox proportional hazards regression model in a single-locus analysis to evaluate associations between 34,096 genetic variants of 227 glycosylation pathway genes and CM disease-specific survival (CMSS) using genotyping data from two previously published genome-wide association studies. The discovery dataset included 858 CM patients with 95 deaths from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the replication dataset included 409 CM patients with 48 deaths from Harvard University nurse/physician cohorts. In the multivariable Cox regression analysis, we found that two novel single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (ALG6 rs10889417 G>A and GALNTL4 rs12270446 G>C) predicted CMSS, with an adjusted hazards ratios of 0.60 (95% confidence interval = 0.44–0.83 and p = 0.002) and 0.66 (0.52–0.84 and 0.004), respectively. Subsequent expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) analysis revealed that ALG6 rs10889417 was associated with mRNA expression levels in the cultured skin fibroblasts and whole blood cells and that GALNTL4 rs12270446 was associated with mRNA expression levels in the skin tissues (all p < 0.05). Our findings suggest that, once validated by other large patient cohorts, these two novel SNPs in the glycosylation pathway genes may be useful prognostic biomarkers for CMSS, likely through modulating their gene expression

Single-molecule in vivo imaging of bacterial respiratory complexes indicates delocalized oxidative phosphorylation

Chemiosmotic energy coupling through oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) is crucial to life, requiring coordinated enzymes whose membrane organization and dynamics are poorly understood. We quantitatively explore localization, stoichiometry, and dynamics of key OXPHOS complexes, functionally fluorescent protein-tagged, in Escherichia coli using low-angle fluorescence and superresolution microscopy, applying single-molecule analysis and novel nanoscale co-localization measurements. Mobile 100-200nm membrane domains containing tens to hundreds of complexes are indicated. Central to our results is that domains of different functional OXPHOS complexes do not co-localize, but ubiquinone diffusion in the membrane is rapid and long-range, consistent with a mobile carrier shuttling electrons between islands of different complexes. Our results categorically demonstrate that electron transport and proton circuitry in this model bacterium are spatially delocalized over the cell membrane, in stark contrast to mitochondrial bioenergetic supercomplexes. Different organisms use radically different strategies for OXPHOS membrane organization, likely depending on the stability of their environment

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

The NOGO Receptor NgR2, A Novel αVβ3 Integrin Effector, Induces Neuroendocrine Differentiation in Prostate Cancer

Androgen deprivation therapies aimed to target prostate cancer (PrCa) are only partially successful given the occurrence of neuroendocrine PrCa (NEPrCa), a highly aggressive and highly metastatic form of PrCa, for which there is no effective therapeutic approach. Our group has demonstrated that while absent in prostate adenocarcinoma, the αVβ3 integrin expression is increased during PrCa progression toward NEPrCa. Here, we show a novel pathway activated by αVβ3 that promotes NE differentiation (NED). This novel pathway requires the expression of a GPI-linked surface molecule, NgR2, also known as Nogo-66 receptor homolog 1. We show here that NgR2 is upregulated by αVβ3, to which it associates; we also show that it promotes NED and anchorage-independent growth, as well as a motile phenotype of PrCa cells. Given our observations that high levels of αVβ3 and, as shown here, of NgR2 are detected in human and mouse NEPrCa, our findings appear to be highly relevant to this aggressive and metastatic subtype of PrCa. This study is novel because NgR2 role has only minimally been investigated in cancer and has instead predominantly been analyzed in neurons. These data thus pave new avenues toward a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of integrin-directed signaling during PrCa progression toward a NE phenotype

A compendium of genetic regulatory effects across pig tissues

The Farm Animal Genotype-Tissue Expression (FarmGTEx) project has been established to develop a public resource of genetic regulatory variants in livestock, which is essential for linking genetic polymorphisms to variation in phenotypes, helping fundamental biological discovery and exploitation in animal breeding and human biomedicine. Here we show results from the pilot phase of PigGTEx by processing 5,457 RNA-sequencing and 1,602 whole-genome sequencing samples passing quality control from pigs. We build a pig genotype imputation panel and associate millions of genetic variants with five types of transcriptomic phenotypes in 34 tissues. We evaluate tissue specificity of regulatory effects and elucidate molecular mechanisms of their action using multi-omics data. Leveraging this resource, we decipher regulatory mechanisms underlying 207 pig complex phenotypes and demonstrate the similarity of pigs to humans in gene expression and the genetic regulation behind complex phenotypes, supporting the importance of pigs as a human biomedical model.</p

Software for the frontiers of quantum chemistry:An overview of developments in the Q-Chem 5 package

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an “open teamware” model and an increasingly modular design

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals &lt;1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License