20 research outputs found
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific research in the life sciences
The COVID-19 outbreak has posed an unprecedented challenge to humanity and
science. On the one side, public and private incentives have been put in place
to promptly allocate resources toward research areas strictly related to the
COVID-19 emergency. But on the flip side, research in many fields not directly
related to the pandemic has lagged behind. In this paper, we assess the impact
of COVID-19 on world scientific production in the life sciences. We investigate
how the usage of medical subject headings (MeSH) has changed following the
outbreak. We estimate through a difference-in-differences approach the impact
of COVID-19 on scientific production through PubMed. We find that COVID-related
research topics have risen to prominence, displaced clinical publications,
diverted funds away from research areas not directly related to COVID-19 and
that the number of publications on clinical trials in unrelated fields has
contracted. Our results call for urgent targeted policy interventions to
reactivate biomedical research in areas that have been neglected by the
COVID-19 emergency
A network approach to expertise retrieval based on path similarity and credit allocation
With the increasing availability of online scholarly databases, publication
records can be easily extracted and analysed. Researchers can promptly keep
abreast of others' scientific production and, in principle, can select new
collaborators and build new research teams. A critical factor one should
consider when contemplating new potential collaborations is the possibility of
unambiguously defining the expertise of other researchers. While some
organisations have established database systems to enable their members to
manually produce a profile, maintaining such systems is time-consuming and
costly. Therefore, there has been a growing interest in retrieving expertise
through automated approaches. Indeed, the identification of researchers'
expertise is of great value in many applications, such as identifying qualified
experts to supervise new researchers, assigning manuscripts to reviewers, and
forming a qualified team. Here, we propose a network-based approach to the
construction of authors' expertise profiles. Using the MEDLINE corpus as an
example, we show that our method can be applied to a number of widely used data
sets and outperforms other methods traditionally used for expertise
identification
Isobaric Vapor Liquid Equilibrium of 3-Methyl-1-butanol + Ethyl Lactate and 1-Pentanol + Ethyl Lactate at (13.0 and 101.3) kPa
Bacterial strains isolated from cedar wood improve the mycelial growth and morphology of white rot fungus Phlebia brevispora on agar and liquid medium
Stress resistance and C1 metabolism involved in plant colonization of a methanotroph Methylosinus sp. B4S
Methanotrophs are widespread and have been isolated from various environments including the phyllosphere. In this study, we characterized the plant colonization by Methylosinus sp. B4S, an α-proteobacterial methanotroph isolated from plant leaf. The gfp-tagged Methylosinus sp. B4S cells were observed to colonize Arabidopsis leaf surfaces by forming aggregates. We cloned and sequenced the general stress response genes, phyR, nepR and ecfG, from Methylosinus sp. B4S. In vitro analysis showed that the phyR expression level was increased after heat shock challenge, and phyR was shown to be involved in resistance to heat shock and UV light. In the phyllospheric condition, the gene expression level of phyR as well as mmoX and mxaF was found to be relatively high, compared with methane-grown liquid cultures. The phyR-deletion strain as well as the wild-type strain inoculated on Arabidopsis leaves proliferated at the initial phase and then gradually decreased during plant colonization. These results have shed light firstly on the importance of general stress resistance and C1 metabolism in methanotroph living in the phyllosphere