Forage Quality, Yield and Palatability of Quackgrass (\u3ci\u3eElytrigia repens\u3c/i\u3e (L.) Nevski)

Quackgrass (Elytrigia repens (L.) Nevski) is a competitive perennial invader of pastures and hay meadows which is frequently harvested as forage in mixtures with desired forage species. Field experiments were conducted to compare quackgrass with cool-season perennial grasses grown under the same soil and climatic conditions, in terms of forage quality, productivity, and palatability. The forage quality of the hays was influenced by the grass species. Quackgrass showed forage crude protein (CP) concentration that was equal to those of perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne), reed canarygrass (Phalaris arundinacea) and Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis), and greater than orchardgrass (Dactylis glomerata). The neutral detergent fiber (NDF) acid detergent fiber (ADF) concentration of the quackgrass was intermediate between those of perennial ryegrass and Kentucky bluegrass. Yields of quackgrass was equal to reed canarygrass, and greater than those of Kentucky bluegrass, orchardgrass and perennial ryegrass. The different hays did not affect the response of animals by feed intake. Quackgrass hay had higher phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) concentration, and lower calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg) concentrations. Quackgrass was not to be inferior to other cool-season perennial grasses under frequent utilization

Assessment of Dopamine Neurotransmission in Dementia Using Positron Emission Tomography

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(2-Methyl­phen­yl)(phen­yl)methanol

In the title compound, C14H14O, the two benzene rings are almost orthogonal [dihedral angle = 87.78 (8) °]. The hy­droxy group lies approximately in the plane of its attached benzene ring [O—C—C—C torsion angle = −17.47 (17)°], and the hydroxyl and methyl groups lie to the same side of the mol­ecule and are gauche to each other. In the crystal, a hexa­meric aggregate mediated by a ring of six O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds occurs, generating an R 6 6(12) loop

Normal Distribution of the Muscarinic Cholinergic Receptors in the Human Brain Studied with 11C-Benztropine and the Human Brain Atlas System

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Global and regional brain metabolic scaling and its functional consequences

Background: Information processing in the brain requires large amounts of metabolic energy, the spatial distribution of which is highly heterogeneous reflecting complex activity patterns in the mammalian brain. Results: Here, it is found based on empirical data that, despite this heterogeneity, the volume-specific cerebral glucose metabolic rate of many different brain structures scales with brain volume with almost the same exponent around -0.15. The exception is white matter, the metabolism of which seems to scale with a standard specific exponent -1/4. The scaling exponents for the total oxygen and glucose consumptions in the brain in relation to its volume are identical and equal to $0.86\pm 0.03$, which is significantly larger than the exponents 3/4 and 2/3 suggested for whole body basal metabolism on body mass. Conclusions: These findings show explicitly that in mammals (i) volume-specific scaling exponents of the cerebral energy expenditure in different brain parts are approximately constant (except brain stem structures), and (ii) the total cerebral metabolic exponent against brain volume is greater than the much-cited Kleiber's 3/4 exponent. The neurophysiological factors that might account for the regional uniformity of the exponents and for the excessive scaling of the total brain metabolism are discussed, along with the relationship between brain metabolic scaling and computation.Comment: Brain metabolism scales with its mass well above 3/4 exponen

Impairment of Dopamine Metabolism in the Brain of Patients with Dementia Assessed using 18F-fluorodopa and PET

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Profiling allele-specific gene expression in brains from individuals with autism spectrum disorder reveals preferential minor allele usage.

One fundamental but understudied mechanism of gene regulation in disease is allele-specific expression (ASE), the preferential expression of one allele. We leveraged RNA-sequencing data from human brain to assess ASE in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). When ASE is observed in ASD, the allele with lower population frequency (minor allele) is preferentially more highly expressed than the major allele, opposite to the canonical pattern. Importantly, genes showing ASE in ASD are enriched in those downregulated in ASD postmortem brains and in genes harboring de novo mutations in ASD. Two regions, 14q32 and 15q11, containing all known orphan C/D box small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs), are particularly enriched in shifts to higher minor allele expression. We demonstrate that this allele shifting enhances snoRNA-targeted splicing changes in ASD-related target genes in idiopathic ASD and 15q11-q13 duplication syndrome. Together, these results implicate allelic imbalance and dysregulation of orphan C/D box snoRNAs in ASD pathogenesis

Identification of the Imprinted KLF14 Transcription Factor Undergoing Human-Specific Accelerated Evolution

Imprinted genes are expressed in a parent-of-origin manner and are located in clusters throughout the genome. Aberrations in the expression of imprinted genes on human Chromosome 7 have been suggested to play a role in the etiologies of Russell-Silver Syndrome and autism. We describe the imprinting of KLF14, an intronless member of the Krüppel-like family of transcription factors located at Chromosome 7q32. We show that it has monoallelic maternal expression in all embryonic and extra-embryonic tissues studied, in both human and mouse. We examine epigenetic modifications in the KLF14 CpG island in both species and find this region to be hypomethylated. In addition, we perform chromatin immunoprecipitation and find that the murine Klf14 CpG island lacks allele-specific histone modifications. Despite the absence of these defining features, our analysis of Klf14 in offspring from DNA methyltransferase 3a conditional knockout mice reveals that the gene's expression is dependent upon a maternally methylated region. Due to the intronless nature of Klf14 and its homology to Klf16, we suggest that the gene is an ancient retrotransposed copy of Klf16. By sequence analysis of numerous species, we place the timing of this event after the divergence of Marsupialia, yet prior to the divergence of the Xenarthra superclade. We identify a large number of sequence variants in KLF14 and, using several measures of diversity, we determine that there is greater variability in the human lineage with a significantly increased number of nonsynonymous changes, suggesting human-specific accelerated evolution. Thus, KLF14 may be the first example of an imprinted transcript undergoing accelerated evolution in the human lineage

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

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