The Subjective Well-being Evaluation of Seniors using Questionnaires

The authors of the paper analyze how marital status and level of education influence subjective economic well-being of an individual. 118 residents from Tomsk and Tomsk region took part in the research. All respondents were retired citizens. The presence or absence of children was the criterion to determine their marital status. Data processing and analysis were performed using the Excel descriptive statistics method. As a result of the questionnaire, a portrait of the respondents was identified: it is 55-65 years old retired who live in a small village of Tomsk region and have secondary special education. They have children who live separately but help their parents as they can. The main source of their income is a pension, which is spent mainly on food, domestic needs and medicines. They assess their standard of living as average. In general, the retired are satisfied with their life and would like to improve or change living conditions, to travel and be able to help children and grandchildren financially. General and specific features of subjective economic well-being among the seniors have been revealed. It was established that the most important factors in the determination of subjective economic well-being are the presence or absence of children, possibility to communicate with them as well as to render all possible assistance to them. Clear correlation between subjective assessment of well-being and level of education of the respondents has not been established

Plants with genetically encoded autoluminescence

Autoluminescent plants engineered to express a bacterial bioluminescence gene cluster in plastids have not been widely adopted because of low light output. We engineered tobacco plants with a fungal bioluminescence system that converts caffeic acid (present in all plants) into luciferin and report self-sustained luminescence that is visible to the naked eye. Our findings could underpin development of a suite of imaging tools for plants

Systematic Comparison of Plant Promoters in <i>Nicotiana</i> spp. Expression Systems

We report a systematic comparison of 19 plant promoters and 20 promoter-terminator combinations in two expression systems: agroinfiltration in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, and Nicotiana tabacum BY-2 plant cell packs. The set of promoters tested comprised those not present in previously published work, including several computationally predicted synthetic promoters validated here for the first time. The expression of EGFP driven by different promoters varied by more than two orders of magnitude and was largely consistent between two tested Nicotiana systems. We confirmed previous reports of significant modulation of expression by terminators, as well as synergistic effects of promoters and terminators. Additionally, we observed non-linear effects of gene dosage on expression level. The dataset presented here can inform the design of genetic constructs for plant engineering and transient expression assays