Host Resistance to Monilinia vaccinii-corymbosi in Flowers and Fruits of Highbush Blueberry

Monilinia vaccinii-corymbosi, the causal agent of mummy berry disease, infects blueberry flowers via the gynoecial pathway. To describe the expression of host resistance in highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum), fungal growth in the styles and colonization of the locules were compared among five blueberry cultivars in a series of controlled greenhouse experiments. Styles were harvested 1 and 4 days postinoculation, and the length colonized by hyphae was determined using fluorescence microscopy. At 8 weeks after inoculation, fruit were harvested and scored for the presence of hyphae in the locules. The infection frequency of styles ranged from 0.33 to 0.71, and only cv. Weymouth had significantly lower infection frequency than the other cultivars. The mean length of the colonized portion of the stylar canal ranged from 0.126 to 0.434 mm after 1 day and 1.62 to 3.59 mm after 4 days. Hyphae in the styles of cv. Weymouth exhibited the least growth, whereas hyphae in the styles of cultivars Jersey and Rancocas were significantly longer. The distance of style penetrated for cultivars Bluecrop and Coville was intermediate. The mean disease incidence of locules differed significantly. Values for cultivars Weymouth and Jersey were the smallest (0.038 and 0.039) and largest (0.249 and 0.236), respectively. The results demonstrate that a component of resistance to infection by M. vaccinii-corymbosi is expressed during growth in the gynoecial pathway

Gradual session types

Session types are a rich type discipline, based on linear types, that lifts the sort of safety claims that come with type systems to communications. However, web-based applications and microservices are often written in a mix of languages, with type disciplines in a spectrum between static and dynamic typing. Gradual session types address this mixed setting by providing a framework which grants seamless transition between statically typed handling of sessions and any required degree of dynamic typing. We propose Gradual GV as a gradually typed extension of the functional session type system GV. Following a standard framework of gradual typing, Gradual GV consists of an external language, which relaxes the type system of GV using dynamic types, and an internal language with casts, for which operational semantics is given, and a cast-insertion translation from the former to the latter. We demonstrate type and communication safety as well as blame safety, thus extending previous results to functional languages with session-based communication. The interplay of linearity and dynamic types requires a novel approach to specifying the dynamics of the language.Comment: Preprint of an article to appear in Journal of Functional Programmin

Towards Weyl fermions on the lattice without artefacts

In spite of the breakthrough in non-perturbative chiral gauge theories during the last decade, the present formulation has stubborn artefacts. Independently of the fermion representation one is confronted with unwanted CP violation and infinitely many undetermined weight factors. Renormalization group identifies the culprit. We demonstrate the procedure on Weyl fermions in a real representation

Systems analysis of inflammatory bowel disease based on comprehensive gene information

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The rise of systems biology and availability of highly curated gene and molecular information resources has promoted a comprehensive approach to study disease as the cumulative deleterious function of a collection of individual genes and networks of molecules acting in concert. These "human disease networks" (HDN) have revealed novel candidate genes and pharmaceutical targets for many diseases and identified fundamental HDN features conserved across diseases. A network-based analysis is particularly vital for a study on polygenic diseases where many interactions between molecules should be simultaneously examined and elucidated. We employ a new knowledge driven HDN gene and molecular database systems approach to analyze Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), whose pathogenesis remains largely unknown.</p> <p>Methods and Results</p> <p>Based on drug indications for IBD, we determined sibling diseases of mild and severe states of IBD. Approximately 1,000 genes associated with the sibling diseases were retrieved from four databases. After ranking the genes by the frequency of records in the databases, we obtained 250 and 253 genes highly associated with the mild and severe IBD states, respectively. We then calculated functional similarities of these genes with known drug targets and examined and presented their interactions as PPI networks.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results demonstrate that this knowledge-based systems approach, predicated on functionally similar genes important to sibling diseases is an effective method to identify important components of the IBD human disease network. Our approach elucidates a previously unknown biological distinction between mild and severe IBD states.</p

Orbital Localization and Delocalization Effects in the U 5f^2 Configuration: Impurity Problem

Anderson models, based on quantum chemical studies of the molecule of U(C_8H_8)_2, are applied to investigate the problem of an U impurity in a metal. The special point here is that the U 5f-orbitals are divided into two subsets: an almost completely localized set and a considerably delocalized one. Due to the crystal field, both localized and delocalized U 5f-orbitals affect the low-energy physics. A numerical renormalization group study shows that every fixed point is characterized by a residual local spin and a phase shift. The latter changes between 0 and \pi/2, which indicates the competition between two different fixed points. Such a competition between the different local spins at the fixed points reflects itself in the impurity magnetic susceptibility at high temperatures. These different features cannot be obtained if the special characters of U 5f-orbitals are neglected.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX, email to [email protected]