Aberrant meiotic behavior in Agave tequilana Weber var. azul

BACKGROUND: Agave tequilana Weber var. azul, is the only one variety permitted by federal law in México to be used for tequila production which is the most popular contemporary alcoholic beverage made from agave and recognized worldwide. Despite the economic, genetic, and ornamental value of the plant, it has not been subjected to detailed cytogenetic research, which could lead to a better understanding of its reproduction for future genetic improvement. The objective of this work was to study the meiotic behavior in pollen mother cells and its implications on the pollen viability in Agave tequilana Weber var. azul. RESULTS: The analysis of Pollen Mother Cells in anaphase I (A-I) showed 82.56% of cells with a normal anaphase and, 17.44% with an irregular anaphase. In which 5.28% corresponded to cells with side arm bridges (SAB); 3.68% cells with one bridge and one fragment; 2.58% of irregular anaphase showed cells with one or two lagging chromosomes and 2.95% showed one acentric fragment; cells with two bridges and cells with two bridges and one acentric fragment were observed in frequencies of 1.60% and 1.35% respectively. In anaphase II some cells showed bridges and fragments too. Aberrant A-I cells had many shrunken or empty pollen grains (42.00%) and 58.00 % viable pollen. CONCLUSION: The observed meiotic irregularities suggest that structural chromosome aberrations have occurred, such as heterozygous inversions, sister chromatid exchanges, deletions and duplications which in turn are reflected in a low pollen viability

Ressenya a Theresa Earenfight, Queenship in medieval Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Ressenya a Theresa Earenfight, Queenship in medieval Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 356 pp. ISBN 978-0-230-27646-

QCSPScore: a new scoring function for driving protein-ligand docking with quantitative chemical shifts perturbations

Through the use of information about the biological target structure, the optimization of potential drugs can be improved. In this work I have developed a procedure that uses the quantitative change in the chemical perturbations (CSP) in the protein from NMR experiments for driving protein-ligand docking. The approach is based on a hybrid scoring function (QCSPScore) which combines traditional DrugScore potentials, which describe the interaction between protein and ligand, with Kendall’s rank correlation coefficient, which evaluates docking poses in terms of their agreement with experimental CSP. Prediction of the CSP for a specific ligand pose is done efficiently with an empirical model, taking into account only ring current effects. QCSPScore has been implemented in the AutoDock software package. Compared to previous methods, this approach shows that the use of rank correlation coefficient is robust to outliers. In addition, the prediction of native-like complex geometries improved because the CSP are already being used during the docking process, and not only in a post-filtering setting for generated docking poses. Since the experimental information is guaranteed to be quantitatively used, CSP effectively contribute to align the ligand in the binding pocket. The first step in the development of QCSPScore was the analysis of 70 protein-ligand complexes for which reference CSP were computed. The success rate in the docking increased from 71% without involvement of CSP to 100% if CSP were considered at the highest weighting scheme. In a second step QCSPScore was used in re-docking three test cases, for which reference experimental CSP data was available. Without CSP, i.e. in the use of conventional DrugScore potentials, none of the three test cases could be successfully re-docked. The integration of CSP with the same weighting factor as described above resulted in all three cases successfully re-docked. For two of the three complexes, native-like solutions were only produced if CSP were considered.Conformational changes in the binding pockets of up to 2 Å RMSD did not affect the success of the docking. QCSPScore will be particularly interesting in difficult protein-ligand complexes. They are in particular those cases in which the shape of the binding pocket does not provide sufficient steric restraints such as in flat protein-protein interfaces and in the virtual screening of small chemical fragments.Durch die Verwendung von Information über die biologische Zielstruktur kann die Optimierung potentieller Wirkstoffe verbessert werden. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit habe ich ein Verfahren entwickelt, das quantitativ die Veränderung der Chemischen Verschieben (CSP) im Protein aus NMR-Experimenten für das Protein-Ligand-Docking verwendet. Der Ansatz basiert auf einer Hybridbewertungsfunktion (QCSPScore) und kombiniert herkömmliche DrugScore-Potentiale, welche die Wechselwirkung zwischen Protein und Ligand beschreiben, mit dem Rangkorrelationskoeffizienten nach Kendall, der die Dockingposen hinsichtlich ihrer Übereinstimmung mit experimentellen CSP. Die Vorhersage der CSP für einen bestimmten Liganden geschieht effizient mit einem empirischen Modell, wobei nur Ringstromeffekte berücksichtigt werden. QCSPScore wurde in das AutoDock Softwarepaket implementiert. Im Vergleich zu früheren Verfahren zeigt dieser Ansatz, dass die Verwendung des Rangkorrelationskoeffizienten robuster ist gegenüber Ausreißern in den vorhergesagten CSP. Außerdem ist die Vorhersage nativ-ähnlicher Komplexgeometrien verbessert, da die CSP bereits während des Docking-Prozesses eingesetzt werden, und nicht erst in einem nachträglichen Filter für generierte Dockingposen. Da die experimentelle Informationen quantitativ benutzt werden wird sichergestellt, dass die CSP effektiv dazu beitragen, den Liganden in der Bindetasche auszurichten. Der erste Schritt bei der Entwicklung des QCSPScore war die Analyse von 70 Protein-Ligand-Komplexen, für die als Referenz CSP vorhergesagt wurden. Die Erfolgsrate im Docking erhöhte sich von 71 %, ohne Einbeziehung von CSP, auf 100 %, wenn CSP mit höchster Gewichtung mit einbezogen wurden. Die globale Optimierung auf der kombinierten Docking-Energiehyperfläche ist also erfolgreich. In einem zweiten Schritt wurde QCSPScore zum Docking dreier Testfälle verwendet, für die als Referenz experimentelle CSP zur Verfügung standen. Ohne CSP, d.h. bei der Verwendung von herkömmlichen DrugScore-Potentialen, konnte keiner der drei Testfälle erfolgreich gedockt werden. Die Einbeziehung von CSP mit dem selben hohen Gewichtungsfaktor wie oben führte in allen drei Fällen zu erfolgreichen Docking-Ergebnissen. Für zwei der drei Komplexe wurden zudem nur bei Einbeziehung der experimentellen Information nativ-ähnliche Geometrien vorhergesagt. Konformationelle Änderungen der Bindetasche bis zu 2 Å RMSD beeinträchtigen den Erfolg des Dockings nicht. Ich bin davon überzeugt, dass mein Verfahren besonders für Protein-Ligand-Komplexe interessant sein wird, für die die Vorhersage nativ-ähnlicher Komplexe bislang schwierig war. Das sind insbesondere solche Fälle, in denen die Form der Bindetasche zur Vorhersage des Komplexes nicht ausreichend, wie das bei flachen Protein-Protein-Wechselwirkungsregionen oder beim virtuellen Screening kleiner Fragmente der Fall ist

Warm dark matter and the ionization history of the Universe

In warm dark matter scenarios structure formation is suppressed on small scales with respect to the cold dark matter case, reducing the number of low-mass halos and the fraction of ionized gas at high redshifts and thus, delaying reionization. This has an impact on the ionization history of the Universe and measurements of the optical depth to reionization, of the evolution of the global fraction of ionized gas and of the thermal history of the intergalactic medium, can be used to set constraints on the mass of the dark matter particle. However, the suppression of the fraction of ionized medium in these scenarios can be partly compensated by varying other parameters, as the ionization efficiency or the minimum mass for which halos can host star-forming galaxies. Here we use different data sets regarding the ionization and thermal histories of the Universe and, taking into account the degeneracies from several astrophysical parameters, we obtain a lower bound on the mass of thermal warm dark matter candidates of $m_X > 1.3$ keV, or $m_s > 5.5$ keV for the case of sterile neutrinos non-resonantly produced in the early Universe, both at 90\% confidence level.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

Holaaa!! Writin like u talk is kewl but kinda hard 4 NLP

We present work in progress aiming to build tools for the normalization of User-Generated Content (UGC). As we will see, the task requires the revisiting of the initial steps of NLP processing, since UGC (micro-blog, blog, and, generally, Web 2.0 user texts) presents a number of non-standard communicative and linguistic characteristics, and is in fact much closer to oral and colloquial language than to edited text. We present and characterize a corpus of UGC text in Spanish from three different sources: Twitter, consumer reviews and blogs. We motivate the need for UGC text normalization by analyzing the problems found when processing this type of text through a conventional language processing pipeline, particularly in the tasks of lemmatization and morphosyntactic tagging, and finally we propose a strategy for automatically normalizing UGC using a selector of correct forms on top of a pre-existing spell-checker.Postprint (published version

A fresh look into the interacting dark matter scenario

The elastic scattering between dark matter particles and radiation represents an attractive possibility to solve a number of discrepancies between observations and standard cold dark matter predictions, as the induced collisional damping would imply a suppression of small-scale structures. We consider this scenario and confront it with measurements of the ionization history of the Universe at several redshifts and with recent estimates of the counts of Milky Way satellite galaxies. We derive a conservative upper bound on the dark matter-photon elastic scattering cross section of $\sigma_{\gamma \rm{DM}} < 8 \times 10^{-10} \, \sigma_T \, \left(m_{\rm DM}/{\rm GeV}\right)$ at $95\%$~CL, about one order of magnitude tighter than previous {constraints from satellite number counts}. Due to the strong degeneracies with astrophysical parameters, the bound on the dark matter-photon scattering cross section derived here is driven by the estimate of the number of Milky Way satellite galaxies. Finally, we also argue that future 21~cm probes could help in disentangling among possible non-cold dark matter candidates, such as interacting and warm dark matter scenarios. Let us emphasize that bounds of similar magnitude to the ones obtained here could be also derived for models with dark matter-neutrino interactions and would be as constraining as the tightest limits on such scenarios.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures. v2: matches the published version. Included discussion on the applicability of constraints derived on dark matter-photon interactions to dark matter-neutrino interactions. References adde

Critical analysis of method used to establish environmental flows in the Segura river basin

Minimum environmental flows can be calculated by different methodologies. The main methods habitually used in Spain can be grouped under the headings of Hydrological or Habitat Simulation methodologies. As part of the planning process established by the WFD, the Subdirectorate General for Water Planning and Sustainable Use of the Spanish Environment Ministry has developed a standard that sets out the specific way in which these methodologies must be used to determine minimum environmental flows. In the present work, minimum environmental flow values have been determined using different criteria on nine reaches in the Segura river basin (Spain), on the main course and in several tributaries. Calculations have been made by the most habitual methods and considering the official flow estimation criteria defined in the Segura Basin Management Plan and Spanish Environment Ministry recommendations, including those set out in the new Hydrologic Planning Regulation (RPH). The results obtained have then been analysed and compared. The values obtained using the official methodologies and instructions have been evaluated taking into account the criterion of the water lamina created on each reach and considering whether this is adequate for fish movement.Departamento de Ecología de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Ecohidraulica S.L., Madrid. España

Induced Resistance to Ustilago maydis in Zea mays Inoculated in Non-Sterile Conditions

Plants are able to acquire induced resistance to pathogens (priming) by its previous exposure to biotic or abiotic stresses. To analyze whether this process is involved in the maize infection by Ustilago maydis, we have compared the infection occurring in plants inoculated under axenic conditions or in sterile soil to plants grown in non-sterile soil. Our results showed that plants grown under axenic conditions were more susceptible to infection than those inoculated in non-sterile soil. Accordingly, disease symptoms: chlorosis development, anthocyanin production, tumor development, and necrosis, were more and severe in axenic plants. In addition, cell death and reactive oxygen species production, as well as ethylene, were higher in axenic plants. These observations indicate for the first time, that different physical stressors and contact with microorganisms of the environment are responsible for the induction of resistance (priming) in this pathosystem