Tidal resource extraction in the Pentland Firth, UK : Potential impacts on flow regime and sediment transport in the Inner Sound of Stroma

Large-scale extraction of power from tidal streams within the Pentland Firth is expected to be underway in the near future. The Inner Sound of Stroma in particular has attracted significant commercial interest. To understand potential environmental impacts of the installation of a tidal turbine array a case study based upon the Inner Sound is considered. A numerical computational fluid dynamics model, Fluidity, is used to conduct a series of depth-averaged simulations to investigate velocity and bed shear stress changes due to the presence of idealised tidal turbine arrays. The number of turbines is increased from zero to 400. It is found that arrays in excess of 85 turbines have the potential to affect bed shear stress distributions in such a way that the most favourable sites for sediment accumulation migrate from the edges of the Inner Sound towards its centre. Deposits of fine gravel and coarse sand are indicated to occur within arrays of greater than 240 turbines with removal of existing deposits in the shallower channel margins also possible. The effects of the turbine array may be seen several kilometres from the site which has implications not only on sediment accumulation, but also on the benthic fauna

Ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptide natural products: Overview and recommendations for a universal nomenclature

Covering: 1988 to 2012 This review presents recommended nomenclature for the biosynthesis of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs), a rapidly growing class of natural products. The current knowledge regarding the biosynthesis of the >20 distinct compound classes is also reviewed, and commonalities are discussed

Microbiome research as an effective driver of success stories in agrifood systems – a selection of case studies.

Increasing knowledge of the microbiome has led to significant advancements in the agrifood system. Case studies based on microbiome applications have been reported worldwide and, in this review, we have selected 14 success stories that showcase the importance of microbiome research in advancing the agrifood system. The selected case studies describe products, methodologies, applications, tools, and processes that created an economic and societal impact. Additionally, they cover a broad range of fields within the agrifood chain: the management of diseases and putative pathogens; the use of microorganism as soil fertilizers and plant strengtheners; the investigation of the microbial dynamics occurring during food fermentation; the presence of microorganisms and/or genes associated with hazards for animal and human health (e.g., mycotoxins, spoilage agents, or pathogens) in feeds, foods, and their processing environments; applications to improve HACCP systems; and the identification of novel probiotics and prebiotics to improve the animal gut microbiome or to prevent chronic non-communicable diseases in humans (e.g., obesity complications). The microbiomes of soil, plants, and animals are pivotal for ensuring human and environmental health and this review highlights the impact that microbiome applications have with this regard

Overview of the geometries of shape spaces and diffeomorphism groups

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014. This article provides an overview of various notions of shape spaces, including the space of parametrized and unparametrized curves, the space of immersions, the diffeomorphism group and the space of Riemannian metrics. We discuss the Riemannian metrics that can be defined thereon, and what is known about the properties of these metrics.We put particular emphasis on the induced geodesic distance, the geodesic equation and its well-posedness, geodesic and metric completeness and properties of the curvature