Identification and characterization of the BZR transcription factor family and its expression in response to abiotic stresses in Zea mays L.

Brassinosteroids (BRs) are plant specific steroidal hormones that play diverse roles in regulating a broad spectrum of plant growth and developmental processes, as well as, in responding to various biotic and abiotic stresses. Extensive research over the years has established stress-impact-mitigating role of BRs and associated compounds in different plants exposed to various abiotic and biotic stresses, suggesting the idea that they may act as immunomodulators, thus opening new approaches for plant resistance against hazardous environmental conditions. In this research the characterization of the transcriptional response of 11 transcription factors (TFs) belonging to BRASSINAZOLE-RESISTANT 1 (BZR1) TF family of Zea mays L. was analyzed in seedlings subjected to different stress conditions. Being important regulators of the BR synthesis, BZR TFs might have stress resistance related activities. However, no stress resistance related functional study of BZR TFs has been reported in maize so far. In silico analyses of the selected 11 TFs validated the features of their protein domains, where a highest degree of similarity observed with recognized BZR TFs of rice and Sorghum bicolor. Additionally, we investigated the organ-specific expression of 11 ZmBZR in maize seedlings. Five of them did not show any transcript accumulation, suggesting that ZmBZR expression might be regulated in a manner dependent on plant developmental stage. For the remaining six ZmBZR, their ubiquitous expression in the whole plant indicates they could function as growth regulators during maize development. More importantly, in response to various stress conditions, the spatial transcript accumulation of all ZmBZR varies along the plant. All six ZmBZR showed up-regulation against N starvation, hypoxia and salt stress. On the contrary, heat stress clearly down-regulated gene expression of all ZmBZR analysed. Consistently with the expression results, the distribution of stress-related cis-acting elements in the promoter of these genes inferred that the maize BZR TFs might play some roles in regulating the expression of the corresponding genes in response to multifarious stresses. In conclusion, these data reveal that BZR TFs have stress signaling activity in maize, in addition to their confirmed role in regulating plant physiology and morphology

On the quantum stress tensor for extreme 2D Reissner-Nordstrom black holes

Contrary to previous claims, it is shown that the expectation values of the quantum stress tensor for a massless scalar field propagating on a two-dimensional extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black hole are indeed regular on the horizon.Comment: 5 pages, revtex, 1 figur

Solvability of the Dirichlet Problem for Elliptic Equations in Weighted Sobolev Spaces on Unbounded Domains

This paper is concerned with the study of the Dirichlet problem for a class of second-order linear elliptic equations in weighted Sobolev spaces on unbounded domains of , . We state a regularity result and we can deduce an existence and uniqueness theorem

Elliptic Equations in Weighted Sobolev Spaces on Unbounded Domains

We study in this paper a class of second-order linear elliptic equations in weighted Sobolev spaces on unbounded domains of , . We obtain an a priori bound, and a regularity result from which we deduce a uniqueness theorem

Adamantiades-Behcet disease at the beginning of the Silk Route: North-East Italian experience.

No abstract availabl

Role of Fibre in Nutritional Management of Pancreatic Diseases

The role of fibre intake in the management of patients with pancreatic disease is still controversial. In acute pancreatitis, a prebiotic enriched diet is associated with low rates of pancreatic necrosis infection, hospital stay, systemic inflammatory response syndrome and multiorgan failure. This protective effect seems to be connected with the ability of fibre to stabilise the disturbed intestinal barrier homeostasis and to reduce the infection rate. On the other hand, in patients with exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, a high content fibre diet is associated with an increased wet fecal weight and fecal fat excretion because of the fibre inhibition of pancreatic enzymes. The mechanism by which dietary fibre reduces the pancreatic enzyme activity is still not clear. It seems likely that pancreatic enzymes are absorbed on the fibre surface or entrapped in pectin, a gel-like substance, and are likely inactivated by anti-nutrient compounds present in some foods. The aim of the present review is to highlight the current knowledge on the role of fibre in the nutritional management of patients with pancreatic disorders

Never Retreat, Never Retract: Argumentation Analysis for Political Speeches

International audienceIn this work, we apply argumentation mining techniques, in particular relation prediction, to study political speeches in monological form, where there is no direct interaction between opponents. We argue that this kind of technique can effectively support researchers in history, social and political sciences, which must deal with an increasing amount of data in digital form and need ways to automatically extract and analyse argumentation patterns. We test and discuss our approach based on the analysis of documents issued by R. Nixon and J. F. Kennedy during 1960 presidential campaign. We rely on a supervised classifier to predict argument relations (i.e., support and attack), obtaining an accuracy of 0.72 on a dataset of 1,462 argument pairs. The application of argument mining to such data allows not only to highlight the main points of agreement and disagreement between the candidates' arguments over the campaign issues such as Cuba, disarmament and health-care, but also an in-depth argumentative analysis of the respective viewpoints on these topics

Neutrophil unsaturated fatty acid release by GM-CSF is impaired in cystic fibrosis

Dysregulated inflammation in cystic fibrosis (CF) is attributed to an altered production of inflammatory mediators derived from polyunsaturated lipids. In comparison to the arachidonic acid (AA) cascade, little is known about the modulation of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) membrane release. We compared data on neutrophil DHA- and AA- release from both control (CT) and patients with CF using [3H]AA or [14C]DHA as a markers for, respectively, AA and DHA- release. Granulocyte-macrophage-colony stimulating factor stimulated DHA release from CT, but not CF, neutrophils. Comparison showed that both [14C]DHA and [3H]AA liberated after stimulation was higher in CT than in CF neutrophils. Since bioactive mediators derived from DHA are resolving factors and those derived from AA are both pro- and anti- inflammatory, these results suggest that CF is associated with a reduction of the release of PUFA-precursors of lipooxygenated resolving mediators. This leads to the hypothesis that defects in the resolving factors production could contribute to the inflammatory dysregulated processes in CF. Furthermore, the methodology used may help to improve knowledge on the regulation and resolution of inflammation

Cross-Platform Evaluation for Italian Hate Speech Detection

International audienceEnglish. Despite the number of approaches recently proposed in NLP for detecting abusive language on social networks , the issue of developing hate speech detection systems that are robust across different platforms is still an unsolved problem. In this paper we perform a comparative evaluation on datasets for hate speech detection in Italian, extracted from four different social media platforms, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and What-sApp. We show that combining such platform-dependent datasets to take advantage of training data developed for other platforms is beneficial, although their impact varies depending on the social network under consideration. 1 Italiano. Nonostante si osservi un cre-scente interesse per approcci che identi-fichino il linguaggio offensivo sui social network attraverso l'NLP, la necessità di sviluppare sistemi che mantengano una buona performance anche su piattaforme diverseè ancora un tema di ricerca aper-to. In questo contributo presentiamo una valutazione comparativa su dataset per l'identificazione di linguaggio d'odio pro-venienti da quattro diverse piattaforme: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Wha-tsApp. Lo studio dimostra che, combinan-do dataset diversi per aumentare i dati di training, migliora le performance di clas-sificazione, anche se l'impatto varia a se-conda della piattaforma considerata.