Pseudothionin-St1. A potato peptide active against potato pathogens.

A 5-kDa polypeptide, pseudothionin Solanum tuberosum 1(Pth-St1), which was active against Clavibacter michiganensis subspecies sepedonicus, a bacterial pathogen of potatoes, has been purified from the buffer-insoluble fraction of potato tubers by salt extraction and HPCL. Pth-St1 was also active against other potato pathogens tested (Pseudomonas solanacearum and Fusarium solani). The N-terminal amino acid sequence of this peptide was identical (except for a N/H substitution at position 2) to that deduced from a previously reported cDNA sequence (EMBL accession number X-13180), which had been misclassified as a Bowman-Birk protease inhibitor. Pth-St1 did not inhibit either trypsin or insect α-amylase activities, and, in contrast with true thionins, did not affect cell-free protein synthesis or β-glucuronidase activity. Northern-blot and tissue-print analyses showed that steady-state mRNA levels were highest in flowers (especially in petals), followed by tubers (especially in the epidermal cell layers and in leaf primordia), stems and leaves. Infection of leaves with a bacterial pathogen suspended in 10 mM MgCl2 switched off the gene, whereas mock inoculation with 10 mM MgCl2 alone induced higher mRNA levels

El trap es poesía: desencorsetando la poesía

La poesía suele generar ciertos recelos en un segmento grande de la población, y de igual manera, esta circunstancia se ve reflejada en las aulas, donde el alumnado tiende a comenzar el aprendizaje de esta disciplina literaria con grandes prejuicios. La presentación de la poesía como un espacio lúdico y libre, y la enseñanza de dicha expresión literaria con cuidado y contemporaneidad, son los pilares de este Trabajo Fin de Máster, que presenta una propuesta didáctica dirigida al alumnado de 1º ESO con el objetivo de hacer de los y las alumnas lectores y poetas.<br /

Truncated distributions of valuation multiples: an application to European food firms

[EN] Company valuation is increasingly used in company management for various purposes. However, in Spain, information that is useful for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is non-existent. In order to broaden this information, a mass model for valuation of companies is proposed to enable valuation multiples to be obtained. This model has been applied to SMEs in the food sector in Spain. However, the asymmetry of the distributions obtained causes an upwards bias of the mean multiples and makes it difficult to establish statistically significant differences between the distributions. To solve this problem, an algorithm to eliminate outliers has been designed which enables the most probable range of values to be obtained for each multiple. The multiples obtained are compared with the multiples for European food companies listed on the stock market, revealing statistically significant differences.Ribal Sanchis, FJ.; Blasco Ruiz, A.; Segura García Del Río, B. (2009). Truncated distributions of valuation multiples: an application to European food firms. International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research. 1(4):419-432. doi:10.1504/IJMOR.2009.026275S4194321

High conservation among sequences encoding type-V thionins in wheat and Aegilops

Thionins are Cys-rich plant polypeptides of about 5 kD that are synthesized as larger precursors, which include a typical signal peptide and a posttranslationally processed, C-terminal peptide, and are thought to be involved in plant defense (García-Olmedo et al., 1989, 1991, 1992). We have previously reported on a nove1 neutral thionin type in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), designated type V, which has diverged extensively from type I by a process of acceler- ated evolution specially affecting the mature protein do- main of the precursor (Castagnaro et al., 1992). It was further shown that type-V genes were located within a few kilobases of type-I genes in the long arms of group-1 chro- mosomes in the three genomes (ABD) of allohexaploid wheat and that both types were simultaneously ex- pressed in endosperm (Castagnaro et al., 199

Degradation of phenanthrene by Novosphingobium sp. HS2a improved plant growth in PAHs-contaminated environments

At the same time that the European Union (EU) policy recommend to direct efforts towards reductions of heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and mining residues, there is the need to increase the cultivable areas within Europe to cope with the increasing demands for food and energy crops. Bioremediation is a good technique for the restoration of contaminated soils; however, it has not been used extensively because of the variability of the outcome. This variability is frequently due to a bad establishment of foreign degrading populations in soil. We have demonstrated that Novosphingobium sp. HS2aR (i) is able to compete with other root colonizers and with indigenous bacteria, (ii) is able to establish in high numbers in the contaminated environments and (iii) is able to remove more than 90 % of the extractable phenanthrene in artificially contaminated soils. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that the capacity to remove phenanthrene is linked to the ability to promote plant growth in contaminated environments. The fact that the presence of Novosphingobium sp. HS2aR improves the growth of plants in contaminated soil suggests that it may be a useful strain for utilization in amelioration of soil quality while improving the growth of economically important energy crops, thus adding value to the bioremediation strategy.Fil: Rodriguez Conde, Sara. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Estación Experimental del Zaidín; EspañaFil: Molina, Lázaro. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Estación Experimental del Zaidín; EspañaFil: González, Paola Solange. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Fisicoquímicas y Naturales; Argentina. Centro de Investigaciones Cientificas ; Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Fisicas y Naturales ; Universidad Nacional de Cordoba;Fil: García Puente, Alicia. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Estación Experimental del Zaidín; EspañaFil: Segura, Ana. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Estación Experimental del Zaidín; Españ

Balancing software engineering education and industrial needs

In the world of information and communications technologies the demand for professionals with software engineering skills grows at an exponential rate. On this ground, we have conducted a study to help both academia and the software industry form a picture of the relationship between the competences of recent graduates of undergraduate and graduate software engineering programmes and the tasks that these professionals are to perform as part of their jobs in industry. Thanks to this study, academia will be able to observe which skills demanded by industry the software engineering curricula do or do not cater for, and industry will be able to ascertain which tasks a recent software engineering programme graduate is well qualified to perform. The study focuses on the software engineering knowledge guidelines provided in SE2004 and GSwE2009, and the job profiles identified by Career Space

A Box-Behnken Design for Optimal Green Extraction of Compounds from Olive Leaves That Potentially Activate the AMPK Pathway

The author B.M.-G. is grateful to the National Youth Guarantee System for the grant for young research personnel. Also, the authors are grateful to the University of Granada for a “Contrato Puente” postdoctoral contract (S.P.-M.).Olive leaves contain bioactive compounds that have been shown to activate AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), which decreases intracellular lipid accumulation. Microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) is a green extraction technique that is frequently used in the recovery of phenolic compounds from plants. Thus, in this study, a Box-Behnken design was used to optimize MAE conditions such as temperature, percentage of ethanol and extraction time to obtain the maximum content of total compounds and compounds that activate AMPK. To this end, all extracts were characterized by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography Coupled to Electrospray Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-ESI-TOF-MS). The optimum conditions to obtain the highest content of total compounds were 123 ◦C, 100% of ethanol/water (v/v) and 23 min, whereas the optimum conditions for the highest amount of compounds that activate AMPK were 111 ◦C, 42% of ethanol/water (v/v) and 23 min. Thus, a multi-analysis by desirability was carried out to establish MAE optimal conditions for both responses. The optimum conditions were 111 ◦C, 100% EtOH and 23 min with a desirability of 0.97, which means that the responses are close to their individual optimal values. As a result, the olive leaf extract obtained at these optimal MAE conditions has great potential to be effective in the treatment of obesity.Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) AGL2015-67995-C3-2Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities RTI2018-096724-B-C22Ministry of Economy, Knowledge, Business and University of the Junta de Andalucia B-AGR-466-UGR1

Social media photo content for Sierra Nevada: a dataset to support the assessment of cultural ecosystem services in protected areas

This dataset provides crowd-sourced and georeferenced information useful for the assessment of cultural ecosystem services in the Sierra Nevada Biosphere Reserve (southern Spain). Data were collected within the European project ECOPOTENTIAL focused on Earth observations of ecosystem services. The dataset comprises 778 records expressing the results of the content analysis of social media photos published in Flickr. Our dataset is illustrated in this data paper with density maps for different types of information.This work has been carried out within the H2020 project “ECOPOTENTIAL: Improving future ecosystem benefits through earth observations” (http://www.ecopotential- project.eu/), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 641762