Analysis of Carbohydrate Storage Granules in the Diazotrophic Cyanobacterium Cyanothece sp. PCC 7822.

The unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacteria of the genus Cyanothece demonstrate oscillations in nitrogenase activity and H2 production when grown under 12 h light–12 h dark cycles. We established that Cyanothece sp. PCC 7822 allows for the construction of knock-out mutants and our objective was to improve the growth characteristics of this strain and to identify the nature of the intracellular storage granules. We report the physiological and morphological effects of reduction in nitrate and phosphate concentrations in BG-11 media on this strain. We developed a series of BG-11-derived growth media and monitored batch culture growth, nitrogenase activity and nitrogenase-mediated hydrogen production, culture synchronicity, and intracellular storage content. Reduction in NaNO3 and K2HPO4 concentrations from 17.6 and 0.23 to 4.41 and 0.06 mM, respectively, improved growth characteristics such as cell size and uniformity, and enhanced the rate of cell division. Cells grown in this low NP BG-11 were less complex, a parameter that related to the composition of the intracellular storage granules. Cells grown in low NP BG-11 had less polyphosphate, fewer polyhydroxybutyrate granules and many smaller granules became evident. Biochemical analysis and transmission electron microscopy using the histocytochemical PATO technique demonstrated that these small granules contained glycogen. The glycogen levels and the number of granules per cell correlated nicely with a 2.3 to 3.3-fold change from the minimum at L0 to the maximum at D0. The differences in granule morphology and enzymes between Cyanothece ATCC 51142 and CyanothecePCC 7822 provide insights into the formation of large starch-like granules in some cyanobacteria

P-11 Social Support and Fundamentalism as Predictors of Religious Internalization

What variables are the strongest predictors of religious identification? Religious internalization can be broken down into identification, the full adoption of religious values, and introjection, a partial internalization of values. Fundamentalism is one variable thought to predict these motivational types. We defined fundamentalism as the degree to which someone holds their sacred texts as true. Additionally, social support relates to religious internalization. To measure these variables, two separate scales were used for each: Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support and Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Scale for social support, Intratextual Fundamentalism Scale and Revised Religious Fundamentalism scale for fundamentalism, and The Faith Maturity Scale and Christian Religious Internalization Scale for religious internalization. After extensive review of previous literature, it was hypothesized that measures of fundamentalism would be independent predictors of religious identification relative to social support. The results of this study were analyzed using a hierarchical linear regression and the results of this hypothesis were partially supported. Fundamental beliefs and a personal relationship with Christ were the predictors of religious identification after measures of social support were included; however, measures of social support accounted for minimal additional variance

Implementation of a symmetric surface electrode ion trap with field compensation using a modulated Raman effect

We describe the fabrication and characterization of a new surface-electrode Paul ion trap designed for experiments in scalable quantum information processing with Ca+. A notable feature is a symmetric electrode pattern which allows rotation of the normal modes of ion motion, yielding efficient Doppler cooling with a single beam parallel to the planar surface. We propose and implement a technique for micromotion compensation in all directions using an infrared repumper laser beam directed into the trap plane. Finally, we employ an alternate repumping scheme that increases ion fluorescence and simplifies heating rate measurements obtained by time-resolved ion fluorescence during Doppler cooling

Powerful sequence similarity search methods and in-depth manual analyses can identify remote homologs in many apparently "orphan" viral proteins.

The genome sequences of new viruses often contain many "orphan" or "taxon-specific" proteins apparently lacking homologs. However, because viral proteins evolve very fast, commonly used sequence similarity detection methods such as BLAST may overlook homologs. We analyzed a data set of proteins from RNA viruses characterized as "genus specific" by BLAST. More powerful methods developed recently, such as HHblits or HHpred (available through web-based, user-friendly interfaces), could detect distant homologs of a quarter of these proteins, suggesting that these methods should be used to annotate viral genomes. In-depth manual analyses of a subset of the remaining sequences, guided by contextual information such as taxonomy, gene order, or domain cooccurrence, identified distant homologs of another third. Thus, a combination of powerful automated methods and manual analyses can uncover distant homologs of many proteins thought to be orphans. We expect these methodological results to be also applicable to cellular organisms, since they generally evolve much more slowly than RNA viruses. As an application, we reanalyzed the genome of a bee pathogen, Chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV). We could identify homologs of most of its proteins thought to be orphans; in each case, identifying homologs provided functional clues. We discovered that CBPV encodes a domain homologous to the Alphavirus methyltransferase-guanylyltransferase; a putative membrane protein, SP24, with homologs in unrelated insect viruses and insect-transmitted plant viruses having different morphologies (cileviruses, higreviruses, blunerviruses, negeviruses); and a putative virion glycoprotein, ORF2, also found in negeviruses. SP24 and ORF2 are probably major structural components of the virions

Bringing Agriculture into the GATT: Assessing the Benefits of Trade Liberalization

International Relations/Trade,