Cenários futuros para cana-de-açúcar no Estado de São Paulo baseados em projeções regionalizadas de mudanças climáticas.

Após a divulgação das projeções de mudanças climáticas globais pelo IPCC, a avaliação de impacto das mudanças climáticas sobre a agricultura para tornouse uma necessidade para a quantificação da vulnerabilidade dos sistemas agrícolas. Este trabalho teve como objetivo simular cenários futuros para a cana-de-açúcar no Estado de São Paulo em função de cenários regionalizados de projeções climáticas, utilizando um banco de dados de 78 estações meteorológicas com séries de, pelo menos, nove anos. Para cada estação meteorológica foi associado um determinado perfil do solo e todas as séries foram expandidas para 30 anos utilizando geradores de dados. As simulações foram feitas para a variedade RB72454, considerando dois cenários futuros de mudanças climáticas para 2040. Os resultados mostraram elevação na produtividade média do Estado, com ganho de até 6% de produção total no cenário pessimista para 2040. Para o cenário otimista, o efeito sobre a produção de cana-de-açúcar seria pequeno, com perspectivas de ganhos no rendimento áreas cultivadas com solos argilosos, além de uma tendência de migração para a região Sul do Estado.CBA 2009

Lem benchmark database for tropical agricultural remote sensing application.

Abstract: The monitoring of agricultural activities at a regular basis is crucial to assure that the food production meets the world population demands, which is increasing yearly. Such information can be derived from remote sensing data. In spite of topic?s relevance, not enough efforts have been invested to exploit modern pattern recognition and machine learning methods for agricultural land-cover mapping from multi-temporal, multi-sensor earth observation data. Furthermore, only a small proportion of the works published on this topic relates to tropical/subtropical regions, where crop dynamics is more complicated and difficult to model than in temperate regions. A major hindrance has been the lack of accurate public databases for the comparison of different classification methods. In this context, the aim of the present paper is to share a multi-temporal and multi-sensor benchmark database that can be used by the remote sensing community for agricultural land-cover mapping. Information about crops in situ was collected in Luís Eduardo Magalhães (LEM) municipality, which is an important Brazilian agricultural area, to create field reference data including information about first and second crop harvests. Moreover, a series of remote sensing images was acquired and pre-processed, from both active and passive orbital sensors (Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2/MSI, Landsat-8/OLI), correspondent to the LEM area, along the development of the main annual crops. In this paper, we describe the LEM database (crop field boundaries, land use reference data and pre-processed images) and present the results of an experiment conducted using the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data

Estimation of interdomain flexibility of N-terminus of factor H using residual dipolar couplings

Characterization of segmental flexibility is needed to understand the biological mechanisms of the very large category of functionally diverse proteins, exemplified by the regulators of complement activation, that consist of numerous compact modules or domains linked by short, potentially flexible, sequences of amino acid residues. The use of NMR-derived residual dipolar couplings (RDCs), in magnetically aligned media, to evaluate interdomain motion is established but only for two-domain proteins. We focused on the three N-terminal domains (called CCPs or SCRs) of the important complement regulator, human factor H (i.e. FH1-3). These domains cooperate to facilitate cleavage of the key complement activation-specific protein fragment, C3b, forming iC3b that no longer participates in the complement cascade. We refined a three-dimensional solution structure of recombinant FH1-3 based on nuclear Overhauser effects and RDCs. We then employed a rudimentary series of RDC datasets, collected in media containing magnetically aligned bicelles (disk-like particles formed from phospholipids) under three different conditions, to estimate interdomain motions. This circumvents a requirement of previous approaches for technically difficult collection of five independent RDC datasets. More than 80% of conformers of this predominantly extended three-domain molecule exhibit flexions of < 40 °. Such segmental flexibility (together with the local dynamics of the hypervariable loop within domain 3), could facilitate recognition of C3b via initial anchoring and eventual reorganization of modules to the conformation captured in the previously solved crystal structure of a C3b:FH1-4 complex

Evaluation of the morphologic, pollen viability and germination in progeny of the first backcross generation of passionfruit.

Brazil is considered the main center of the genetic diversity and greatest worldwide producer of passionfruit. This fruit is severely attacked by many phytosanitary problems, specially by the passionfruit woodiness virus which leads to severe losses in yield. Wild species of Passifloraare valuable sources of genetic resistance to this disease

Resolving the ancestry of Austronesian-speaking populations

There are two very different interpretations of the prehistory of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), with genetic evidence invoked in support of both. The “out-of-Taiwan” model proposes a major Late Holocene expansion of Neolithic Austronesian speakers from Taiwan. An alternative, proposing that Late Glacial/postglacial sea-level rises triggered largely autochthonous dispersals, accounts for some otherwise enigmatic genetic patterns, but fails to explain the Austronesian language dispersal. Combining mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), Y-chromosome and genome-wide data, we performed the most comprehensive analysis of the region to date, obtaining highly consistent results across all three systems and allowing us to reconcile the models. We infer a primarily common ancestry for Taiwan/ISEA populations established before the Neolithic, but also detected clear signals of two minor Late Holocene migrations, probably representing Neolithic input from both Mainland Southeast Asia and South China, via Taiwan. This latter may therefore have mediated the Austronesian language dispersal, implying small-scale migration and language shift rather than large-scale expansion

LEM BENCHMARK DATABASE FOR TROPICAL AGRICULTURAL REMOTE SENSING APPLICATION

The monitoring of agricultural activities at a regular basis is crucial to assure that the food production meets the world population demands, which is increasing yearly. Such information can be derived from remote sensing data. In spite of topic’s relevance, not enough efforts have been invested to exploit modern pattern recognition and machine learning methods for agricultural land-cover mapping from multi-temporal, multi-sensor earth observation data. Furthermore, only a small proportion of the works published on this topic relates to tropical/subtropical regions, where crop dynamics is more complicated and difficult to model than in temperate regions. A major hindrance has been the lack of accurate public databases for the comparison of different classification methods. In this context, the aim of the present paper is to share a multi-temporal and multi-sensor benchmark database that can be used by the remote sensing community for agricultural land-cover mapping. Information about crops in situ was collected in Luís Eduardo Magalhães (LEM) municipality, which is an important Brazilian agricultural area, to create field reference data including information about first and second crop harvests. Moreover, a series of remote sensing images was acquired and pre-processed, from both active and passive orbital sensors (Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2/MSI, Landsat-8/OLI), correspondent to the LEM area, along the development of the main annual crops. In this paper, we describe the LEM database (crop field boundaries, land use reference data and pre-processed images) and present the results of an experiment conducted using the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data

Isolated familial somatotropinoma: 11q13-loh and gene/protein expression analysis suggests a possible involvement of aip also in non-pituitary tumorigenesis

OBJECTIVE: Non-pituitary tumors have been reported in a subset of patients harboring germline mutations in the aryl hydrocarbon receptor-interacting protein (AIP) gene. However, no detailed investigations of non-pituitary tumors of AIP-mutated patients have been reported so far. PATIENTS: We examined a MEN1- and p53-negative mother-daughter pair with acromegaly due to somatotropinoma. Subsequently, the mother developed a large virilizing adrenocortical carcinoma and a grade II B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. DESIGN: Mutational analysis was performed by automated sequencing. Loss-of-heterozygosity (LOH) analysis was carried out by sequencing and microsatellite analysis. AIP expression was assessed through quantitative PCR (qPCR) and immunohistochemistry. RESULTS: The functional inactivating mutation c.241C>T (R81X), which blocks the AIP protein from interacting with phosphodiesterase 4A (PDE4A), was identified in the heterozygous state in the leukocyte DNA of both patients. Analyzing the tumoral DNA revealed that the AIP wild-type allele was lost in the daughter's somatotropinoma and the mother's adrenocortical carcinoma. Both tumors displayed low AIP protein expression levels. Low AIP gene expression was confirmed by qPCR in the adrenocortical carcinoma. No evidence of LOH was observed in the DNA sample from the mother's B-cell lymphoma, and this tumor displayed normal AIP immunostaining. CONCLUSIONS: Our study presents the first molecular analysis of non-pituitary tumors in AIP-mutated patients. The finding of AIP inactivation in the adrenocortical tumor suggests that further investigation of the potential role of this recently identified tumor suppressor gene in non-pituitary tumors, mainly in those tumors in which the cAMP and the 11q13 locus are implicated, is likely to be worthwhile

The sudden change phenomenon of quantum discord

Even if the parameters determining a system's state are varied smoothly, the behavior of quantum correlations alike to quantum discord, and of its classical counterparts, can be very peculiar, with the appearance of non-analyticities in its rate of change. Here we review this sudden change phenomenon (SCP) discussing some important points related to it: Its uncovering, interpretations, and experimental verifications, its use in the context of the emergence of the pointer basis in a quantum measurement process, its appearance and universality under Markovian and non-Markovian dynamics, its theoretical and experimental investigation in some other physical scenarios, and the related phenomenon of double sudden change of trace distance discord. Several open questions are identified, and we envisage that in answering them we will gain significant further insight about the relation between the SCP and the symmetry-geometric aspects of the quantum state space.Comment: Lectures on General Quantum Correlations and their Applications, F. F. Fanchini, D. O. Soares Pinto, and G. Adesso (Eds.), Springer (2017), pp 309-33

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Encoder-Decoder Networks for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

We propose an encoder-decoder framework for the segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images that relies on the extraction of large-scale patches at multiple image-scales during training. Experiments on three fundus image datasets demonstrate that this approach achieves state-of-the-art results and can be implemented using a simple and efficient fully-convolutional network with a parameter count of less than 0.8M. Furthermore, we show that this framework - called VLight - avoids overfitting to specific training images and generalizes well across different datasets, which makes it highly suitable for real-world applications where robustness, accuracy as well as low inference time on high-resolution fundus images is required