Flower-specific KNOX phenotype in the orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii

The KNOTTED1-like homeobox (KNOX) genes are best known for maintaining a pluripotent stem-cell population in the shoot apical meristem that underlies indeterminate vegetative growth, allowing plants to adapt their development to suit the prevailing environmental conditions. More recently, the function of the KNOXgene family has been expanded to include additional roles in lateral organ development such as complex leaf morphogenesis, which has come to dominate the KNOX literature. Despite several reports implicating KNOX genes in the development of carpels and floral elaborations such as petal spurs, few authors have investigated the role of KNOX genes in flower development. Evidence is presented here of a flower-specific KNOX function in the development of the elaborate flowers of the orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii, which have a three-lobed labellum petal with a prominent spur. Using degenerate PCR, four Class I KNOX genes (DfKN1–4) have been isolated, one from each of the four major Class I KNOX subclades and by reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR), it is demonstrated that DfKNOXtranscripts are detectable in developing floral organs such as the spur-bearing labellum and inferior ovary. Although constitutive expression of the DfKN2 transcript in tobacco produces a wide range of floral abnormalities, including serrated petal margins, extra petal tissue, and fused organs, none of the vegetative phenotypes typical of constitutive KNOX expression were produced. These data are highly suggestive of a role for KNOX expression in floral development that may be especially important in taxa with elaborate flowers

The OMA orthology database in 2015: function predictions, better plant support, synteny view and other improvements

The Orthologous Matrix (OMA) project is a method and associated database inferring evolutionary relationships amongst currently 1706 complete proteomes (i.e. the protein sequence associated for every protein-coding gene in all genomes). In this update article, we present six major new developments in OMA: (i) a new web interface; (ii) Gene Ontology function predictions as part of the OMA pipeline; (iii) better support for plant genomes and in particular homeologs in the wheat genome; (iv) a new synteny viewer providing the genomic context of orthologs; (v) statically computed hierarchical orthologous groups subsets downloadable in OrthoXML format; and (vi) possibility to export parts of the all-against-all computations and to combine them with custom data for ‘client-side' orthology prediction. OMA can be accessed through the OMA Browser and various programmatic interfaces at http://omabrowser.or

Genomic evidence of recent European introgression into North American farmed and wild Atlantic salmon

publishedVersio

Discovery and Characterization of 2-Anilino-4- (Thiazol-5-yl)Pyrimidine Transcriptional CDK Inhibitors as Anticancer Agents

The main difficulty in the development of ATP antagonist kinase inhibitors is target specificity, since the ATP-binding motif is present in many proteins. We introduce a strategy that has allowed us to identify compounds from a kinase inhibitor library that block the cyclin-dependent kinases responsible for regulating transcription, i.e., CDK7 and especially CDK9. The screening cascade employs cellular phenotypic assays based on mitotic index and nuclear p53 protein accumulation. This permitted us to classify compounds into transcriptional, cell cycle, and mitotic inhibitor groups. We describe the characterization of the transcriptional inhibitor class in terms of kinase inhibition profile, cellular mode of action, and selectivity for transformed cells. A structural selectivity rationale was used to optimize potency and biopharmaceutical properties and led to the development of a transcriptional inhibitor, 3,4-dimethyl-5-[2-(4-piperazin-1-yl-phenylamino)-pyrimidin-4-yl]-3H-thiazol-2-one, with anticancer activity in animal models

Kinematics of Galactic Centre clouds shaped by shear-seeded solenoidal turbulence

The Central Molecular Zone (CMZ; the central ~ 500 pc of the Galaxy) is a kinematically unusual environment relative to the Galactic disc, with high velocity dispersions and a steep size-linewidth relation of the molecular clouds. In addition, the CMZ region has a significantly lower star formation rate (SFR) than expected by its large amount of dense gas. An important factor in explaining the low SFR is the turbulent state of the star-forming gas, which seems to be dominated by rotational modes. However, the turbulence driving mechanism remains unclear. In this work, we investigate how the Galactic gravitational potential affects the turbulence in CMZ clouds. We focus on the CMZ cloud G0.253+0.016 (`the Brick'), which is very quiescent and unlikely to be kinematically dominated by stellar feedback. We demonstrate that several kinematic properties of the Brick arise naturally in a cloud-scale hydrodynamics simulation that takes into account the Galactic gravitational potential. These properties include the line-of-sight velocity distribution, the steepened size-linewidth relation, and the predominantly solenoidal nature of the turbulence. Within the simulation, these properties result from the Galactic shear in combination with the cloud's gravitational collapse. This is a strong indication that the Galactic gravitational potential plays a crucial role in shaping the CMZ gas kinematics, and is a major contributor to suppressing the SFR by inducing predominantly solenoidal turbulent modes.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures; accepted to MNRAS (July 24th 2023

The Role of Individual Variables, Organizational Variables and Moral Intensity Dimensions in Libyan Management Accountants’ Ethical Decision Making

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world

The lifecycle of molecular clouds in nearby star-forming disc galaxies

It remains a major challenge to derive a theory of cloud-scale (⁠≲100 pc) star formation and feedback, describing how galaxies convert gas into stars as a function of the galactic environment. Progress has been hampered by a lack of robust empirical constraints on the giant molecular cloud (GMC) lifecycle. We address this problem by systematically applying a new statistical method for measuring the evolutionary timeline of the GMC lifecycle, star formation, and feedback to a sample of nine nearby disc galaxies, observed as part of the PHANGS-ALMA survey. We measure the spatially resolved (∼100 pc) CO-to-H α flux ratio and find a universal de-correlation between molecular gas and young stars on GMC scales, allowing us to quantify the underlying evolutionary timeline. GMC lifetimes are short, typically 10−30 Myr⁠, and exhibit environmental variation, between and within galaxies. At kpc-scale molecular gas surface densities Σ_(H₂) ≥ 8 M_⊙ pc⁻²⁠, the GMC lifetime correlates with time-scales for galactic dynamical processes, whereas at Σ_(H₂) ≤ 8 M_⊙ pc⁻² GMCs decouple from galactic dynamics and live for an internal dynamical time-scale. After a long inert phase without massive star formation traced by H α (75–90 per cent of the cloud lifetime), GMCs disperse within just 1−5 Myr once massive stars emerge. The dispersal is most likely due to early stellar feedback, causing GMCs to achieve integrated star formation efficiencies of 4–10 per cent. These results show that galactic star formation is governed by cloud-scale, environmentally dependent, dynamical processes driving rapid evolutionary cycling. GMCs and H II regions are the fundamental units undergoing these lifecycles, with mean separations of 100−300 pc in star-forming discs. Future work should characterize the multiscale physics and mass flows driving these lifecycles

The Function Biomedical Informatics Research Network Data Repository

The Function Biomedical Informatics Research Network (FBIRN) developed methods and tools for conducting multi-scanner functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. Method and tool development were based on two major goals: 1) to assess the major sources of variation in fMRI studies conducted across scanners, including instrumentation, acquisition protocols, challenge tasks, and analysis methods, and 2) to provide a distributed network infrastructure and an associated federated database to host and query large, multi-site, fMRI and clinical datasets. In the process of achieving these goals the FBIRN test bed generated several multi-scanner brain imaging data sets to be shared with the wider scientific community via the BIRN Data Repository (BDR). The FBIRN Phase 1 dataset consists of a traveling subject study of 5 healthy subjects, each scanned on 10 different 1.5 to 4 Tesla scanners. The FBIRN Phase 2 and Phase 3 datasets consist of subjects with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder along with healthy comparison subjects scanned at multiple sites. In this paper, we provide concise descriptions of FBIRN’s multi-scanner brain imaging data sets and details about the BIRN Data Repository instance of the Human Imaging Database (HID) used to publicly share the data

A multilevel analysis on the relationship between neighbourhood poverty and public hospital utilization: is the high Indigenous morbidity avoidable?

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The estimated life expectancy at birth for Indigenous Australians is 10-11 years less than the general Australian population. The mean family income for Indigenous people is also significantly lower than for non-Indigenous people. In this paper we examine poverty or socioeconomic disadvantage as an explanation for the Indigenous health gap in hospital morbidity in Australia.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We utilised a cross-sectional and ecological design using the Northern Territory public hospitalisation data from 1 July 2004 to 30 June 2008 and socio-economic indexes for areas (SEIFA) from the 2006 census. Multilevel logistic regression models were used to estimate odds ratios and confidence intervals. Both total and potentially avoidable hospitalisations were investigated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This study indicated that lifting SEIFA scores for family income and education/occupation by two quintile categories for low socio-economic Indigenous groups was sufficient to overcome the excess hospital utilisation among the Indigenous population compared with the non-Indigenous population. The results support a reframing of the Indigenous health gap as being a consequence of poverty and not simplistically of ethnicity.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Socio-economic disadvantage is a likely explanation for a substantial proportion of the hospital morbidity gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Efforts to improve Indigenous health outcomes should recognise poverty as an underlying determinant of the health gap.</p