Skp is a multivalent chaperone of outer membrane proteins

The trimeric chaperone Skp sequesters outer-membrane proteins (OMPs) within a hydrophobic cage, thereby preventing their aggregation during transport across the periplasm in Gram-negative bacteria. Here, we studied the interaction between Escherichia coli Skp and five OMPs of varying size. Investigations of the kinetics of OMP folding revealed that higher Skp/OMP ratios are required to prevent the folding of 16-stranded OMPs compared with their 8-stranded counterparts. Ion mobility spectrometry–mass spectrometry (IMS–MS) data, computer modeling and molecular dynamics simulations provided evidence that 10- to 16-stranded OMPs are encapsulated within an expanded Skp substrate cage. For OMPs that cannot be fully accommodated in the expanded cavity, sequestration is achieved by binding of an additional Skp trimer. The results suggest a new mechanism for Skp chaperone activity involving the coordination of multiple copies of Skp in protecting a single substrate from aggregation

Summary and Recommendations from Working Group 1: model uncertainty representations in convection-permitting / shorter lead-time / limited-area ensembles

WG3 discussed both the pros and cons of existing schemes as Working group 1 considered the treatment of model uncertainty (MU) in high-resolution ensembles, at grid spacings of order 1-5 km. These systems are often run for regional weather forecasting, perhaps over a single country, and for lead times of up to 5 days. Looking ahead, ECMWF’s strategy seeks to deliver global medium-range ensemble forecasts with 3-4 km grid spacings by 2030. It is questionable for what grid spacing we should dispense with a deep convection parameterization, but it will be either switched off or damped in these systems, such that deep convection can be assumed to be dominated by explicit motions. One of the problems with limited-area ensemble systems at this scale is that spread depends not only on the modelling system itself but also on the variability inherited from the large-scale boundary conditions. There is often thought to be a lack of spread in our high-resolution EPS (ensemble prediction systems), but this could reflect a lack of diversity on larger scales. The relative importance of lateral-boundary diversity and the model uncertainty mechanisms is regime dependent. The lateral boundaries will generally be more important in midlatitude winter but less so for summertime convection in relatively weak synoptic flow

Security of Energy Supply: Comparing Scenarios from a European Perspective

This paper compares different results from a set of energy scenarios produced by international energy experts, in order to analyze projections on increasing European external energy dependence and vulnerability. Comparison among different scenarios constitutes the basis of a critical review of existing energy security policies, suggesting alternative or complementary future actions. According to the analysis, the main risks and negative impacts in the long term could be the increasing risk of collusion among exporters due to growing dependence of industrialized countries and insufficient diversification; and a risk of demand/supply imbalance, with consequent instability for exporting regions due to insufficient demand, and lack of infrastructures due to insufficient supply. Cooperation with exporting countries enhancing investments in production capacity, and with developing countries in order to reinforce negotiation capacity of energy importing countries seem to be the most effective policies at international level

Farm knowledge: machines versus biotechnology

Local farm knowledge is being eroded and, given its relevance to the viability of farm communities, ways have to be found to revive it. Young people often leave farming communities and with them this source of population, knowledge, and skill regeneration is lost to the farm community forever. This trend must be reversed and the loss of community knowledge be replaced by independent public universities and state research agencies, not by private generation of knowledge as has been the tren

Environmental learning and agency in diverse educational and cultural contexts

[Extract] Environmental education is concerned with engaging learners in examining the relationship between humans and nature, or stated another way, between society and its social systems, on the one hand, and the biophysical or non-human natural environment and its ecological systems, on the other. And as Scott and Gough (2003) argue:\ud "learning is central to the relationship between society and nature. People learn, organizations learn and, in a sense, the environment learns as nature responds to the results of human learning and activity." (p. 8)\ud These authors further characterize environmental learning as "learning that accrues from an engagement with the environment or environmental ideas" (p. 14). Furthermore, with the emergence over the last 20 years of the language of sustainable development and sustainability in international policy, they argue that sustainable development itself is a learning process through which we need to learn to build our capacity to live more sustainably (Scott & Gough, 2003). Thus, learning is viewed as central to creating a more environmentally sustainable, and, I would add, more socially just, future. In other words, learning is involved in improving both the condition of the planet and the human condition.\ud The previous chapters in this book examine environmental learning in a full range of educational settings in diverse international contexts, including Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The case studies from these different educational and cultural contexts illuminate the challenges of engaging children and adults in meaningful learning regarding the complexity of environmental issues, as well as document and offer insights into the promising possibilities of such engagement

Workshop speakers

Abstracts of the workshop speaker presentation

The impact of surface heterogeneity on the diurnal cycle of deep convection

Despite some recent improvements, there remain major deficiencies in model simulations using parameterised convection in capturing both the phase and amplitude of the daily cycle of precipitation in tropical regions. The difficulties are particularly acute in regions of heterogeneous surface conditions, since the simulations need not only to respond appropriately to the local forcing from surface fluxes but also to capture the interactions with near-surface mesoscale circulations. Here we examine such a situation by means of idealised cloud-resolving simulations of deep convection over a heterogeneous surface, performed using the cloud-resolving simulation model MONC. In these simulations, we show that precipitation forms preferentially over dry and warm patches ("DRY") as compared to wet and cold patches ("WET"), with the peak precipitation rates differing by a factor of approximately 4. The initiation of precipitation occurs approximately 1.5 hours earlier in the DRY patches compared to the WET. Moreover, within the WET and DRY patches there are marked differences in the spatial distribution of the precipitation. These cloud-resolving simulations are then used as a benchmark to assess the behaviour of simulations using parameterised convection, performed using the idealised configuration of the MetUM. The MetUM simulations do produce a response with some qualitative similarities to the cloud-resolving simulations. In particular, although the simulations with parameterised convection initiate precipitation too early they are capable of capturing the relative amounts of daily-mean precipitation in the DRY and WET patches. We propose that the cloud-resolving simulations could be further used to investigate the impact of fully interactive surface schemes and as benchmark simulations to evaluate new parameterisation schemes