MARKET FORCES AND CHANGES IN THE PLANT INPUT SUPPLY INDUSTRY

Agribusiness, Input Supply Industry, Fertilizer, Plant Nutrients, Seed, Capital, Market Forces, Structural Change, Porter’s Five Forces, Agribusiness, Q13, L10, L22, M22, L80,

Technical Advance: caspase‐1 activation and IL‐1β release correlate with the degree of lysosome damage, as illustrated by a novel imaging method to quantify phagolysosome damage

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142182/1/jlb0813.pd

Pilin expression and processing in pilus mutants of Neisseria gonorrhoeae : critical role of Gly -1 in assembly

Spontaneous mutants of Neisseria gonorrheae failing to express pili or having diminished levels of piliation were studied with regard to pilin expression. All mutants displayed altered pilin processing detectable as the release of soluble, truncated pilin molecules (S-pilin). Of particular interest was the finding, in one mutant, that substitution of serine for glycine at position -1 of propilin, a highly conserved residue among N -metPhe and related pilins, abolished pilus expression but not S-pilin release. The degree of S-pilin processing and the levels of membrane-associated pilin varied among the different classes of mutants, suggesting that each was blocked at a distinct step of pilus biogenesis. The data support a model in which increased S-pilin processing is a result of a decreased rate of pilus polymerization.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74951/1/j.1365-2958.1991.tb02108.x.pd

Physics Opportunities with Meson Beams

Over the past two decades, meson photo- and electro-production data of unprecedented quality and quantity have been measured at electromagnetic facilities worldwide. By contrast, the meson-beam data for the same hadronic final states are mostly outdated and largely of poor quality, or even nonexistent, and thus provide inadequate input to help interpret, analyze, and exploit the full potential of the new electromagnetic data. To reap the full benefit of the high-precision electromagnetic data, new high-statistics data from measurements with meson beams, with good angle and energy coverage for a wide range of reactions, are critically needed to advance our knowledge in baryon and meson spectroscopy and other related areas of hadron physics. To address this situation, a state of-the-art meson-beam facility needs to be constructed. The present paper summarizes unresolved issues in hadron physics and outlines the vast opportunities and advances that only become possible with such a facility.Comment: 46 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

Regional biodiversity of terrestrial Heteroptera and Orthoptera in southwestern Illinois

We conducted a baseline inventory of terrestrial Heteroptera (true bugs) and Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets and katydids) at foursites in Monroe and Randolph counties,Illinois in 2014, namely: Mill Creek Natural Area (MCNA); White Rock Nature Preserve (WRNP); Fogelpole Cave Nature Preserve (FCNP); and Kidd Lake State Natural Area (KLSNA).A total of 95 species in the focal taxa were recorded (67 Heteropteraand28 Orthoptera). In addition, a further 96 species of arthropods in groups other than Heteroptera and Orthoptera were also recorded.Heteropteran diversity was found to be typical of that expected for other natural areas in Illinois, though orthopteran diversity was much lower and may be related to structural aspects of the respective habitats.Cluster analysis of our presence/absence data revealed marked differences in site similarity between orthopteran and heteropteran species assemblages.IDNR Division of Wildlifeunpublishednot peer reviewedOpe

The tegula tango: A coevolutionary dance of interacting, positively selected sperm and egg proteins

Reproductive proteins commonly show signs of rapid divergence driven by positive selection. The mechanisms driving these changes have remained ambiguous in part because interacting male and female proteins have rarely been examined. We isolate an egg protein the vitelline envelope receptor for lysin (VERL) from Tegula, a genus of free-spawning marine snails. Like VERL from abalone, Tegula VERL is a major component of the VE surrounding the egg, includes a conserved zona pellucida (ZP) domain at its C-terminus, and possesses a unique, negatively charged domain of about 150 amino acids implicated in interactions with the positively charged lysin. Unlike for abalone VERL, where this unique VERL domain occurs in a tandem array of 22 repeats, Tegula VERL has just one such domain. Interspecific comparisons show that both lysin and the VERL domain diverge via positive selection, whereas the ZP domain evolves neutrally. Rates of nonsynonymous substitution are correlated between lysin and the VERL domain, consistent with sexual antagonism, although lineage-specific effects, perhaps owing to different ecologies, may alter the relative evolutionary rates of sperm- and egg-borne proteins. © 2012 The Author(s). Evolution © 2012 The Society for the Study of Evolution

Inefficient Vaginal Transmission of Tenofovir-Resistant HIV-1

Transmission of drug-resistant HIV has been postulated to be a threat to current first-line antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimens and the efficacy of several antiretroviral-based preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) strategies being tested. Here we evaluated the effect of the common tenofovir (TFV) resistance mutation K65R on vaginal HIV transmission. Our results demonstrate that despite no overt loss of overall replication competence in vivo, this mutation results in significantly reduced mucosal transmission. When transmitted, the mutant virus eventually reverted to the wild type in 2 of 3 animals examined

From Current to Constituent Quarks: a Renormalization Group Improved Hamiltonian-based Description of Hadrons

A model which combines the perturbative behavior of QCD with low energy phenomenology in a unified framework is developed. This is achieved by applying a similarity transformation to the QCD Hamiltonian which removes interactions between the ultraviolet cutoff and an arbitrary lower scale. Iteration then yields a renormalization group improved effective Hamiltonian at the hadronic energy scale. The procedure preserves the standard ultraviolet behavior of QCD. Furthermore, the Hamiltonian evolves smoothly to a phenomenological low energy behavior below the hadronic scale. This method has the benefit of allowing radiative corrections to be directly incorporated into nonperturbative many-body techniques. It is applied to Coulomb gauge QCD supplemented with a low energy linear confinement interaction. A nontrivial vacuum is included in the analysis via a Bogoliubov-Valatin transformation. Finally, the formalism is applied to the vacuum gap equation, the quark condensate, and the dynamical quark mass.Comment: 36 pages, RevTeX, 5 ps figures include