Correction: assortative mating in fallow deer reduces the strength of sexual selection.

PMCID: PMC3182158 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This article corrects this one: PLoS One. 2011; 6(4): e18533. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018533[This corrects the article on p. e18533 in vol. 6.]

A novel mechanism for binding of galactose-terminated glycans by the C-type carbohydrate recognition domain in blood dendritic cell antigen 2

Blood dendritic cell antigen 2 (BDCA-2; also designated CLEC4C or CD303) is uniquely expressed on plasmacytoid dendritic cells. Stimulation of BDCA-2 with antibodies leads to an anti-inflammatory response in these cells, but the natural ligands for the receptor are not known. The C-type carbohydrate recognition domain in the extracellular portion of BDCA-2 contains a signature motif typical of C-type animal lectins that bind mannose, glucose, or GlcNAc, yet it has been reported that BDCA-2 binds selectively to galactose-terminated, biantennary N-linked glycans. A combination of glycan array analysis and binding competition studies with monosaccharides and natural and synthetic oligosaccharides have been used to define the binding epitope for BDCA-2 as the trisaccharide Galβ1–3/4GlcNAcβ1–2Man. X-ray crystallography and mutagenesis studies show that mannose is ligated to the conserved Ca2+ in the primary binding site that is characteristic of C-type carbohydrate recognition domains, and the GlcNAc and galactose residues make additional interactions in a wide, shallow groove adjacent to the primary binding site. As predicted from these studies, BDCA-2 binds to IgG, which bears galactose-terminated glycans that are not commonly found attached to other serum glycoproteins. Thus, BDCA-2 has the potential to serve as a previously unrecognized immunoglobulin Fc receptor

Rekeningkunde 2B

Exam paper for second semeste

Coupled-cluster theory of a gas of strongly-interacting fermions in the dilute limit

We study the ground-state properties of a dilute gas of strongly-interacting fermions in the framework of the coupled-cluster expansion (CCE). We demonstrate that properties such as universality, opening of a gap in the excitation spectrum and applicability of s-wave approximations appear naturally in the CCE approach. In the zero-density limit, we show that the ground-state energy density depends on only one parameter which in turn may depend at most on the spatial dimensionality of the system.Comment: 7 figure

BodyNet: Volumetric Inference of 3D Human Body Shapes

Human shape estimation is an important task for video editing, animation and fashion industry. Predicting 3D human body shape from natural images, however, is highly challenging due to factors such as variation in human bodies, clothing and viewpoint. Prior methods addressing this problem typically attempt to fit parametric body models with certain priors on pose and shape. In this work we argue for an alternative representation and propose BodyNet, a neural network for direct inference of volumetric body shape from a single image. BodyNet is an end-to-end trainable network that benefits from (i) a volumetric 3D loss, (ii) a multi-view re-projection loss, and (iii) intermediate supervision of 2D pose, 2D body part segmentation, and 3D pose. Each of them results in performance improvement as demonstrated by our experiments. To evaluate the method, we fit the SMPL model to our network output and show state-of-the-art results on the SURREAL and Unite the People datasets, outperforming recent approaches. Besides achieving state-of-the-art performance, our method also enables volumetric body-part segmentation.Comment: Appears in: European Conference on Computer Vision 2018 (ECCV 2018). 27 page

Abundance and gill net selectivity of Pellonula leonensis in the Lower Nun River, Niger Delta, Nigeria

The abundance of Pellonula leonensis in relation to location, photoperiod, depth, tide, season and gill net selectivity was studied from May 2001 to April, 2002 in the Lower Nun River, Niger Delta. Three sets of gill net with stretched mesh sizes of 8, 12 and 15 mm respectively were used each measuring 35 m in length and 3 m in depth having a surface area of 105 m2. Abundance was least in September and highest in February and P. leonensis was more dominant in the convex area of the river and lowest inthe concave section. There was no significant variation (P > 0.05) in abundance of P. leonensis with photoperiod, water depth, tide and season. There was gillnet selectivity with the medium mesh size (12mm) gill net as more effective constituting 68.77% of the total catch of P. leonensis in the Lower Nun River

Geographical trends in research: a preliminary analysis on authors' affiliations

In the last decade, research literature reached an enormous volume with an unprecedented current annual increase of 1.5 million new publications. As research gets ever more global and new countries and institutions, either from academia or corporate environment, start to contribute with their share, it is important to monitor this complex scenario and understand its dynamics. We present a study on a conference proceedings dataset extracted from Springer Nature Scigraph that illustrates insightful geographical trends and highlights the unbalanced growth of competitive research institutions worldwide. Results emerged from our micro and macro analysis show that the distributions among countries of institutions and papers follow a power law, and thus very few countries keep producing most of the papers accepted by high-tier conferences. In addition, we found that the annual and overall turnover rate of the top 5, 10 and 25 countries is extremely low, suggesting a very static landscape in which new entries struggle to emerge. Finally, we highlight the presence of an increasing gap between the number of institutions initiating and overseeing research endeavours (i.e. first and last authors' affiliations) and the total number of institutions participating in research. As a consequence of our analysis, the paper also discusses our experience in working with affiliations: an utterly simple matter at first glance, that is instead revealed to be a complex research and technical challenge yet far from being solved