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Riparian Meadow Response to Modern Conservation Grazing Management.
Riparian meadows occupy a small proportion of the public lands in the western United States but they provide numerous ecosystem services, including the production of high-quality forage for livestock grazing. Modern conservation management strategies (e.g., reductions in livestock stocking rates and adoption of new riparian grazing standards) have been implemented to better balance riparian conservation and livestock production objectives on publicly managed lands. We examined potential relationships between long-term changes in plant community, livestock grazing pressure and environmental conditions at two spatial scales in meadows grazed under conservation management strategies. Changes in plant community were not associated with either livestock stocking rate or precipitation at the grazing allotment (i.e., administrative) scale. Alternatively, both grazing pressure and precipitation had significant, albeit modest, associations with changes in plant community at the meadow (i.e., ecological site) scale. These results suggest that reductions in stocking rate have improved the balance between riparian conservation and livestock production goals. However, associations between elevation, site wetness, precipitation, and changes in plant community suggest that changing climate conditions (e.g., reduced snowpack and changes in timing of snowmelt) could trigger shifts in plant communities, potentially impacting both conservation and agricultural services (e.g., livestock and forage production). Therefore, adaptive, site-specific management strategies are required to meet grazing pressure limits and safeguard ecosystem services within individual meadows, especially under more variable climate conditions
Global Profiling and Inhibition of Protein Lipidation in Vector and Host Stages of the Sleeping Sickness Parasite Trypanosoma brucei
The enzyme N-myristoyltransferase (NMT) catalyzes the essential fatty acylation of substrate proteins with myristic acid in eukaryotes and is a validated drug target in the parasite Trypanosoma brucei, the causative agent of African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). N-Myristoylation typically mediates membrane localization of proteins and is essential to the function of many. However, only a handful of proteins are experimentally validated as N-myristoylated in T. brucei. Here, we perform metabolic labeling with an alkyne-tagged myristic acid analogue, enabling the capture of lipidated proteins in insect and host life stages of T. brucei. We further compare this with a longer chain palmitate analogue to explore the chain length-specific incorporation of fatty acids into proteins. Finally, we combine the alkynyl-myristate analogue with NMT inhibitors and quantitative chemical proteomics to globally define N-myristoylated proteins in the clinically relevant bloodstream form parasites. This analysis reveals five ARF family small GTPases, calpain-like proteins, phosphatases, and many uncharacterized proteins as substrates of NMT in the parasite, providing a global view of the scope of this important protein modification and further evidence for the crucial and pleiotropic role of NMT in the cell
Pressure Induced Hydration Dynamics of Membranes
Pressure-jump initiated time-resolved x-ray diffraction studies of dynamics
of the hydration of the hexagonal phase in biological membranes show that (i)
the relaxation of the unit cell spacing is non-exponential in time; (ii) the
Bragg peaks shift smoothly to their final positions without significant
broadening or loss in crystalline order. This suggests that the hydration is
not diffusion limited but occurs via a rather homogeneous swelling of the whole
lattice, described by power law kinetics with an exponent .Comment: REVTEX 3, 10 pages,3 figures(available on request),#
Radio Galaxy Zoo: The Distortion of Radio Galaxies by Galaxy Clusters
We study the impact of cluster environment on the morphology of a sample of
4304 extended radio galaxies from Radio Galaxy Zoo. A total of 87% of the
sample lies within a projected 15 Mpc of an optically identified cluster.
Brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) are more likely than other cluster members to
be radio sources, and are also moderately bent. The surface density as a
function of separation from cluster center of non-BCG radio galaxies follows a
power law with index out to (Mpc), which
is steeper than the corresponding distribution for optically selected galaxies.
Non-BCG radio galaxies are statistically more bent the closer they are to the
cluster center. Within the inner (Mpc) of a cluster,
non-BCG radio galaxies are statistically more bent in high-mass clusters than
in low-mass clusters. Together, we find that non-BCG sources are statistically
more bent in environments that exert greater ram pressure. We use the
orientation of bent radio galaxies as an indicator of galaxy orbits and find
that they are preferentially in radial orbits. Away from clusters, there is a
large population of bent radio galaxies, limiting their use as cluster
locators; however, they are still located within statistically overdense
regions. We investigate the asymmetry in the tail length of sources that have
their tails aligned along the radius vector from the cluster center, and find
that the length of the inward-pointing tail is weakly suppressed for sources
close to the center of the cluster.Comment: 23 pages, 17 figures, 2 tables. Supplemental data files available in
The Astronomical Journal or contact autho
Heating mechanisms in radio frequency driven ultracold plasmas
Several mechanisms by which an external electromagnetic field influences the
temperature of a plasma are studied analytically and specialized to the system
of an ultracold plasma (UCP) driven by a uniform radio frequency (RF) field.
Heating through collisional absorption is reviewed and applied to UCPs.
Furthermore, it is shown that the RF field modifies the three body
recombination process by ionizing electrons from intermediate high-lying
Rydberg states and upshifting the continuum threshold, resulting in a
suppression of three body recombination. Heating through collisionless
absorption associated with the finite plasma size is calculated in detail,
revealing a temperature threshold below which collisionless absorption is
ineffective.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure
Rotating Superconductors and the London Moment: Thermodynamics versus Microscopics
Comparing various microscopic theories of rotating superconductors to the
conclusions of thermodynamic considerations, we traced their marked difference
to the question of how some thermodynamic quantities (the electrostatic and
chemical potentials) are related to more microscopic ones: The electron's the
work function, mean-field potential and Fermi energy -- certainly a question of
general import.
After the correct identification is established, the relativistic correction
for the London Moment is shown to vanish, with the obvious contribution from
the Fermi velocity being compensated by other contributions such as
electrostatics and interactions.Comment: 23 pages 4 fi
Spin foams with timelike surfaces
Spin foams of 4d gravity were recently extended from complexes with purely
spacelike surfaces to complexes that also contain timelike surfaces. In this
article, we express the associated partition function in terms of vertex
amplitudes and integrals over coherent states. The coherent states are
characterized by unit 3--vectors which represent normals to surfaces and lie
either in the 2--sphere or the 2d hyperboloids. In the case of timelike
surfaces, a new type of coherent state is used and the associated completeness
relation is derived. It is also shown that the quantum simplicity constraints
can be deduced by three different methods: by weak imposition of the
constraints, by restriction of coherent state bases and by the master
constraint.Comment: 22 pages, no figures; v2: remarks on operator formalism added in
discussion; correction: the spin 1/2 irrep of the discrete series does not
appear in the Plancherel decompositio
Endomorphisms of abelian varieties, cyclotomic extensions and Lie algebras
We prove an analogue of the Tate conjecture on homomorphisms of abelian
varieties over infinite cyclotomic extensions of finitely generated fields of
characteristic zero.Comment: 9 page
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