Screening of Perennial Grasses and a Mutant Maize Collection by Fourier-Transformed InfraRed (FTIR) Spectroscopy for Improved Biofuel Traits

Currently the potential of biomass crops, including grasses, is limited because most species have not been bred for this purpose. However traits such as lignification, phenolic cross-linking and carbohydrate accessibility, which are also important for nutritive quality in forage grasses, can affect potential biofuel quality in applications such as combustion, fast-pyrolysis or fermentation. A collection of Lolium and Festuca species known to exhibit a range of lignin, cell wall phenolic and carbohydrate concentrations have been used to test optimum characteristics for biofuel processing. This collection formed a “calibration” set for subsequent high through-put FTIR chemical screening of additional plant lines: (1) A set of Lolium-Festuca substitution lines, in which L. perenne chromosomes or chromosome segments are substituted by homoeologous regions of F. pratensis, that provide the potential to physically map biofuel traits to an individual chromosome or chromosome segment; (2) A maize transposon (Robertson’s Mutator) induced mutant collection, which provides the potential to identify gene sequences underlying important biochemical traits linked to biofuel as determined by FTIR analysis

Functional independence of circadian clocks that regulate plant gene expression

AbstractBackground: Circadian clocks regulate the gene expression, metabolism and behaviour of most eukaryotes, controlling an orderly succession of physiological processes that are synchronised with the environmental day/night cycle. Central circadian pacemakers that control animal behaviour are located in the brains of insects and rodents, but the location of such a pacemaker has not been determined in plants. Peripheral plant and animal tissues also maintain circadian rhythms when isolated in culture, indicating that these tissues contain circadian clocks. The degree of autonomy that the multiple, peripheral circadian clocks have in the intact organism is unclear.Results: We used the bioluminescent luciferase reporter gene to monitor rhythmic expression from three promoters in transgenic Arabidopsis and tobacco plants. The rhythmic expression of a single gene could be set at up to three phases in different anatomical locations of a single plant, by applying light/dark treatments to restricted tissue areas. The initial phases were stably maintained after the entraining treatments ended, indicating that the circadian oscillators in intact plants are autonomous. This result held for all the vegetative plant organs and for promoters expressed in all major cell types. The rhythms of one organ were unaffected by entrainment of the rest of the plant, indicating that phase-resetting signals are also autonomous.Conclusions: Higher plants contain a spatial array of autonomous circadian clocks that regulate gene expression without a localised pacemaker. Circadian timing in plants might be less accurate but more flexible than the vertebrate circadian system

Biological effects of contaminants: Stress on Stress (SoS) response in mussels

The SoS biomarker provides evidence of the effects of pollutants at the whole organism response level. It shows a typical dose-response curve, characterized by a continuous decrease of the parameter LT50 (the median survival time or the time (days) in which 50% of mussels have died) with increasing pollutant concentrations. However, in some experiments with low concentrations of contaminants a slight increase in LT50 has beeno bserved, possibly due to a hormetic effect. The method for determining SoS in mussels is being applied routinely to both toxicant-exposed mussels in laboratory studies and to mussels collected in national monitoring programmes from polluted environments and along pollution gradients. The added value of SoS in mussels is that this response measures the overall impact of multiple stressors on an organism. Thus, SoS responses can be quantitatively correlated to contaminant tissue concentrations, providing an integrated biological effect–chemical monitoring tool.Postprin

Cloudbus Toolkit for Market-Oriented Cloud Computing

This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds, in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii) internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference pape

On transformation of query scheduling strategies in distributed and heterogeneous database systems

This work considers a problem of optimal query processing in heterogeneous and distributed database systems. A global query sub- mitted at a local site is decomposed into a number of queries processed at the remote sites. The partial results returned by the queries are in- tegrated at a local site. The paper addresses a problem of an optimal scheduling of queries that minimizes time spend on data integration of the partial results into the final answer. A global data model defined in this work provides a unified view of the heterogeneous data structures located at the remote sites and a system of operations is defined to ex- press the complex data integration procedures. This work shows that the transformations of an entirely simultaneous query processing strate- gies into a hybrid (simultaneous/sequential) strategy may in some cases lead to significantly faster data integration. We show how to detect such cases, what conditions must be satisfied to transform the schedules, and how to transform the schedules into the more efficient ones

Finite geometries and diffractive orbits in isospectral billiards

Several examples of pairs of isospectral planar domains have been produced in the two-dimensional Euclidean space by various methods. We show that all these examples rely on the symmetry between points and blocks in finite projective spaces; from the properties of these spaces, one can derive a relation between Green functions as well as a relation between diffractive orbits in isospectral billiards.Comment: 10 page

Diffractive orbits in isospectral billiards

Isospectral domains are non-isometric regions of space for which the spectra of the Laplace-Beltrami operator coincide. In the two-dimensional Euclidean space, instances of such domains have been given. It has been proved for these examples that the length spectrum, that is the set of the lengths of all periodic trajectories, coincides as well. However there is no one-to-one correspondence between the diffractive trajectories. It will be shown here how the diffractive contributions to the Green functions match nevertheless in a ''one-to-three'' correspondence.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure

Supporting variables for biological effects measurements in fish and blue mussels

Biological effects measurements in fish and blue mussel are fundamental in marine environmental monitoring. Nevertheless, currently used biomarkers may be confounded by basic physiological phenomena, such as growth, reproduction, and feeding, as well as thereby associated physiological variation. Here, we present a number of supporting variables, which are essential to measure in order to obtain reliable biological effects data, facilitate their interpretation, and make valid comparisons. For fish, these variables include: body weight, body length, condition, gonad maturation status, various somatic indices, age, and growth. For blue mussels, these variables include: volume, flesh weight, shell weight, and condition. Also, grossly visible anomalies, lesions, and parasites should be recorded for both fish and blue mussels. General confounding factors and their effects are described, as well as recommendations for how to handle themPostprint

GeneMill: A 21st century platform for innovation

GeneMill officially launched on 4th February 2016 and is an open access academic facility located at The University of Liverpool that has been established for the high-throughput construction and testing of synthetic DNA constructs. GeneMill provides end-to-end design, construction and phenotypic characterization of small to large gene constructs or genetic circuits/pathways for academic and industrial applications. Thus, GeneMill is equipping the scientific community with easy access to the validated tools required to explore the possibilities of Synthetic Biology