From bench to bountiful harvests : a road map for the next decade of Arabidopsis research

In the face of an increasing world population and climate instability, the demands for food and fuel will continue to rise. Plant science will be crucial to help meet these exponentially increasing requirements for food and fuel supplies. Fundamental plant research will play a major role in providing key advances in our understanding of basic plant processes that can then flow into practical advances through knowledge sharing and collaborations. The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana has played a major role in our understanding of plant biology, and the Arabidopsis community has developed many tools and resources to continue building on this knowledge. Drawing from previous experience of internationally coordinated projects, The international Arabidopsis community, represented by the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC), has drawn up a road map for the next decade of Arabidopsis research to inform scientists and decision makers on the future foci of Arabidopsis research within the wider plant science landscape. This article provides a summary of the MASC road map

TONSPUR 59 - Krakow to Venice in 12 Hours - 8-channel sound installation, 7-part series of posters plus clock / at TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien, Museumsquartier, Vienna 2013

The Installation premiered in July 2013 in TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien (Vienna), a public outdoor location. TONSPUR is curated sound project public platform, showcasing international and Austrian artists engaged in sound art, music and auditory research and practice. 4 projects each year are shown in the passage, which is part of Museumsquartie Vienna. Krakow to Venice in 12 hours ran each day for 3 months from 21st July 2013. 8 channel installation (12 hours audio) synced in real time from 8 am – 8 pm. Multichannel audio piece is design to change perspective on the architectural structure of the location where piece is presented. Noise pollution is a common concern in today’s architecture and urban planning but at the same time city soundscape is an integral part of the identity of the location. Urban sound gives us a point of orientation on a journey. The structure of a 12-hour clock forms the basis of the immersive multichannel sound installation. In this 12 hour-long composition, the times of the recordings are synchronous with the real time of the installation’s location. “Kraków to Venice in 12 hours” maps a journey across Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Slovenia to Italy, visiting Krakow, Katowice, Bielsko-Biala, Ostrava, Brno, Bratislava, Vienna, Graz, Maribor, Ljubljana, Trieste and Venice. The journey was undertaken on a railway connecting Eastern and Western Europe that was built during the reign of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The project attempts to captures the unique sonic identities of the 12 cities travelled through, searching for similarities and differences. It acts as a personal and subjective audio travel guide and a clock for the journey, mapping the movement through geographical locations over the passage of time. The artist captures the city with binaural microphones; two microphones are worn in her ears as she moves through the city giving a personal time space perspective of the city soundscape. The unobtrusive microphones also bring the artist passing snippets of unguarded conversations interwoven with the unique sonic footprint of the city. The language recorded on the streets, stations, town squares and cafes is an important element of the piece; marking the transition from one country to another, it serves as a spatial and temporal reference for the traveler in a borderless Schengen Europe. “50.06465,19.94498 to 45.441058,12.320845” (set of 6 prints) is a visual record of the artist’s movement through 12 urban locations where the field recordings took place for the “Kraków to Venice in 12 hours” project. The artist as an outsider is looking for key points within the urban space, but the city imposes its structure and creates a unique pattern for each of the drawings denoting the walks. The coloured dots on the map point to locations where the recordings took place on the hour. The printed record of latitude and longitude allows the viewer to discover exact locations where audio material was recorded. The project exists on line as an interactive platform, where the listener can move through geographical locations and time listening to the field recordings and compositions on chosen parts of the journey. www.krakowtovenicein12h.co

Integrative molecular profiling indicates a central role of transitory starch breakdown in establishing a stable C/N homeostasis during cold acclimation in two natural accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana

Figure S1. Comparison of metabolite levels between non-acclimated and acclimated plants. Ratios were built by dividing the absolute mean values of metabolite levels of Rsch by levels of Cvi, or by dividing absolute mean values of metabolites of acc by na plants. Asterisks indicate significant differences as described in the figure. Grey-coloured metabolites were not experimentally analysed. (TIF 1649 kb

The Coastal Convective Interactions Experiment (CCIE): understanding the role of sea breezes for hailstorm hotspots in Eastern Australia

The coastal convective interactions experiment (CCIE's) integration of climatological analysis with an intensive field campaign has provided an opportunity for revealing some of the complexities surrounding thunderstorm hotpots in complex physical settings like SEQ. For the CCIE climatological analysis, a continuous 18-yr (July 1997 to June 2015) volumetric reflectivity radar dataset was sourced from the 1.9° S-band weather radar located at Marburg, 50 km west of Brisbane. A cell-based analysis of this archive was performed using a MATLAB implementation of the identification, tracking, and selected analysis algorithms from the Weather Decision Support System-Integrated Information (WDSS-II). The 10-min interval of the Marburg radar volumes creates significant spatial discontinuities between MESH grids from an individual thunderstorm. A preliminary analysis indicates a strong relationship between the presence of the sea breeze and the Boonah hailstorm hotspot, but further analysis is needed to isolate the additional influence of synoptic and topographic drivers. Furthermore, fine-scale field observations of the sea-breeze?thunderstorm interaction events have begun to shed some light on the meteorology of thunderstorm hotspots in South East Queensland (SEQ)

Diurnal effects of anoxia on the metabolome of the seagrass Zostera marina

We investigated the response, adaptation and tolerance mechanisms of the temperate seagrass Zostera marina to water column anoxia. We exposed Z. marina to a diurnal light/dark cycle under anoxia and assessed the metabolic response by measuring the metabolome with gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC–MS). During anoxia and light exposure the roots showed an altered metabolome whereas the leaves were only marginally affected, indicating that photosynthetically derived oxygen could satisfy the oxygen demand in the leaves but not in the roots. Nocturnal anoxia caused a biphasic shift in the metabolome of roots and leaves. The first phase, after 15 h under anoxia and 3 h of darkness showed a fast increase of lactate, pyruvate, GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid), succinate, alanine and a decrease in glutamate and glutamine. The second phase, after 21 h under anoxia and 9 h of darkness showed a decrease in lactate and pyruvate and an increase in alanine, GABA and succinate. This reprogramming of the metabolome after 21 h under anoxia indicates a possible mitigation mechanism to avoid the toxic effects of anoxia. A pathway enrichment analysis proposes the alanine shunt, the GABA shunt and the 2-oxoglutarate shunt as such mitigation mechanisms that alleviate pyruvate levels and lead to carbon and nitrogen storage during anoxia. This work demonstrates the applicability of metabolomics to assess low oxygen stress responses of Z. marina and allows us to propose an anoxia recovery model

Time-resolved impulse response of the magnetoplasmon resonance in a two-dimensional electron gas

We have used optically excited ultrashort electrical pulses to measure the magnetoplasmon resonance of a two-dimensional electron gas formed in an AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructure at frequencies up to 200 gigahertz. This is accomplished by incorporating the sample into a guided wave probe operating in a pumped (^{3}He) system. We are able to detect the resonance by launching a stimulus pulse in the guide, and monitoring the system response in a time resolved pump-probe arrangement. Data obtained from measurements yield resonant frequencies that agree with the magnetoplasmon dispersion relation.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Coulomb drag between one-dimensional conductors

We have analyzed Coulomb drag between currents of interacting electrons in two parallel one-dimensional conductors of finite length $L$ attached to external reservoirs. For strong coupling, the relative fluctuations of electron density in the conductors acquire energy gap $M$. At energies larger than $\Gamma = const \times v_- \exp (-LM/v_-)/L + \Gamma_{+}$, where $\Gamma_{+}$ is the impurity scattering rate, and for $L>v_-/M$, where $v_-$ is the fluctuation velocity, the gap leads to an ``ideal'' drag with almost equal currents in the conductors. At low energies the drag is suppressed by coherent instanton tunneling, and the zero-temperature transconductance vanishes, indicating the Fermi liquid behavior.Comment: 5 twocolumn pages in RevTex, added 1 eps-Figure and calculation of trans-resistanc

Radar climatology of the COPS region

A climatology of convection initiation (CI) and convective enhancements (CE) has been developed using radar reflectivity data in southwestern Germany and eastern France over the period of May�August of 2000�2006 and 2008. The study region included the Vosges Mountains of France, the Rhine Valley which straddles France and Germany, the Black ForestMountains and the SwabianMountains of Germany. Convection occurred frequently during the summer months throughout the study region. The CI density (number of initiations per square km) illustrates preferential formation in the mountain regions while the CE events spanned both mountains and valleys nearly equally. There is a strongmid-day peak of the CI events suggesting that diurnal heating is critical for CI in the region. The very strong thunderstorms (>46 dBZ) first occurred in the mountains and �2 h later in the Rhine Valley. During the summer of 2007, the Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS) field campaign was conducted with the objective of obtaining improved understanding of convective processes and short-term quantitative precipitation forecasting in low-mountain regions. Comparisons were made between the radar climatology results and the COPS summer. The COPS summer exhibited preferential CI density in the mountainous regions but not as pronounced as the climatology. The COPS summer had a similar diurnal peak of CI events as climatology but the ratio of daytime to nighttime CI (1.7), or amplitude of the diurnal cycle, was less than that of climatology (3.0). While both the 8-year climatology and COPS summer were dominated by daytime, locally-forced CI occurrences, the broad distribution of daytime CI events and increase in nighttime events observed during COPS indicate a more active synoptic pattern in 2007

Otopathogenic Pseudomonas aeruginosa Enters and Survives Inside Macrophages

Otitis media (OM) is a broad term describing a group of infectious and inflammatory disorders of the middle ear. Despite antibiotic therapy, acute OM can progress to chronic suppurative otitis media (CSOM) characterized by ear drum perforation and purulent discharge. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the most common pathogen associated with CSOM. Although, macrophages play an important role in innate immune responses but their role in the pathogenesis of P. aeruginosa-induced CSOM is not known. The objective of this study is to examine the interaction of P. aeruginosa with primary macrophages. We observed that P. aeruginosa enters and multiplies inside human and mouse primary macrophages. This bacterial entry in macrophages requires both microtubule and actin dependent processes. Transmission electron microscopy demonstrated that P. aeruginosa was present in membrane bound vesicles inside macrophages. Interestingly, deletion of oprF expression in P. aeruginosa abrogates its ability to survive inside macrophages. Our results suggest that otopathogenic P. aeruginosa entry and survival inside macrophages is OprF-dependent. The survival of bacteria inside macrophages will lead to evasion of killing and this lack of pathogen clearance by phagocytes contributes to the persistence of infection in CSOM. Understanding host–pathogen interaction will provide novel avenues to design effective treatment modalities against OM