4,120 research outputs found
Developments in plant breeding for improved nutritional quality of soya beans I. Protein and amino acid content
Soya beans, like other legumes, contain low concentrations of the nutritionally essential sulphur amino acid, methionine. Cysteine, although not an essential amino acid because it can be synthesized from methionine, also influences the nutritional quality of soya bean products when it is only present in low levels. A low cysteine content will also aggravate a methionine deficiency. Soya bean lines deficient in 7S protein subunits have been identified. The 7S proteins contain substantially less methionine and cysteine than the 11S proteins. With the myriad of genetic null alleles for these subunits it may be possible to tailor the 7S/11S storage protein ratio and their total composition in seeds to include only those subunits with the richest sulphur amino acid composition. Cotyledon feeding experiments, using isolated soya bean cotyledons, demonstrated that addition of methionine to the culture media caused increased synthesis of both proteins and free amino acids but the mechanism by which this takes place is not clear
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Developments in plant breeding for improved nutritional quality of soya beans II. Anti-nutritional factors
Nutritional value of most plant materials is limited by the presence of numerous naturally occurring compounds which interfere with nutrient digestion and absorption. Although processing is employed widely in removal of these factors, selection of cultivars of soya beans with inherently low levels would have a considerable impact on efficiency of non-ruminant livestock production. The review considers the role of plant breeding in achieving this objective. The most abundant trypsin inhibitors are the Kunitz and the Bowman Birk inhibitors, containing 181 and 71 amino acids respectively. The Kunitz inhibitor is present at a concentration of 1.4g/kg of total seed contents and the Bowman Birk inhibitor 1.6g/kg. A large number of isoforms of the Bowman Birk inhibitor have been described in soya bean cultivars and it has been shown that the general properties of the inhibitor are, in fact, attributable to different isoforms. Nulls for both Bowman-Birk and Kunitz trypsin inhibitors have been identified, allowing new low trypsin inhibitor cultivars to be produced. However, research into breeding for low trypsin inhibitor cultivars currently has limited application as trypsin inhibitors contribute a major proportion of the methionine content of soya beans. Trypsin inhibitors are thought to be involved in the regulation of and protection against unwanted proteolysis in plant tissues and also act as a defense mechanism against attack from diseases, insects and animals. Hence, in breeding programes for low trypsin inhibitor cultivars, alternative protection for growing plants must be considered. Use of soya beans in non-ruminant animal feeds is limited by the flatulence associated with their consumption
Nuclear mutations affecting mitochondrial structure and function in Chlamydomonas
Wild type cells of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii can grow in the in the dark by taking up and respiring exogenously supplied acetate. Obligate photoautotrophic (dark dier, dk) mutants of this alga have been selected which grow at near wild type rates in the light, but rapidly die when transferred to darkness because of defects in mitochondrial structure and function. In crosses of the dk mutants to wild type, the majority of the mutants are inherited in a mendelian fashion, although two have been isolated which are inherited in a clearly nonmendelian fashion. Nine mendelian dk mutants have been analyzed in detail, and belong to eight different complementation groups representing eight gene loci. These mutants have been tentatively grouped into three classes on the basis of the pleiotropic nature of their phenotypic defects. Mutants in Class I have gross alterations in the ultrastructure of their mitochondrial inner membranes together with deficiencies in cytochrome oxidase and antimycin/rotenone-sensitive NADH-cytochrome c reductase activities. Mutants in Class II have a variety of less severe alterations in mitochondrial ultrastructure and deficiencies in cytochrome oxidase activity. Mutants in Class III have normal or near normal mitochondrial ultrastructure and reduced cytochrome oxidase activity. Eight of the nine mutants show corresponding reductions in cyanide-sensitive respiration
Quantum error correction for continuously detected errors
We show that quantum feedback control can be used as a quantum error
correction process for errors induced by weak continuous measurement. In
particular, when the error model is restricted to one, perfectly measured,
error channel per physical qubit, quantum feedback can act to perfectly protect
a stabilizer codespace. Using the stabilizer formalism we derive an explicit
scheme, involving feedback and an additional constant Hamiltonian, to protect
an ()-qubit logical state encoded in physical qubits. This works for
both Poisson (jump) and white-noise (diffusion) measurement processes. In
addition, universal quantum computation is possible in this scheme. As an
example, we show that detected-spontaneous emission error correction with a
driving Hamiltonian can greatly reduce the amount of redundancy required to
protect a state from that which has been previously postulated [e.g., Alber
\emph{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 4402 (2001)].Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure; minor correction
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Effects of variability in trypsin inhibitor content of soya bean meals on true and apparent ileal digestibility of amino acids and pancreas size in broiler chicks
Variability in the nutritional value of processed soya bean meal (SBM) and full fat soya bean (FFSB) currently restrict its use in diets for non-ruminant livestock. Two metabolism trials determined the amino acid digestibility and effect on pancreas size in young broilers of 8 commercially obtained products. Trypsin inhibitor (TI) values varied from 1.1 to 3.6mg/g but were all within the tolerated range of trypsin inhibitor activity (TIA). The results of the trials reported demonstrated that the coefficients of digestibility for individual amino acids varied widely between samples (e.g. coefficient of ileal apparent digestibility, CIAD, for lysine was from 0.755 to 0.884 for SBM and 0.778 to 0.848 for FFSB) but did not correlate with TIA levels, indicating other factors also affect amino acid digestibility of FFSB and SBM. Pancreas to body weight ratio (PBWR) increased with rate of soya inclusion in both the SBM (from 2.25 to 2.44g pancreas/kg body weight) and the FFSB (from 2.19 to 2.40g pancreas/kg body weight). The linear increase in pancreas size with increasing TIA intake suggested a dose dependent response that should be considered in feed formulation
Retroactive quantum jumps in a strongly-coupled atom-field system
We investigate a novel type of conditional dynamic that occurs in the
strongly-driven Jaynes-Cummings model with dissipation. Extending the work of
Alsing and Carmichael [Quantum Opt. {\bf 3}, 13 (1991)], we present a combined
numerical and analytic study of the Stochastic Master Equation that describes
the system's conditional evolution when the cavity output is continuously
observed via homodyne detection, but atomic spontaneous emission is not
monitored at all. We find that quantum jumps of the atomic state are induced by
its dynamical coupling to the optical field, in order retroactively to justify
atypical fluctuations in ocurring in the homodyne photocurrent.Comment: 4 pages, uses RevTex, 5 EPS figure
Experimental criteria for steering and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox
We formally link the concept of steering (a concept created by Schrodinger
but only recently formalised by Wiseman, Jones and Doherty [Phys. Rev. Lett.
98, 140402 (2007)] and the criteria for demonstrations of
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox introduced by Reid [Phys. Rev. A, 40, 913
(1989)]. We develop a general theory of experimental EPR-steering criteria,
derive a number of criteria applicable to discrete as well as
continuous-variables observables, and study their efficacy in detecting that
form of nonlocality in some classes of quantum states. We show that previous
versions of EPR-type criteria can be rederived within this formalism, thus
unifying these efforts from a modern quantum-information perspective and
clarifying their conceptual and formal origin. The theory follows in close
analogy with criteria for other forms of quantum nonlocality (Bell-nonlocality,
entanglement), and because it is a hybrid of those two, it may lead to insights
into the relationship between the different forms of nonlocality and the
criteria that are able to detect them.Comment: Changed title, updated references, minor corrections, added
journal-ref and DO
A matched expansion approach to practical self-force calculations
We discuss a practical method to compute the self-force on a particle moving
through a curved spacetime. This method involves two expansions to calculate
the self-force, one arising from the particle's immediate past and the other
from the more distant past. The expansion in the immediate past is a covariant
Taylor series and can be carried out for all geometries. The more distant
expansion is a mode sum, and may be carried out in those cases where the wave
equation for the field mediating the self-force admits a mode expansion of the
solution. In particular, this method can be used to calculate the gravitational
self-force for a particle of mass mu orbiting a black hole of mass M to order
mu^2, provided mu/M << 1. We discuss how to use these two expansions to
construct a full self-force, and in particular investigate criteria for
matching the two expansions. As with all methods of computing self-forces for
particles moving in black hole spacetimes, one encounters considerable
technical difficulty in applying this method; nevertheless, it appears that the
convergence of each series is good enough that a practical implementation may
be plausible.Comment: IOP style, 8 eps figures, accepted for publication in a special issue
of Classical and Quantum Gravit
Atom laser coherence and its control via feedback
We present a quantum-mechanical treatment of the coherence properties of a
single-mode atom laser. Specifically, we focus on the quantum phase noise of
the atomic field as expressed by the first-order coherence function, for which
we derive analytical expressions in various regimes. The decay of this function
is characterized by the coherence time, or its reciprocal, the linewidth. A
crucial contributor to the linewidth is the collisional interaction of the
atoms. We find four distinct regimes for the linewidth with increasing
interaction strength. These range from the standard laser linewidth, through
quadratic and linear regimes, to another constant regime due to quantum
revivals of the coherence function. The laser output is only coherent (Bose
degenerate) up to the linear regime. However, we show that application of a
quantum nondemolition measurement and feedback scheme will increase, by many
orders of magnitude, the range of interaction strengths for which it remains
coherent.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, revtex
Heterodyne and adaptive phase measurements on states of fixed mean photon number
The standard technique for measuring the phase of a single mode field is
heterodyne detection. Such a measurement may have an uncertainty far above the
intrinsic quantum phase uncertainty of the state. Recently it has been shown
[H. M. Wiseman and R. B. Killip, Phys. Rev. A 57, 2169 (1998)] that an adaptive
technique introduces far less excess noise. Here we quantify this difference by
an exact numerical calculation of the minimum measured phase variance for the
various schemes, optimized over states with a fixed mean photon number. We also
analytically derive the asymptotics for these variances. For the case of
heterodyne detection our results disagree with the power law claimed by
D'Ariano and Paris [Phys. Rev. A 49, 3022 (1994)].Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, minor changes from journal versio
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