Optogenetic control of gene expression in plants in the presence of ambient white light

Optogenetics is the genetic approach for controlling cellular processes with light. It provides spatiotemporal, quantitative and reversible control over biological signaling and metabolic processes, overcoming limitations of chemically inducible systems. However, optogenetics lags in plant research because ambient light required for growth leads to undesired system activation. We solved this issue by developing plant usable light-switch elements (PULSE), an optogenetic tool for reversibly controlling gene expression in plants under ambient light. PULSE combines a blue-light-regulated repressor with a red-light-inducible switch. Gene expression is only activated under red light and remains inactive under white light or in darkness. Supported by a quantitative mathematical model, we characterized PULSE in protoplasts and achieved high induction rates, and we combined it with CRISPR–Cas9-based technologies to target synthetic signaling and developmental pathways. We applied PULSE to control immune responses in plant leaves and generated Arabidopsis transgenic plants. PULSE opens broad experimental avenues in plant research and biotechnology

Mouse Rif1 is a regulatory subunit of protein phosphatase 1 (PP1)

International audienceRif1 is a conserved protein that plays essential roles in orchestrating DNA replication timing, controlling nuclear architecture, telomere length and DNA repair. However, the relationship between these different roles, as well as the molecular basis of Rif1 function is still unclear. The association of Rif1 with insoluble nuclear lamina has thus far hampered exhaustive characterization of the associated protein complexes. We devised a protocol that overcomes this problem, and were thus able to discover a number of novel Rif1 interactors, involved in chromatin metabolism and phosphorylation. Among them, we focus here on PP1. Data from different systems have suggested that Rif1-PP1 interaction is conserved and has important biological roles. Using mutagenesis, NMR, isothermal calorimetry and surface plasmon resonance we demonstrate that Rif1 is a high-affinity PP1 adaptor, able to out-compete the well-established PP1-inhibitor I2 in vitro. Our conclusions have important implications for understanding Rif1 diverse roles and the relationship between the biological processes controlled by Rif1

CloudSafetyNet: Detecting Data Leakage between Cloud Tenants

Copyright © 2014 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).When tenants deploy applications under the control of third-party cloud providers, they must trust the providers security mechanisms for inter-tenant isolation, resource sharing and access control. Despite a providers best efforts, accidental data leakage may occur due to misconfigurations or bugs in the cloud platform. Especially in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds, which rely on weaker forms of isolation, the potential for unnoticed data leakage is high. Prior work to raise tenants trust in clouds relies on attestation, which limits the management flexibility of providers, or fine-grained data tracking, which has high overheads. We describe CloudSafetyNet (CSN), a lightweight monitoring framework that gives tenants visibility into the propagation of their application data in a cloud environment with low performance overhead. It exploits the incentive of tenants to co-operate with each other to detect accidental data leakage. CSN transparently adds opaque security tags to a subset of form fields in HTTP requests, using a client-side JavaScript library. Socket-level monitors maintain a log of observed tags flowing between application components. Tenants retrieve their logs and identify foreign tags that indicate data leakage. To check the correct operation of CSN, tenants send probe requests with known tags and verify that monitors are logging correctly. Using an implementation of CSN deployed on the OpenShift and AppScale PaaS platforms, we show that it can discover misconfigurations and bugs with a negligible performance impact

LOVTRAP: an optogenetic system for photoinduced protein dissociation

LOVTRAP is an optogenetic approach for reversible light-induced protein dissociation using protein A fragments that bind to the LOV domain only in the dark, with tunable kinetics and a >150-fold change in the dissociation constant (Kd). By reversibly sequestering proteins at mitochondria, we precisely modulated the proteins' access to the cell edge, demonstrating a naturally occurring 3-mHz cell-edge oscillation driven by interactions of Vav2, Rac1, and PI3K proteins

ОБОСНОВАНИЕ ОТКРЫТИЯ ОРГАНИЗАЦИИ РОЗНИЧНОЙ ТОРГОВЛИ: аннотация к дипломной работе/Илона Евгеньевна Стукмейстер; БГУ, Факультет бизнеса, Кафедра бизнес-администрирования; науч.рук.Капорцева О.Н.

With the widespread availability of multi-core processors, running multiple diversified variants or several different ver-sions of an application in parallel is becoming a viable ap-proach for increasing the reliability and security of software systems. The key component of such N-version execution (NVX) systems is a runtime monitor that enables the execu-tion of multiple versions in parallel. Unfortunately, existing monitors impose either a large per-formance overhead or rely on intrusive kernel-level changes. Moreover, none of the existing solutions scales well with the number of versions, since the runtime monitor acts as a performance bottleneck. In this paper, we introduce VARAN, an NVX framework that combines selective binary rewriting with a novel event-streaming architecture to significantly reduce performance overhead and scale well with the number of versions, without relying on intrusive kernel modifications. Our evaluation shows that VARAN can run NVX systems based on popular C10k network servers with only a modest performance overhead, and can be effectively used to increase software reliability using techniques such as transparent failover, live sanitization and multi-revision execution