Absorption and Transport of Inorganic Carbon in Kelps with Emphasis on Saccharina japonica

Due to the low CO2 concentration in seawater, macroalgae including Saccharina japonica have developed mechanisms for using the abundant external pool of HCO3− as an exogenous inorganic carbon (Ci) source. Otherwise, the high photosynthetic efficiency of some macroalgae indicates that they might possess CO2 concentrating mechanisms (CCMs) to elevate CO2 concentration intracellularly around the active site of ribulose-1, 5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCo). As the photosynthetic modes of macroalgae are diverse (C3, C4 or a combination of C3 and C4 pathway), CCMs in different carbon fixation pathways should vary correspondingly. However, both in C3 and C4 pathways, carbonic anhydrase (CA) plays a key role by supplying either CO2 to RuBisCO or HCO3− to PEPC. Over the past decade, although CA activities have been detected in a number of macroalgae, genes of CA family, expression levels of CA genes under different CO2 concentrations, as well as subcellular location of each CA have been rarely reported. Based on analysis the reported high-throughput sequencing data of S. japonica, 12 CAs of S. japonica (SjCA) genes were obtained. Neighbor-Joining (NJ) phylogenetic tree of SjCAs constructed using Mega6.0 and the subcellular location prediction of each CA by WoLFPSORT are also conducted in this article

Temperature dependence of circular DNA topological states

Circular double stranded DNA has different topological states which are defined by their linking numbers. Equilibrium distribution of linking numbers can be obtained by closing a linear DNA into a circle by ligase. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we predict the temperature dependence of the linking number distribution of small circular DNAs. Our predictions are based on flexible defect excitations resulted from local melting or unstacking of DNA base pairs. We found that the reduced bending rigidity alone can lead to measurable changes of the variance of linking number distribution of short circular DNAs. If the defect is accompanied by local unwinding, the effect becomes much more prominent. The predictions can be easily investigated in experiments, providing a new method to study the micromechanics of sharply bent DNAs and the thermal stability of specific DNA sequences. Furthermore, the predictions are directly applicable to the studies of binding of DNA distorting proteins that can locally reduce DNA rigidity, form DNA kinks, or introduce local unwinding.Comment: 15 pages in preprint format, 4 figure

Fuzzy logic based metric in software testing

How to provide cost-effective strategies for Software Testing has been one of the research focuses in Software Engineering for a long time. Many researchers in Software Engineering have addressed the effectiveness and quality metric of Software Testing, and many interesting results have been obtained. However, one issue of paramount importance in software testing &ndash; the intrinsic imprecise and uncertain relationships within testing metrics &ndash; is left unaddressed. To this end, a new quality and effectiveness measurement based on fuzzy logic is proposed. The software quality features and analogy-based reasoning are discussed, which can deal with quality and effectiveness consistency between different test projects. Experimental results are also provided to verify the proposed measurement.<br /

An analysis of the isoparametric bilinear finite volume element method by applying the Simpson rule to quadrilateral meshes

In this work, we construct and study a special isoparametric bilinear finite volume element scheme for solving anisotropic diffusion problems on general convex quadrilateral meshes. The new scheme is obtained by employing the Simpson rule to approximate the line integrals in the classical isoparametric bilinear finite volume element method. By using the cell analysis approach, we suggest a sufficient condition to ensure the coercivity of the new scheme. The sufficient condition has an analytic expression, which only involves the anisotropic diffusion tensor and the geometry of quadrilateral mesh. This yields that for any diffusion tensor and quadrilateral mesh, we can directly judge whether this sufficient condition is satisfied. Specifically, this condition covers the traditional $h^{1+\gamma}$-parallelogram and some trapezoidal meshes with any full anisotropic diffusion tensor. An optimal $H^1$ error estimate of the proposed scheme is also obtained for a quasi-parallelogram mesh. The theoretical results are verified by some numerical experiments

CT Experiments and Image Processing for the Water-Oil Displacement at Pore Scale

AbstractWe established a CT experimental method for the study of the water-oil displacement at pore scale. The microscopic core model made up of reservoir coring materials could truthfully reflect the surface property and pore structure of reservoir rocks. We scanned the core model at different water flooding stages using SkyScan1174v2 CT scanner, and high resolution images were obtained. The present paper adopted a new image segmentation method, which depends on the discriminatory analysis constrained by the measured porosity and oil saturation. This new method improved the accuracy of image segmentation. We utilized the new algorithm to carry out the segmentation of pores and residual oil from the scanning images. The segmentation results were in agreement with those measured from the core experiments

Economic Globalization, Marketization Reform and Economic Development in China

Economic globalization is one of the hottest topics among academics, government agencies and other concerned organizations. This paper investigates whether the overall benefits of economic globalization are greater than their costs, and discusses the interaction among economic globalization, economic development, and marketization reform in China, so as to present an answer to the question of how China should participate in economic globalization