Phenotypic variation in Calandrinia galapagosa (Portulacaceae)

Calandrinia galapagosa St. John is found only on San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos archipelago, where it is severely threatened by feral goats. A population at Cerro Colorado is protected by an exclosure constructed for this purpose in 1993. Individuals of this population have white or pinkish white flowers with a green stem, whereas the population at La Galapaguera, has pinkish white flowers with a purple stem

Inhomogeneities in 3 dimensional oscillatory media

We consider localized perturbations to spatially homogeneous oscillations in dimension 3 using the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation as a prototype. In particular, we will focus on heterogeneities that locally change the phase of the oscillations. In the usual translation invariant spaces and at $\varepsilon=0$ the linearization about these spatially homogeneous solutions result in an operator with zero eigenvalue embedded in the essential spectrum. In contrast, we show that when considered as an operator between Kondratiev spaces, the linearization is a Fredholm operator. These spaces consist of functions with algebraical localization that increases with each derivative. We use this result to construct solutions close to the equilibrium via the Implicit Function Theorem and derive asymptotics for wavenumbers in the far field.Comment: 3 figures, 15 pages. More accurate numerical results. Added a figure illustrating the decay of Amplitude of solution

Automated design of bacterial genome sequences

Background: Organisms have evolved ways of regulating transcription to better adapt to varying environments. Could the current functional genomics data and models support the possibility of engineering a genome with completely rearranged gene organization while the cell maintains its behavior under environmental challenges? How would we proceed to design a full nucleotide sequence for such genomes? Results: As a first step towards answering such questions, recent work showed that it is possible to design alternative transcriptomic models showing the same behavior under environmental variations than the wild-type model. A second step would require providing evidence that it is possible to provide a nucleotide sequence for a genome encoding such transcriptional model. We used computational design techniques to design a rewired global transcriptional regulation of Escherichia coli, yet showing a similar transcriptomic response than the wild-type. Afterwards, we “compiled” the transcriptional networks into nucleotide sequences to obtain the final genome sequence. Our computational evolution procedure ensures that we can maintain the genotype-phenotype mapping during the rewiring of the regulatory network. We found that it is theoretically possible to reorganize E. coli genome into 86% fewer regulated operons. Such refactored genomes are constituted by operons that contain sets of genes sharing around the 60% of their biological functions and, if evolved under highly variable environmental conditions, have regulatory networks, which turn out to respond more than 20% faster to multiple external perturbations. Conclusions: This work provides the first algorithm for producing a genome sequence encoding a rewired transcriptional regulation with wild-type behavior under alternative environments