DEVELOPMENT OF PARASITE BROOMRAPE (OROBANCHE CUMANA WALLR.) IN BRAILA COUNTY IN YEARS 2016 AND 2017

In the last two years broomrape became more and more agresive in favorable area for sunflower crop. Because of that, we must tested in every year in natural and artificial condition many genotypes of sunflower to identify new sources of resistance at races of broomrape present in this Braila area. We tested 20 genotypes created at NARDI Fundulea, in artificial conditions, in the greenhouse in 2017 (broomrape collected from Braila County, Chiscani locality) and under natural conditions in year 2017 on the field of ARDS Braila (Braila County, Chiscani locality), where is races of broomrape more then G and H

A muon-track reconstruction exploiting stochastic losses for large-scale Cherenkov detectors

IceCube is a cubic-kilometer Cherenkov telescope operating at the South Pole. The main goal of IceCube is the detection of astrophysical neutrinos and the identification of their sources. High-energy muon neutrinos are observed via the secondary muons produced in charge current interactions with nuclei in the ice. Currently, the best performing muon track directional reconstruction is based on a maximum likelihood method using the arrival time distribution of Cherenkov photons registered by the experiment\u27s photomultipliers. A known systematic shortcoming of the prevailing method is to assume a continuous energy loss along the muon track. However at energies >1 TeV the light yield from muons is dominated by stochastic showers. This paper discusses a generalized ansatz where the expected arrival time distribution is parametrized by a stochastic muon energy loss pattern. This more realistic parametrization of the loss profile leads to an improvement of the muon angular resolution of up to 20% for through-going tracks and up to a factor 2 for starting tracks over existing algorithms. Additionally, the procedure to estimate the directional reconstruction uncertainty has been improved to be more robust against numerical errors

NEW SUNFLOWER GENOTYPES WITH RESISTANCE TO BROOMRAPE, CREATED AT NARDI FUNDULEA

Parasite broomrape of sunflower become a very difficult problem, in south-east of Romania, because in a short period of time, new virulent races appear. When sunflower breeders from regions infested with Orobanche cumana Wallr. obtain resistant sunflower genotypes, to present races, in a short time became sensible. In this paper, we present results from two years, 2018 and 2019 when we tested sunflower genotypes in artificial condition, in green house, for resistance to broomrape collected from natural infested fields in Braila area, 2017 and 2018

Seeing the trees through the forest: sequence-based homo- and heteromeric protein-protein interaction sites prediction using random forest

Motivation: Genome sequencing is producing an ever-increasing amount of associated protein sequences. Few of these sequences have experimentally validated annotations, however, and computational predictions are becoming increasingly successful in producing such annotations. One key challenge remains the prediction of the amino acids in a given protein sequence that are involved in protein-protein interactions. Such predictions are typically based on machine learning methods that take advantage of the properties and sequence positions of amino acids that are known to be involved in interaction. In this paper, we evaluate the importance of various features using Random Forest (RF), and include as a novel feature backbone flexibility predicted from sequences to further optimise protein interface prediction. Results: We observe that there is no single sequence feature that enables pinpointing interacting sites in our Random Forest models. However, combining different properties does increase the performance of interface prediction. Our homomeric-trained RF interface predictor is able to distinguish interface from non-interface residues with an area under the ROC curve of 0.72 in a homomeric test-set. The heteromeric-trained RF interface predictor performs better than existing predictors on a independent heteromeric test-set. We trained a more general predictor on the combined homomeric and heteromeric dataset, and show that in addition to predicting homomeric interfaces, it is also able to pinpoint interface residues in heterodimers. This suggests that our random forest model and the features included capture common properties of both homodimer and heterodimer interfaces. Availability and Implementation: The predictors and test datasets used in our analyses are freely available ( http://www.ibi.vu.nl/downloads/RF_PPI/ ). Contact: [email protected]. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Experimental characterization of CFL bulbs for power quality assessment

This paper presents the results of a systematic set of voltage and current transient measurements aimed at characterizing the electrical behavior of a typical energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulb. The considered device represents a well-known example of a number of nonlinear loads that are now massively used in any house or office building and that are contributing to the degradation of the power quality due to highly distorted current absorptions. The comparison between measured data and the predictions obtained by means of a simplified SPICE equivalent of the device under test concludes the work