Classification of the organisms important in dairy products II. Pseudomonas fragi

In the studies at the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station on the bacteria in normal and abnormal dairy products, an organism that produces a rather characteristic change has been encountered over a period of years. On comparatively young plates and in litmus milk it commonly develops a sweet, ester-like odor resembling that of the flower of the common May apple (Podophyllum peltatum ). Cultures have been isolated in large numbers from various defective dairy products, especially those held at low temperature, and it appears that the organism is of considerable practical importance. A study of the morphology, cultural characters, biochemical features and growth conditions of many cultures indicates that, although the reactions are not always identical, the cultures constitute but a single species. The variations involve especially colony appearance, action on litmus milk and action on fat. The species was identified as Pseudomonas tragi; it has been investigated from the standpoint of distribution, identification and action on various dairy products, and the results are presented herein

The Human Affectome

Over the last decades, the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences has seen proliferation rather than integration of theoretical perspectives. This is due to differences in metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions about human affective phenomena (what they are and how they work) which, shaped by academic motivations and values, have determined the affective constructs and operationalizations. An assumption on the purpose of affective phenomena can be used as a teleological principle to guide the construction of a common set of metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions—a framework for human affective research. In this capstone paper for the special issue “Towards an Integrated Understanding of the Human Affectome”, we gather the tiered purpose of human affective phenomena to synthesize assumptions that account for human affective phenomena collectively. This teleologically-grounded framework offers a principled agenda and launchpad for both organizing existing perspectives and generating new ones. Ultimately, we hope Human Affectome brings us a step closer to not only an integrated understanding of human affective phenomena, but an integrated field for affective research

Fast and accurate protein substructure searching with simulated annealing and GPUs

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Searching a database of protein structures for matches to a query structure, or occurrences of a structural motif, is an important task in structural biology and bioinformatics. While there are many existing methods for structural similarity searching, faster and more accurate approaches are still required, and few current methods are capable of substructure (motif) searching.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed an improved heuristic for tableau-based protein structure and substructure searching using simulated annealing, that is as fast or faster and comparable in accuracy, with some widely used existing methods. Furthermore, we created a parallel implementation on a modern graphics processing unit (GPU).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The GPU implementation achieves up to 34 times speedup over the CPU implementation of tableau-based structure search with simulated annealing, making it one of the fastest available methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a GPU to the protein structural search problem.</p