Exploring the link between more negative osmotic potential and ryegrass summer performance

This paper outlines recent research studying within-population variation in selected New Zealand perennial ryegrass cultivars, for traits related to tolerance of summer moisture deficit. Two clonal replicates of 220 genotypes from ‘Grasslands Nui’ (Nui, n=50), ‘Grasslands Samson’ Samson, n=80), and ‘Trojan’ (n=90) were exposed to a 1 month of moisture deficit challenge, with plant water relations measurements performed to evaluate putative drought-response mechanisms. Water use of individual genotypes ranged from 1000 g water/g DM indicating large within-population variation for this trait. Mean WUE for Nui, Samson, and Trojan was, respectively, 424±16, 412±10, and 319±9 g water/g DW (P<0.001), suggesting that commercial plant breeding may have indirectly reduced water use in modern cultivars without specific focus on water relations. Principal component analysis indicated more negative osmotic potential may contribute to reduced water use while maintaining yield under water deficit, giving a potential focus for future breeding selection targeting summer water deficit tolerance.fals

Performance analysis of cables with attached tuned-inerter-dampers

Cables are structural elements designed to bear tensile forces and experience vibration problems due to their slenderness and low mass. In the field of civil engineering, they are mostly used in bridges where the vibrations are mainly induced by wind, rain, traffic and earthquakes. This paper proposes the use of a tuned-inerter-damper (TID) system, mounted on cables to suppress unwanted vibrations. These are to be attached transversally to the cable, in the vicinity of the support, connected between the deck and the cable. The potential advantage of using a TID system consists in the high apparent mass that can be produced by the inerter. Our analysis showed that the modal damping ratio obtained is much higher than in the case of traditional dampers or tuned mass dampers, leading to an improved overall response. An optimal tuning methodology is also discussed. Numerical results are shown with a cable subjected to both free and forced vibrations and the TID performance is improved when compared with equivalent dampers

Hyaluronidase Coated Molecular Envelope Technology Nanoparticles Enhance Drug Absorption via the Subcutaneous Route

Parenteral chemotherapy is usually administered intravenously, although patient preference and health economics suggest the subcutaneous (sc) route could be an attractive alternative. However, due to the low aqueous solubility of hydrophobic drugs and injection volume limitations, the total amount of drug that can be administered in a single sc injection is frequently insufficient. We have developed hyaluronidase coated nanoparticles (NPs) that efficiently encapsulate such drugs, thus addressing both issues and allowing sufficient amounts of hydrophobic drug to be administered and absorbed effectively. CUDC-101, a poorly water-soluble multitargeted anticancer drug that simultaneously inhibits the receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) EGFR and HER2, as well as histone deacetylase (HDAC), was encapsulated in polymeric Molecular Envelope Technology (MET) NPs. The role of polymer chemistry, formulation parameters, and coating with hyaluronidase (HYD) on MET-CUDC-101 NP formulations was examined and optimized to yield high drug loading and colloidal stability, and, after freeze-drying, stable storage at room temperature for up to 90 days. The pharmacokinetic studies in healthy rats showed that plasma AUC0-24h after sc administration correlates tightly with formulation physical chemistry, specifically in vitro colloidal stability. Compared to uncoated NPs, the HYD-coating doubled the drug plasma exposure. In a murine A431 xenograft model, the coated HYD-MET-CUDC-101 NPs at a dose equivalent to 90 mg kg-1 CUDC-101 increased the survival time from 15 days (control animals treated with hyaluronidase alone) to 43 days. Polymer MET nanoparticles coated with hyaluronidase enabled the subcutaneous delivery of a hydrophobic drug with favorable therapeutic outcomes

Diabetes risk and amino acid profiles: cross-sectional and prospective analyses of ethnicity, amino acids and diabetes in a South Asian and European cohort from the SABRE (Southall And Brent REvisited) Study.

Aims/hypothesis: South Asian individuals have an increased risk of diabetes compared with Europeans that is unexplained by obesity and traditional or established metabolic measures. Circulating amino acids (AAs) may provide additional explanatory insights. In a unique cohort of European and South Asian men, we compared cross-sectional associations between AAs, metabolic and obesity traits, and longitudinal associations with incident diabetes. / Methods: Nuclear magnetic spectroscopy was used to measure the baseline (1988–1991) levels of nine AAs in serum samples from a British population-based cohort of 1,279 European and 1,007 South Asian non-diabetic men aged 40–69 years. Follow-up was complete for 19 years in 801 European and 643 South Asian participants. / Results: The serum concentrations of isoleucine, phenylalanine, tyrosine and alanine were significantly higher in South Asian men, while cross-sectional correlations of AAs with glycaemia and insulin resistance were similar in the two ethnic groups. However, most AAs were less strongly correlated with measures of obesity in the South Asian participants. Diabetes developed in 227 (35%) South Asian and 113 (14%) European men. Stronger adverse associations were observed between branched chain and aromatic AAs and incident diabetes in South Asian men. Tyrosine was a particularly strong predictor of incident diabetes in South Asian individuals, even after adjustment for metabolic risk factors, including obesity and insulin resistance (adjusted OR for a 1 SD increment, 1.47, 95% CI 1.17,1.85, p = 0.001) compared with Europeans (OR 1.10, 0.87, 1.39, p = 0.4; p = 0.045 for ethnicity × tyrosine interaction). / Conclusions/interpretation: Branched chain and aromatic AAs, particularly tyrosine, may be a focus for identifying novel aetiological mechanisms and potential treatment targets for diabetes in South Asian populations and may contribute to their excess risk of diabetes

On the role of magnetic reconnection in jet/accretion disk systems

The most accepted model for jet production is based on the magneto-centrifugal acceleration out off an accretion disk that surrounds the central source (Blandford & Payne, 1982). This scenario, however, does not explain, e.g., the quasi-periodic ejection phenomena often observed in different astrophysical jet classes. de Gouveia Dal Pino & Lazarian (2005) (hereafter GDPL) have proposed that the large scale superluminal ejections observed in microquasars during radio flare events could be produced by violent magnetic reconnection (MR) episodes. Here, we extend this model to other accretion disk systems, namely: active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and young stellar objects (YSOs), and also discuss its role on jet heating and particle acceleration.Comment: To be published in the IAU Highlights of Astronomy, Volume 15, XXVII IAU General Assembly, August 2009, Ian F. Corbett et al., eds., 201

Promoter hypermethylation and histone hypoacetylation contribute to pancreatic-duodenal homeobox 1 silencing in gastric cancer

Background and Aims: The expression of pancreatic-duodenal homeobox 1 (PDX1) in gastric cancer is aberrantly reduced. The aim of this study was to elucidate the regulation of DNA methylation and histone acetylation at the promoter for PDX1 silencing in gastric cancer. Methods: PDX1 expression in response to demethylation and acetylation was detected in human gastric cancer cell lines by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and western blot. Four CpG islands within the 5#-flanking region of PDX1 gene were analyzed with their transcription activities being detected by dual luciferase assay. Promoter hypermethylation was identified in gastric cancer cell lines and cancer tissues by methylation-specific PCR or bisulfite DNA sequencing PCR analysis. Histone acetylation was determined by chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assay. Results: Demethylation by 5′-aza-2′-deoxycytidine (5′-aza-dC) and/or acetylation by trichostatin A (TSA) restored PDX1 expression in gastric cancer cells. Hypermethylation was found in four CpG islands in six of seven cancer cell lines. However, only the distal CpG island located in the promoter fragment of PDX1, F383 (c.22063 to 21681 nt upstream of the ATG start codon) displayed significant transcriptional activity that could be suppressed by SssI methylase and increased by 5′-aza-dC and TSA. More than 70% of the single CpG sites in F383 were methylated with hypermethylation of F383 fragment more common in gastric cancerous tissues compared with the paired normal tissues (P < 0.05). ChIP assay showed F383 was also associated with low hypoacetylation level of the histones. Conclusion: Promoter hypermethylation and histone hypoacetylation contribute to PDX1 silencing in gastric cancer. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.postprin

Discovering monotonic stemness marker genes from time-series stem cell microarray data

© 2015 Wang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. Background: Identification of genes with ascending or descending monotonic expression patterns over time or stages of stem cells is an important issue in time-series microarray data analysis. We propose a method named Monotonic Feature Selector (MFSelector) based on a concept of total discriminating error (DEtotal) to identify monotonic genes. MFSelector considers various time stages in stage order (i.e., Stage One vs. other stages, Stages One and Two vs. remaining stages and so on) and computes DEtotal of each gene. MFSelector can successfully identify genes with monotonic characteristics.Results: We have demonstrated the effectiveness of MFSelector on two synthetic data sets and two stem cell differentiation data sets: embryonic stem cell neurogenesis (ESCN) and embryonic stem cell vasculogenesis (ESCV) data sets. We have also performed extensive quantitative comparisons of the three monotonic gene selection approaches. Some of the monotonic marker genes such as OCT4, NANOG, BLBP, discovered from the ESCN dataset exhibit consistent behavior with that reported in other studies. The role of monotonic genes found by MFSelector in either stemness or differentiation is validated using information obtained from Gene Ontology analysis and other literature. We justify and demonstrate that descending genes are involved in the proliferation or self-renewal activity of stem cells, while ascending genes are involved in differentiation of stem cells into variant cell lineages.Conclusions: We have developed a novel system, easy to use even with no pre-existing knowledge, to identify gene sets with monotonic expression patterns in multi-stage as well as in time-series genomics matrices. The case studies on ESCN and ESCV have helped to get a better understanding of stemness and differentiation. The novel monotonic marker genes discovered from a data set are found to exhibit consistent behavior in another independent data set, demonstrating the utility of the proposed method. The MFSelector R function and data sets can be downloaded from: http://microarray.ym.edu.tw/tools/MFSelector/

Decentralized Estimation over Orthogonal Multiple-access Fading Channels in Wireless Sensor Networks - Optimal and Suboptimal Estimators

Optimal and suboptimal decentralized estimators in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) over orthogonal multiple-access fading channels are studied in this paper. Considering multiple-bit quantization before digital transmission, we develop maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) with both known and unknown channel state information (CSI). When training symbols are available, we derive a MLE that is a special case of the MLE with unknown CSI. It implicitly uses the training symbols to estimate the channel coefficients and exploits the estimated CSI in an optimal way. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose suboptimal estimators. These estimators exploit both signal and data level redundant information to improve the estimation performance. The proposed MLEs reduce to traditional fusion based or diversity based estimators when communications or observations are perfect. By introducing a general message function, the proposed estimators can be applied when various analog or digital transmission schemes are used. The simulations show that the estimators using digital communications with multiple-bit quantization outperform the estimator using analog-and-forwarding transmission in fading channels. When considering the total bandwidth and energy constraints, the MLE using multiple-bit quantization is superior to that using binary quantization at medium and high observation signal-to-noise ratio levels

An improved ant colony optimization-based approach with mobile sink for wireless sensor networks

Traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with one static sink node suffer from the well-known hot spot problem, that of sensor nodes near the static sink bear more traffic load than outlying nodes. Thus, the overall network lifetime is reduced due to the fact some nodes deplete their energy reserves much faster compared to the rest. Recently, adopting sink mobility has been considered as a good strategy to overcome the hot spot problem. Mobile sink(s) physically move within the network and communicate with selected nodes, such as cluster heads (CHs), to perform direct data collection through short-range communications that requires no routing. Finding an optimal mobility trajectory for the mobile sink is critical in order to achieve energy efficiency. Taking hints from nature, the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm has been seen as a good solution to finding an optimal traversal path. Whereas the traditional ACO algorithm will guide ants to take a small step to the next node using current information, over time they will deviate from the target. Likewise, a mobile sink may communicate with selected node for a relatively long time making the traditional ACO algorithm delays not suitable for high real-time WSNs applications. In this paper, we propose an improved ACO algorithm approach for WSNs that use mobile sinks by considering CH distances. In this research, the network is divided into several clusters and each cluster has one CH. While the distance between CHs is considered under the traditional ACO algorithm, the mobile sink node finds an optimal mobility trajectory to communicate with CHs under our improved ACO algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve wireless sensor network performance compared to other routing algorithms

Distance-Based and Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises small sensor nodes with limited energy capabilities. The power constraints of WSNs necessitate efficient energy utilization to extend the overall network lifetime of these networks. We propose a distance-based and low-energy adaptive clustering (DISCPLN) protocol to streamline the green issue of efficient energy utilization in WSNs. We also enhance our proposed protocol into the multi-hop-DISCPLN protocol to increase the lifetime of the network in terms of high throughput with minimum delay time and packet loss. We also propose the mobile-DISCPLN protocol to maintain the stability of the network. The modelling and comparison of these protocols with their corresponding benchmarks exhibit promising results