Genetic analysis of the complete G gene of viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV) genotype Ie isolates from Turkey

Viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV) is an enveloped non-segmented, single-stranded, negative-sense RNA virus that belongs to the Novirhabdovirus genus of the family Rhabdoviridae. This virus causes economically significant diseases in farmed rainbow trout, in Turkey, which is often associated with the transmission of pathogens from European resources. In this study, moribund rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) samples were collected during an outbreak of VHSV in a rainbow trout fish farm in Bolu Province of Turkey in 2006. In addition, two VHSV strains were isolated from wild turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) in Trabzon Province of the Black Sea region of Turkey during a field survey. We have sequenced the full-length glycoprotein (G) gene of three VHSV isolates and compared them with 25 previously published gene sequences. Based on a complete gene nucleotide sequence, Turkish VHSV isolates were classified into class Ie of genotype I, which is closely related to GE-1.2 isolate (97.1-97.5% nucleotide identity and 98.2-98.4% amino acid identity) found in Georgia more than 30 years ago. These isolates could be an indigenous type of VHSV distributed in the Black Sea. On the other hand, Turkish isolates have 97.5-97.6% nucleotide identity and 98.8-99% amino acid identity with Finnish, Danish, and Norwegian isolates which are classified under Ib and Id. These results suggest that Turkish VHSV isolates may have orginated from Europe and co-circulated with indigenous strains which can threaten the aquaculture industry in Turkey

INVESTIGATION OF THE COMPATIBILITY OF FASILLAR AND EFLATUNPINAR HITΤITE MONUMENTS WITH CLOSE-RANGE PHOTOGRAMMETRIC TECHNIQUE

There are two Hittite monuments in Konya whose names are Eflatunpınar and Fasıllar. Eflatunpınar is located approximately 25 km at the North of Beysehir town within Konya province in Turkey. Eflatunpınar monument is belonging to Hittite Empire Age, was known since XIX century. It is an open air temple of Hittite, 6.60 m wide and 7 m high, was built with large block stones. The second one known as Fasıllar Hittite monument lies on a hillside next to the Fasıllar village which is 16 km east of Beysehir town and it is a high relief monument which is made of basalt rock. It is commonly accepted that these two monuments had never been completely finished. J. Mellaart have suggested that Fasıllar monument was not in-situ position, it was moved from Eflatunpınar to Fasıllar village by the local people for decoration purposes. This means that ac-cording to J. Mellaart, Fasıllar monument is the part of Eflatunpınar monument. The objective of this study is to investigate whether Fasıllar monument was built for placing on the top of Eflatunpınar monument which is firstly raised a subject by J. Mellaart. For this purpose, three-dimensional (3D) digital model was created for each monument by close-range photogrammetric technique. By the help of the 3D digital models of these monuments, the unity between the monuments were investigated as an engineering approach

Gravitational Instantons from Minimal Surfaces

Physical properties of gravitational instantons which are derivable from minimal surfaces in 3-dimensional Euclidean space are examined using the Newman-Penrose formalism for Euclidean signature. The gravitational instanton that corresponds to the helicoid minimal surface is investigated in detail. This is a metric of Bianchi Type $VII_0$, or E(2) which admits a hidden symmetry due to the existence of a quadratic Killing tensor. It leads to a complete separation of variables in the Hamilton-Jacobi equation for geodesics, as well as in Laplace's equation for a massless scalar field. The scalar Green function can be obtained in closed form which enables us to calculate the vacuum fluctuations of a massless scalar field in the background of this instanton.Comment: One figure available by fax upon request. Abstract missing in original submission. Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit

The effects of an insertion in the 5 ' UTR of the AMCase on gene expression and pulmonary functions

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Background: Studies regarding the physiological role of acidic mammalian chitinase (AMCase) and the effects of its genetic variants on asthma have produced conflicting results. Objectives: We aimed to determine the genetic variants in the AMCase gene that could regulate the gene expression and thus influence disease severity. Methods: Genetic variants of the AMCase gene were determined by sequencing of asthmatics and healthy controls in up to -1 kb in the promoter region and exon 1 and 2. In an association study, a population of asthmatic (n = 504) and healthy Turkish children (n = 188) were genotyped for the observed SNPs. A replication study was performed in a North American adult population of patients with mild (n = 317) and severe (n = 145) asthma. The functional properties of the insertion were determined by promoter reporter assay, electromobility shift assay and transcription factor ELISA experiments. Results: Of the identified SNPs, only a ten base pair insertion (CAATCTAGGC) in the 5'UTR region of exon 2 was significantly associated with lower FEV(1) (beta = -14.63 SE = 6.241, P = 0.019) in Turkish children with asthma. However, in the adult population, the same insertion showed a trend toward higher FEV(1). The insertion was shown to have enhancer activity and the mutant probe possessing the insertion had higher binding affinity for the nuclear extracts. Conclusion: Our study shows that a ten base pair insertion in the 5'UTR region of AMCase gene may modify gene expression and thus may affect the severity of asthma. However, its effects appear to be different in different populations. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Applications of Temperley-Lieb algebras to Lorentz lattice gases

Motived by the study of motion in a random environment we introduce and investigate a variant of the Temperley-Lieb algebra. This algebra is very rich, providing us three classes of solutions of the Yang-Baxter equation. This allows us to establish a theoretical framework to study the diffusive behaviour of a Lorentz Lattice gas. Exact results for the geometrical scaling behaviour of closed paths are also presented.Comment: 10 pages, latex file, one figure(by request

Ontology-based access to temporal data with Ontop: a framework proposal

Predictive analysis gradually gains importance in industry. For instance, service engineers at Siemens diagnostic centres unveil hidden knowledge in huge amounts of historical sensor data and use it to improve the predictive systems analysing live data. Currently, the analysis is usually done using data-dependent rules that are specific to individual sensors and equipment. This dependence poses significant challenges in rule authoring, reuse, and maintenance by engineers. One solution to this problem is to employ ontology-based data access (OBDA), which provides a conceptual view of data via an ontology. However, classical OBDA systems do not support access to temporal data and reasoning over it. To address this issue, we propose a framework for temporal OBDA. In this framework, we use extended mapping languages to extract information about temporal events in the RDF format, classical ontology and rule languages to reflect static information, as well as a temporal rule language to describe events. We also propose a SPARQL-based query language for retrieving temporal information and, finally, an architecture of system implementation extending the state-of-the-art OBDA platform Ontop

Inattentive Consumers in Markets for Services

In an experiment on markets for services, we find that consumers are likely to stick to default tariffs and achieve suboptimal outcomes. We find that inattention to the task of choosing a better tariff is likely to be a substantial problem in addition to any task and tariff complexity effect. The institutional setup on which we primarily model our experiment is the UK electricity and gas markets, and our conclusion is that the new measures by the UK regulator Ofgem to improve consumer outcomes are likely to be of limited impact

Two-dimensional rule language for querying sensor log data: a framework and use cases

Motivated by two industrial use cases that involve detecting events of interest in (asynchronous) time series from sensors in manufacturing rigs and gas turbines, we design an expressive rule language DslD equipped with interval aggregate functions (such as weighted average over a time interval), Allen’s interval relations and various metric constructs. We demonstrate how to model events in the uses cases in terms of DslD programs. We show that answering DslD queries in our use cases can be reduced to evaluating SQL queries. Our experiments with the use cases, carried out on the Apache Spark system, show that such SQL queries scale well on large real-world datasets