Cold Induction of EARLI1, a Putative Arabidopsis Lipid Transfer Protein, Is Light and Calcium Dependent

As sessile organisms, plants must adapt to their environment. One approach toward understanding this adaptation is to investigate environmental regulation of gene expression. Our focus is on the environmental regulation of EARLI1, which is activated by cold and long-day photoperiods. Cold activation of EARLI1 in short-day photoperiods is slow, requiring several hours at 4ºC to detect an increase in mRNA abundance. EARLI1 is not efficiently cold-activated in etiolated seedlings, suggesting that photomorphogenesis is necessary for its cold activation. Cold activation of EARLI1 is inhibited in the presence of the calcium channel blocker lanthanum chloride or the calcium chelator EGTA. Addition of the calcium ionophore Bay K8644 results in cold-independent activation of EARLI1. These data suggest that EARLI1 is not an immediate target of the cold response, and that calcium flux affects its expression. EARLI1 is a putative secreted protein and has motifs found in lipid transfer proteins. Over-expression of EARLI1 in transgenic plants results in reduced electrolyte leakage during freezing damage, suggesting that EARLI1 may affect membrane or cell wall stability in response to low temperature stress

Research and development in marine fisheries extension in Tamil Nadu

improvement In the standard of living of fishing households and fishing labor households and optimal utilisation of fishery resources for employment, production and export are the Important goals of marine fisheries extension service. Despite ttie increasing attention of the Government to fisheries extension work, majority of fisherfolk are caught In a vicious cycle of poverty and indebtness. The paper analyses the present strategies of fisheries extension service In Tamil Nadu, Identifies the pitfalls and lists suggestions for Improving the efficiency of fisheries extension work In the state. The extension teaching methods used for Individual contact, group contact and mass contact, the sul)Ject-matter fields covered In extension teaching with their relative Importance. The characteristics and extension personnel, research support provided, coordination among the various agencies Involved and participation of the clientele and their organisations are analysed and discussed. The analysis helped identifying the major Impediments to success of extension efforts. The analysis provided a tasks for evolving future extension strategies focussed on marine fisheries development. It provides suggestions in term of personnel requirement, effective extension methods, thrust areas among different subject matter- fields, co-ordination among organisations concerned with marine fisheries and extension research support. The recommendations will be of use to the organisations concerned with fisheries extension In their approach to tone up the service of fisheries extension

Mean first passage times for bond formation for a Brownian particle in linear shear flow above a wall

Motivated by cell adhesion in hydrodynamic flow, here we study bond formation between a spherical Brownian particle in linear shear flow carrying receptors for ligands covering the boundary wall. We derive the appropriate Langevin equation which includes multiplicative noise due to position-dependent mobility functions resulting from the Stokes equation. We present a numerical scheme which allows to simulate it with high accuracy for all model parameters, including shear rate and three parameters describing receptor geometry (distance, size and height of the receptor patches). In the case of homogeneous coating, the mean first passage time problem can be solved exactly. In the case of position-resolved receptor-ligand binding, we identify different scaling regimes and discuss their biological relevance.Comment: final version after minor revision

Optimization of Dimensional Tolerances and Material Removal Rate in the Orthogonal Turning of AISI 4340 Steel

Turning is one of the most used metal removal operations in the industry. It can remove material faster, giving reasonably good surface quality apart from geometrical requirements. Conformity of geometry is one of the most significant requirements of turned components to perform their intended functions. Apart from dimensional requirements, the important geometrical necessities are Circularity, Straightness, Cylindricity, Perpendicularity, etc. Since they have a direct influence on the functioning of the components, the effect of the cutting parameters on them has greater significance. In this paper experiments are carried out to examine the effect of turning parameters such as cutting speed, feed rate, and depth of cut on responses like; straightness, roundness, surface roughness, and material removal rate during turning of AISI 4340 steel. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is performed and the influence of parameters on each response is studied. The optimal values of parameters obtained from the study are further confirmed by conducting experiments

A new species of Microhyla (Anura: Microhylidae) from the Malay Peninsula

A new species of microhylid of the genus. Microhyla is described from the Malay Peninsula.M.mantheyi new species, was formerly assigned to M.bornensis, and has been earlier reported from southern Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore

Circadian signatures in rat liver: from gene expression to pathways

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Circadian rhythms are 24 hour oscillations in many behavioural, physiological, cellular and molecular processes that are controlled by an endogenous clock which is entrained to environmental factors including light, food and stress. Transcriptional analyses of circadian patterns demonstrate that genes showing circadian rhythms are part of a wide variety of biological pathways.</p> <p>Pathway activity method can identify the significant pattern of the gene expression levels within a pathway. In this method, the overall gene expression levels are translated to a reduced form, pathway activity levels, via singular value decomposition (SVD). A given pathway represented by pathway activity levels can then be as analyzed using the same approaches used for analyzing gene expression levels. We propose to use pathway activity method across time to identify underlying circadian pattern of pathways.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We used synthetic data to demonstrate that pathway activity analysis can evaluate the underlying circadian pattern within a pathway even when circadian patterns cannot be captured by the individual gene expression levels. In addition, we illustrated that pathway activity formulation should be coupled with a significance analysis to distinguish biologically significant information from random deviations. Next, we performed pathway activity level analysis on a rich time series of transcriptional profiling in rat liver. The over-represented five specific patterns of pathway activity levels, which cannot be explained by random event, exhibited circadian rhythms. The identification of the circadian signatures at the pathway level identified 78 pathways related to energy metabolism, amino acid metabolism, lipid metabolism and DNA replication and protein synthesis, which are biologically relevant in rat liver. Further, we observed tight coordination between cholesterol biosynthesis and bile acid biosynthesis as well as between folate biosynthesis, one carbon pool by folate and purine-pyrimidine metabolism. These coupled pathways are parts of a sequential reaction series where the product of one pathway is the substrate of another pathway.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Rather than assessing the importance of a single gene beforehand and map these genes onto pathways, we instead examined the orchestrated change within a pathway. Pathway activity level analysis could reveal the underlying circadian dynamics in the microarray data with an unsupervised approach and biologically relevant results were obtained.</p

A phase 1b study of Selumetinib in combination with Cisplatin and Gemcitabine in advanced or metastatic biliary tract cancer: the ABC-04 study

BACKGROUND: Combined treatment with cisplatin and gemcitabine (CisGem) is the standard of care for patients with advanced biliary tract cancer (ABC). Selumetinib (AZD6244, ARRY-142886) potently and selectively inhibits MEK1/2, an intracellular kinase and has shown activity in ABC. The objective of the ABC-04 trial was to establish the recommended dose of selumetinib in combination with CisGem in patients with ABC. METHODS: Eligible patients were ≥ 18 years, had histologically or cytologically-confirmed unresectable recurrent or metastatic biliary tract, gallbladder or ampullary carcinoma, WHO performance status 0-2, and adequate major organ function. Patients may have had prior surgery, radiotherapy or adjuvant chemotherapy, but no prior CisGem and no prior chemotherapy for locally advanced or metastatic disease. Patients received cisplatin 25 mg/m(2) plus gemcitabine 1000 mg/m(2) intravenously on days 1 and 8 of a 21-day cycle. Selumetinib capsules were taken daily. Patients received up to 8 cycles of CisGem and could receive selumetinib until disease progression. A dose de-escalation scheme was used to determine the recommended dose of selumetinib. The first dose level was 75 mg bd. Patients were recruited in cohorts of 3 and assessed for dose limiting toxicity (DLT) during the first cycle of treatment. RESULTS: Thirteen patients were recruited, of whom 12 were evaluable for DLT (1 did not start treatment). All evaluable patients received the starting dose of selumetinib 75 mg bd and one patient experienced a DLT (cardiac chest pain). The median number of days selumetinib was taken (adjusted for the number of days of dose interruptions) was 171.5 (IQR: 75.5 to 344). Two patients remained on treatment at 14 and 19 months post registration. There were 3 temporary and 1 permanent interruptions of selumetinib in cycle 1. Eight patients were evaluable for objective response (RECIST v1.1): 3 had a partial response and 5 stable disease. The median PFS was 6.4 months (IQR 5.2 to 13.7). Toxicities related to selumetinib were mostly related to oedema and rash, grade 1-2 and manageable. Pharmacokinetic analysis showed that the AUC(0-t), AUC(0-∞) and Cmax of selumetinib increased by 12, 11 and 30 % respectively when it was administered with CisGem, while Cmax for the N-desmethyl metabolite of selumetinib decreased by 40 %. There was no evidence that the time of Cmax for selumetinib or N-desmethyl metabolite of selumetinib were different when selumetinib was administered alone or with CisGem. CONCLUSION: The recommended dose of selumetinib when combined with CisGem was 75 mg bd. Translational studies are underway to identify biomarkers that may predict outcome (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01242605 July 6(th) 2010)

A Novel Signal Processing Method for Friction and Sliding Wear

© 2021 by ASME. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4052063This current study proposed a new computationally efficient and comparatively accurate algorithm for calculating both static and dynamic coefficients of friction from high frequency data. Its scope embraced an application in a real-time friction-based system, such as active braking safety systems in automobile industries. The signal sources were from a heavy-duty reciprocating dry sliding wear test platform, focused on experimental data related to friction induced by stick-slip phenomena. The test specimen was a polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)-coated basalt/vinyl ester composite material, tested at a large scale. The algorithm was primarily aimed to provide scalability for processing significantly large tribological data in a real-time. Besides a computational efficiency, the proposed method adopted to evaluate both static and dynamic coefficients of friction using the statistical approach exhibited a greater accuracy and reliability when compared with the extant models. The result showed that the proposed method reduced the computation time of processing and reduced the variation of the absolute values of both static and dynamic frictions. However, the variation of dynamic friction was later increased at a particular threshold, based on the test duration.Peer reviewe

Partial Homology Relations - Satisfiability in terms of Di-Cographs

Directed cographs (di-cographs) play a crucial role in the reconstruction of evolutionary histories of genes based on homology relations which are binary relations between genes. A variety of methods based on pairwise sequence comparisons can be used to infer such homology relations (e.g.\ orthology, paralogy, xenology). They are \emph{satisfiable} if the relations can be explained by an event-labeled gene tree, i.e., they can simultaneously co-exist in an evolutionary history of the underlying genes. Every gene tree is equivalently interpreted as a so-called cotree that entirely encodes the structure of a di-cograph. Thus, satisfiable homology relations must necessarily form a di-cograph. The inferred homology relations might not cover each pair of genes and thus, provide only partial knowledge on the full set of homology relations. Moreover, for particular pairs of genes, it might be known with a high degree of certainty that they are not orthologs (resp.\ paralogs, xenologs) which yields forbidden pairs of genes. Motivated by this observation, we characterize (partial) satisfiable homology relations with or without forbidden gene pairs, provide a quadratic-time algorithm for their recognition and for the computation of a cotree that explains the given relations