COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES OF BIOTECHNOLOGY FIRMS: IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. AGRICULTURE

The agricultural biotechnology industry has evolved from a focus on outstanding science to a more mature phase where firms focus on near-term products and building businesses. Understanding complex relationships and distribution channels and a global perspective are crucial to commercialization. Yet, leading-edge technology and early identification of key traits will be critical to developing superior products that ensure competitiveness in the marketplace. Monsanto is organizing around a life sciences model where seed, crop chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and food ingredient businesses will exploit mutual synergies driven by basic science and discovery.Biotechnology, Monsanto, Strategies, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Interference effects in the Coulomb blockade regime: current blocking and spin preparation in symmetric nanojunctions

We consider nanojunctions in the single-electron tunnelling regime which, due to a high degree of spatial symmetry, have a degenerate many body spectrum. As a consequence, interference phenomena which cause a current blocking can occur at specific values of the bias and gate voltage. We present here a general formalism to give necessary and sufficient conditions for interference blockade also in the presence of spin polarized leads. As an example we analyze a triple quantum dot single electron transistor (SET). For a set-up with parallel polarized leads, we show how to selectively prepare the system in each of the three states of an excited spin triplet without application of any external magnetic field.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures. Corrected typos and updated reference

The European ex situ PGR Information Landscape

In this paper the authors try to describe the current situation regarding the documentation of Plant Genetic Resources (PGR) maintained in ex situ collections in Europe. It will tackle the systems that are used to manage the information involved, the mechanisms and systems that exist to exchange this information, and we will discuss the developments and challenges in this area. Apart from this technical description, the authors also try to give a functional description of the changing role of these systems in the light of international, technical and legal developments

Conservation and co-option in developmental programmes: the importance of homology relationships

One of the surprising insights gained from research in evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) is that increasing diversity in body plans and morphology in organisms across animal phyla are not reflected in similarly dramatic changes at the level of gene composition of their genomes. For instance, simplicity at the tissue level of organization often contrasts with a high degree of genetic complexity. Also intriguing is the observation that the coding regions of several genes of invertebrates show high sequence similarity to those in humans. This lack of change (conservation) indicates that evolutionary novelties may arise more frequently through combinatorial processes, such as changes in gene regulation and the recruitment of novel genes into existing regulatory gene networks (co-option), and less often through adaptive evolutionary processes in the coding portions of a gene. As a consequence, it is of great interest to examine whether the widespread conservation of the genetic machinery implies the same developmental function in a last common ancestor, or whether homologous genes acquired new developmental roles in structures of independent phylogenetic origin. To distinguish between these two possibilities one must refer to current concepts of phylogeny reconstruction and carefully investigate homology relationships. Particularly problematic in terms of homology decisions is the use of gene expression patterns of a given structure. In the future, research on more organisms other than the typical model systems will be required since these can provide insights that are not easily obtained from comparisons among only a few distantly related model species

Eros und Gewissen : Literarische Psychologie in Ludwig Tiecks Erzählung "Der getreue Eckart und der Tannenhäuser"

Es gehört wohl zu den wichtigsten Leistungen der jüngeren Romantikforschung, die starre Grenze zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik geschleift zu haben. Wo sich früher zwei monolithische Einheiten gegenüberstanden, zeigen sich inzwischen, ohne daß dadurch der Epochencharakter beider prinzipiell verabschiedet würde, gemeinsame Problemlagen, Kontinuitäten, Übergänge und Transformationen. Dieser Befund bewahrheitet sich, wenn man den herkömmlichen Fragenkreis der Literaturwissenschaft in Richtung einer sozialhistorisch fundierten Geschichte des Subjekts, des Ichs, der Seele erweitert. Die Romantik, hat Hartmut Böhme geschrieben, formuliere "das Unbewußte der Aufklärung. Sie ist nicht deren Opposition, sondern die Komplettierung der bürgerlichen Subjektproduktion [...]". Tatsächlich spielt die Literatur seit der Frühromantik eine durchaus avantgardistische Rolle bei der "Entdeckung des Unbewußten", die in den letzten Jahren anhand vorwiegend theoretischer Texte rekonstruiert worden ist. [...] Ludwig Tiecks Märchenerzählung "Der getreue Eckart und der Tannenhäuser" von 1799 [...], die die Germanistik zumeist in einer Mischung aus Hilflosigkeit und Geringschätzung links liegen gelassen hat, schreitet in einem mythisierenden Szenarium von hoher Raffinesse die Sehnsüchte und inneren Zwänge aus, die sich am Ende der bürgerlichen Aufklärung ausgebildet haben. Er macht auf diese Weise nicht weniger als eine neue psychische Struktur, das Resultat lang- wie kurzfristiger sozialer Prozesse, sichtbar, und zwar in einem doppelten Sinn: Denn diese ist nicht nur auf Inhaltsebene Gegenstand der Erzählung, sondern schreibt sich strukturbildend dem Text selbst ein. In psychogenetischer Perspektive wird erkennbar, daß sich die Romantik, selbst wo sie es will, nicht von dem befreien kann, was ihr die Aufklärung hinterlassen hat

Poiesis des Körpers : Künstlerische Produktivität und Konstruktion des Leibes in der erotischen Dichtung des klassischen Goethe

Goethes Römische Elegien und Venezianische Epigramme entfalten eine "Poiesis des Körpers" in einem doppelten Sinn. In ihren selbstreflexiven poetologischen Passagen zeigen sie Liebe und Sexualität als die Affektbasis der Hervorbringung von Kunst, die sich selbst erotisch auflädt. Sie entwerfen damit eine Anthropologie des künstlerischen Prozesses in nuce. Damit verzahnt ist die Arbeit an einem neuen Blick auf den weiblichen Körper und an der Konstitution eines spezifischen Geschlechtskörpers des Künstlers selbst. Dieser Vorgang beinhaltet zugleich eine Verschiebung und Umformierung der Sexualität. Diese Aspekte werden in Zusammenhang gebracht 1. mit epochenspezifischen kulturhistorischen Phänomenen (Attitude und Tableau vivant; Blick auf die antiken Statuen; Konjunktur des Pygmalionmythos) 2. mit Goethes ästhetischen Reflexionen. Im Zusammenhang mit der Bestimmung des ambivalenten Verhältnisses von Kunst und Natur entwerfen diese eine Ästhetik des lebendigen Kunstwerks: Kunst wird in Natur verankert und in Analogie zum natürlichen Leben - so die Leitmetaphorik - "gezeugt" und "geboren". Diese Gesichtspunkte umreißen eine Art Biologie der Kunst, in die sich die erotische Dichtung nahtlos einfügt, indem sie Kunstschöpfung auf Sexualität bezieht

Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs "Mönch am Meer" : Aspekte eines Umbruchs in der Geschichte der Wahrnehmung

In den "Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft" von Brentano und Kleist läßt sich ein wahrnehmungsgeschichtlich signifikanter Bruch nachweisen. Geht Brentano von der romantischen Konzeption der Sehnsucht aus, so stehen hinter dem Text Kleists die Theorie des Erhabenen und die Assoziation des Panoramas. Diese konkurrierenden Positionen gründen in unterschiedlichen Begriffen vom Subjekt.In the "Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft" by Brentano and Kleist we can trace a break which is relevant in terms of the history of perception. While Brentano bases his argument on the Romantic concept of longing ("Sehnsucht"), Kleist´s text is influenced by the theory of the sublime and the association of the panorama. These competing positions arise from different concepts of the subject

Inelastic cotunneling in quantum dots and molecules with weakly broken degeneracies

We calculate the nonlinear cotunneling conductance through interacting quantum dot systems in the deep Coulomb blockade regime using a rate equation approach based on the T-matrix formalism, which shows in the concerned regions very good agreement with a generalized master equation approach. Our focus is on inelastic cotunneling in systems with weakly broken degeneracies, such as complex quantum dots or molecules. We find for these systems a characteristic gate dependence of the non-equilibrium cotunneling conductance. While on one side of a Coulomb diamond the conductance decreases after the inelastic cotunneling threshold towards its saturation value, on the other side it increases monotonously even after the threshold. We show that this behavior originates from an asymmetric gate voltage dependence of the effective cotunneling amplitudes.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures; revised published versio

GNU Radio Companion (GRC) On Software Defined Radio Platforms

Software defined radio (SDR) is a method to design radio frequency (RF) signal systems using software to implement radio components that are normally implemented in hardware. Several examples of components that can be designed in SDR include RF signal filters, signal amplifiers, and signal resamplers. SDR applications include amateur radio transmission, aircraft and ship tracking, RF communications, and radio astronomy, to name a few. A great advantage of implementing a RF system in software is that the system developed in software is more flexible and upgradeable than a system designed with hardware alone. QRC Technologies offers a wide range of software defined radio solutions and have provided their Wide-Band Transcorder (WBT) platform for this project. QRC would like for its customers to be able to develop custom applications on the WBT with limited programming and communication expertise. One solution to this challenge is to leverage the free and open source GNU Radio Companion (GRC) software development kit. GRC uses a graphical programming concept that users can easily comprehend and become proficient in. The goal of this project include the creation of several GRC programming blocks that encapsulate WBT SDR functions. The blocks that were developed that are of interest to our sponsor, QRC, are a GPS Source block that outputs metadata such as Latitude, Longitude, and time; an fast Fourier transform (FFT) Source block that accesses the pre-processed FFT data available on the WBT and provides an output for the data; a Sweeper block which performs many small FFTs and concatenates them to produce a spectrum with lower noise; an FPGA based HA block that performs a FFT on IQ data; and we partially completed a block which takes in IQ data and writes them in an industry standard VRT file that can be read by the WBT. In addition to implementing the WBT’s functionality in GRC blocks, the team has also investigated the feasibility of increasing the speed of these blocks using a hardware accelerator (HA). Specifically, a HA was developed for a fundamental mathematical signal calculation: the FFT. The FFT HA was developed on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) which is an integrated circuit that is able to be configured to implement digital logic. The usage of a FPGA allowed the team to exploit the parallel nature of the FPGA and thereby greatly improve the performance of this calculation in a GRC application. Please reference Figure 1 below for the HA data flow. The team was able to successfully implement four GRC blocks that are now available to be included in customs applications developed for the WBT. A FFT HA was also successfully developed and included in a GRC block. The FFT HA is able to process up to 8192 points in one FFT cycle and has latency of approximately 330 μseconds to process 8192 points.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1106/thumbnail.jp