Geographic distribution of Desulfitobacterium frappieri PCP-1 and Desulfitobacterium spp. in soils from the province of Quebec, Canada

The presence of indigenous Desulfitobacterium species in 44 soil samples taken from various sites in the southern part of the province of Quebec (Canada) and four from locations outside Quebec was investigated. Twenty-four of these soils were sampled from contaminated industrial sites. Indigenous Desulfitobacterium bacteria from soil samples were enriched by cultivation in anaerobic soil slurry culture. Total DNA was then extracted from these slurries and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplifications were performed with primers targeting 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences of Desulfitobacterium spp. and of Desulfitobacterium frappieri PCP-1. A positive PCR signal was obtained in 31 soil slurry cultures. Resolution of single-strand DNAs of some of the PCR products by a single-strand conformational polymorphism protocol suggests that more than one species of Desulfitobacterium were present in the corresponding slurry cultures. These results suggest that Desulfitobacterium are ubiquitous in soils in the province of Quebec, especially in soils from the St. Lawrence valley and the southern part of the province.</br

Rights of children and teens from a territorial work

El presente escrito se enmarca en la experiencia del proyecto de Extensión “Los derechos de niños y adolescentes en territorio. Promoviendo derechos humanos y ambientales desde un enfoque en red” que se desarrolla en un Centro comunitario de un barrio periférico del Gran La Plata, emplazado en una comunidad entendida como vulnerable. Nuestra labor se orienta hacia el entramado de redes intersectoriales, con el fin de fomentar la participación social. Asimismo nos proponemos revisar los diversos procesos históricosociales que determinan las múltiples infancias y las representaciones sociales instituidas en torno a la figura del adulto. Interrogantes que guían nuestra labor: ¿Podemos considerar que el desarrollo de estas infancias tiene puntos en común con otras? ¿Qué similitudes y diferencias podemos marcar? ¿Los niños/as en contextos vulnerables pueden expresarse, ser escuchados y contenidos en sus vivencias? ¿Qué papel jugamos los adultos? ¿Qué efectos generamos en sus subjetividades? A partir de estas preguntas desarrollamos una metodología de investigación-acción, generando cuestionamientos, intervenciones experimentales y nuevas contribuciones a la teoría. Tomamos como un analizador la metáfora del “adulto como un espectro” (Gagliano, 2015). Al decir “adultos” nos referimos a las instituciones que deben interrelacionarse con estos niños/as (familia, escuelas, etc.). Destacamos la importancia de realizar abordajes integrales, instituyentes, creativos y constructores de subjetividad.This study is part of the experience of Extension project “The rights of children and adolescents in the territory. Promoting environmental and human rights from a focus on network “that takes place in a community center in a suburb of Greater La Plata, located in a community understood as vulnerable. Our work is oriented towards the framework of intersectoral networks to promote social participation. We also propose to review the various historical and social processes that determine the many childhoods and social representations instituted around the figure of the adult. Questions that guide our work: Can we consider that the development of these childhoods have in common with others? What similarities and differences we can make? Do children in vulnerable contexts can express themselves, be heard and contained in their experiences? What role do adults play? What effects generate in their subjectivities? From these questions we develop a methodology of action research, generating questions, pilot interventions and new contributions to the theory. We take it as a metaphor analyzer “adult like a specter” (Gagliano, 2015). By “adults” we mean institutions should interact with these children (family, educational institutions, health, social development,etc.)We stress the importance of comprehensive, instituent, creative and builders of subjectivity approaches.Facultad de Psicologí

Manganese and cobalt redox cycling in laterites; Biogeochemical and bioprocessing implications

This research was developed during the PhD studies of Agustín Solano Arguedas in the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. PhD scholarship was funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología y Telecomunicaciones (MICITT) of the Government of Costa Rica and the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). Agustín Solano Arguedas is a researcher at the Unidad de Recursos Forestales (Reforesta, Unit of Forest Resources) of the Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería (INII, Engineering Research Institute), UCR.Cobalt is essential for the modern technology that underpins the decarbonisation of our economies, but its supply is limited leading to its designation as a critical metal. Cobalt biogeochemistry is poorly understood, yet knowledge of how biogeochemical cycling impacts cobalt behaviour could assist the development of new techniques to recover cobalt from ores, and so improve the security of supply. Laterites are an important source of cobalt, they are primarily processed for nickel using energy or chemical intensive processes, with cobalt recovered as a by-product. Metal-reducing conditions were stimulated in laterite sediment microcosms by the addition of simple and cheaply available organic substrates (acetate or glucose). At the end of the experiment the amount of easily recoverable cobalt (aqueous or extractable with acetic acid) increased from < 1% to up to 64%, which closely mirrored the behaviour of manganese, while only a small proportion of iron was transformed into an easily recoverable phase. Sequencing of the microbial community showed that the addition of organic substrates stimulated the growth of indigenous prokaryotes closely related to known manganese(IV)/iron(III)-reducers, particularly from the Clostridiales, and that fungi assigned to Penicillium, known to produce organic acids beneficial for leaching cobalt and nickel from laterites, were identified. Overall, the results indicate that the environmental behaviour of cobalt in laterites is likely to be controlled by manganese biogeochemical cycling by microorganisms. These results are compelling given that similar behaviour was observed in four laterites (Acoje, Çaldağ, Piauí and Shevchenko) from different continents. A new bioprocessing strategy is proposed whereby laterites are treated with an organic substrate to generate metal-reducing conditions, then rinsed with acetic acid to remove the cobalt. Not only are organic substrates environmentally-friendly and potentially sourced from waste carbon substrates, a minimal amount of iron oxides was mobilised and consequently less waste generated.Natural Environment Research Council/[CoG3 NE/M011518/1]/NERC/Reino UnidoDiamond Light Source/[SP16735]//Reino UnidoDiamond Light Source/[SP17313]//Reino UnidoOffice of Science User Facility/[DE-AC02-05CH11231]//Estados UnidosUCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ingeniería::Instituto Investigaciones en Ingeniería (INII

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Energy aware simplicial processor for embedded morphological visual processing in intelligent internet of things

This Letter presents the architecture implementation and testing of an single instruction multiple data (SIMD) processor for energy aware embedded morphological visual processing using the simplicial piece-wise linear approximation. The architecture comprises a linear array of 48 × 48 processing elements, each connected to an eight-neighbour clique operating on binary input and state data. The architecture is synthesised from a custom designed ultra low-voltage CMOS library and fabricated in a 55 nm CMOS technology. The chip is capable of dynamic voltage/frequency scaling with power supplies between 0.5 and 1.2 V. The fabricated chip achieves an overall performance of 293 TOPS/W with dynamic energy dissipation efficiency of 3.4 fJ per output operation at 0.6 V.Fil: Villemur, Martin. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica "Alfredo Desages". Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica y de Computadoras. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica "Alfredo Desages"; ArgentinaFil: Julian, Pedro Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica "Alfredo Desages". Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica y de Computadoras. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica "Alfredo Desages"; ArgentinaFil: Andreou, Andreas. University Johns Hopkins; Estados Unido

The Desulfitobacterium genus

Desulfitobacterium spp. are strictly anaerobic bacteria that were first isolated from environments contaminated by halogenated organic compounds. They are very versatile microorganisms that can use a wide variety of electron acceptors, such as nitrate, sulfite, metals, humic acids, and man-made or naturally occurring halogenated organic compounds. Most of the Desulfitobacterium strains can dehalogenate halogenated organic compounds by mechanisms of reductive dehalogenation, although the substrate spectrum of halogenated organic compounds varies substantially from one strain to another, even with strains belonging to the same species. A number of reductive dehalogenases and their corresponding gene loci have been isolated from these strains. Some of these loci are flanked by transposition sequences, suggesting that they can be transmitted by horizontal transfer via a catabolic transposon. Desulfitobacterium spp. can use H-2 as electron donor below the threshold concentration that would allow sulfate reduction and methanogenesis. Furthermore, there is some evidence that syntrophic relationships occur between Desulfitobacterium spp. and sulfate-reducing bacteria, from which the Desulfitobacterium cells acquire their electrons by interspecies hydrogen transfer, and it is believed that this relationship also occurs in a methanogenic consortium. Because of their versatility, desulfitobacteria can be excellent candidates for the development of anaerobic bioremediation processes. The release of the complete genome of Desulfitobacterium hafniense strain Y51 and information from the partial genome sequence of D. hafniense strain DCB-2 will certainly help in predicting how desulfitobacteria interact with their environments and other microorganisms, and the mechanisms of actions related to reductive dehalogenation.</br

Architecture Analysis for Symmetric Simplicial Deep Neural Networks on Chip

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are the dom-inating Machine Learning (ML) architecture used for complex tasks such as image classification despite their required usage of heavy computational resources, large storage space and power-demanding hardware. This motivates the exploration of alternative implementations using efficient neuromorphic hardware for resource constrained applications. Conventional Simplicial Piece-Wise Linear implementations allow the development of efficient hardware to run DNNs by avoiding multipliers, but demand large memory requirements. Symmetric Simplicial (SymSim) functions preserve the efficiency of the implementation while reducing the number of parameters per layer, and can be trained to replace convolutional layers and natively run non-linear filters such as MaxPool. This paper analyzes architectures to implement a Neural Network accelerator for SymSim operations optimizing the number of parallel cores to reduce the computational time. For this, we develop a model that takes into account the core processing times as well as the data transfer times.Fil: Rodríguez, Nicolás Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica "Alfredo Desages". Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica y de Computadoras. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica "Alfredo Desages"; ArgentinaFil: Villemur, Martin. Universidad Nacional del Sur; ArgentinaFil: Julian, Pedro Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica "Alfredo Desages". Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica y de Computadoras. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica "Alfredo Desages"; Argentina57th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and SystemsBaltimoreEstados UnidosInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer