The effects of the nonextensivity on the dimerization process and nematic ordering

The influence of the dimerization process on the nematic ordering is investigated by using a nonextensive thermostatistics, namely Tsallis thermostatistics(TT). A theoretical model taking into account the dimerization influence on the nematic scalar order parameter has been recently presented[1]. Our study considers this model and the theoretical predictions for the nematic order parameter are improved by using TT

Transcript profiling of serine- and cysteine protease inhibitors in Triticum aestivum varieties with different drought tolerance

A high number of protease inhibitors (PI) have been identified in diverse plant species but information about their role in plant stress responses is still fragmentary. Transcript profiling of six published serine and cysteine protease inhibitor sequences in water-deprived plants from four winter wheat (Triticum aestivum) varieties with varying tolerance was performed in order to outline PIs predominantly accumulating under drought. Expression was analyzed by real time RT-qPCR. Considerable transcript accumulation of Bowman-Birk type PI WALI3 (BBPI) was detected in drought stressed leaves suggesting an important regulatory role of BBPI in adjustment of protein metabolism in leaves under dehydration. Serpin transcripts were less represented in water-deprived plants. Transient accumulation of cystatin transcripts revealed organ-specificity. Under drought cystatin and serpin expression in the leaves of the most drought tolerant variety “Katya” tended to preserve relatively stable levels close to the controls. This preliminary data will serve for future detailed study of regulation of proteolysis in winter wheat subjected to unfavorable environmental factors for development of molecular-based strategies for selection of tolerant varieties

Towards the extraction of cross-sentence relations through event extraction and entity coreference

Cross-sentence relation extraction deals with the extraction of relations beyond the sentence boundary. This thesis focuses on two of the NLP tasks which are of importance to the successful extraction of cross-sentence relation mentions: event extraction and coreference resolution. The first part of the thesis focuses on addressing data sparsity issues in event extraction. We propose a self-training approach for obtaining additional labeled examples for the task. The process starts off with a Bi-LSTM event tagger trained on a small labeled data set which is used to discover new event instances in a large collection of unstructured text. The high confidence model predictions are selected to construct a data set of automatically-labeled training examples. We present several ways in which the resulting data set can be used for re-training the event tagger in conjunction with the initial labeled data. The best configuration achieves statistically significant improvement over the baseline on the ACE 2005 test set (macro-F1), as well as in a 10-fold cross validation (micro- and macro-F1) evaluation. Our error analysis reveals that the augmentation approach is especially beneficial for the classification of the most under-represented event types in the original data set. The second part of the thesis focuses on the problem of coreference resolution. While a certain level of precision can be reached by modeling surface information about entity mentions, their successful resolution often depends on semantic or world knowledge. This thesis investigates an unsupervised source of such knowledge, namely distributed word representations. We present several ways in which word embeddings can be utilized to extract features for a supervised coreference resolver. Our evaluation results and error analysis show that each of these features helps improve over the baseline coreference system’s performance, with a statistically significant improvement (CoNLL F1) achieved when the proposed features are used jointly. Moreover, all features lead to a reduction in the amount of precision errors in resolving references between common nouns, demonstrating that they successfully incorporate semantic information into the process

The common cuckoo is an effective indicator of high bird species richness in Asia and Europe

AbstractCommon cuckoo Cuculus canorus is a charismatic bird species with a dominant presence in human culture: from folklore legends to nowadays there is evidence of cuckoos being a prime candidate as a surrogate of bird diversity. Recent studies demonstrated that the cuckoo can predict hotspots of taxonomic diversity and functional diversity of bird communities in European countries. In this study, we demonstrated that the cuckoo is an excellent bioindicator at multi-spatial scale, extending cuckoo surrogacy from Europe to Asia. Even using three different survey methods (transect, square, point counts), comparing the new findings with results of our research in Europe, sites where the cuckoo is present were characterized by greater species richness, while the cuckoo was absent from sites with low species richness. The goodness of fit of models based on point counts ranged between 71 and 92%. Furthermore, the cuckoo population trend mirrors the average population trend and climate suitability of overall bird communities in Europe. The common cuckoo is therefore a suitable intercontinental bioindicator of hotspots of bird richness, even under climate change scenarios or in areas where the species co-occurs with other cuckoo species, opening a new avenue for standardized citizen science on bird biodiversity surveys worldwide.</jats:p

Chemical composition and sensory analysis of cheese whey-based beverages using kefir grains as starter culture

The aim of the present work was to evaluate the use of the kefir grains as a starter culture for tradicional milk kefir beverage and for cheese whey-based beverages production. Fermentation was performed by inoculating kefir grains in milk (ML), cheese whey (CW) and deproteinised cheese whey (DCW). Erlenmeyers containing kefir grains and different substrates were statically incubated for 72 h at 25 °C. Lactose, ethanol, lactic acid, acetic acid, acetaldehyde, ethyl acetate, isoamyl alcohol, isobutanol, 1-propanol, isopentyl alcohol and 1-hexanol were identified and quantified by high-performance liquid chromatography and GC-FID. The results showed that kefir grains were able to utilise lactose in 60 h from ML and 72 h from CW and DCW and produce similar amounts of ethanol (∼12 g L−1), lactic acid (∼6 g L−1) and acetic acid (∼1.5 g L−1) to those obtained during milk fermentation. Based on the chemical characteristics and acceptance in the sensory analysis, the kefir grains showed potential to be used for developing cheese whey-based beverages.The authors acknowledge the financial support from Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES), CAPES-GRICES and Lactogal for supplying CW powder

In vivo spectroscopy and NMR metabolite fingerprinting approaches to connect the dynamics of photosynthetic and metabolic phenotypes in resurrection plant Haberlea rhodopensis during desiccation and recovery.

International audienceThe resurrection plant Haberlea rhodopensis was used to study dynamics of drought response of photosynthetic machinery parallel with changes in primary metabolism. A relation between leaf water content and photosynthetic performance was established, enabling us to perform a non-destructive evaluation of the plant water status during stress. Spectroscopic analysis of photosynthesis indicated that, at variance with linear electron flow (LEF) involving photosystem (PS) I and II, cyclic electron flow around PSI remains active till almost full dry state at the expense of the LEF, due to the changed protein organization of photosynthetic apparatus. We suggest that, this activity could have a photoprotective role and prevent a complete drop in adenosine triphosphate (ATP), in the absence of LEF, to fuel specific energy-dependent processes necessary for the survival of the plant, during the late states of desiccation. The NMR fingerprint shows the significant metabolic changes in several pathways. Due to the declining of LEF accompanied by biosynthetic reactions during desiccation, a reduction of the ATP pool during drought was observed, which was fully and quickly recovered after plants rehydration. We found a decline of valine accompanied by lipid degradation during stress, likely to provide alternative carbon sources for sucrose accumulation at late stages of desiccation. This accumulation, as well as the increased levels of glycerophosphodiesters during drought stress could provide osmoprotection to the cells

Drought stress response in winter wheat varieties – changes in leaf proteins and proteolytic activities

Radiation mutagenesis has been used in sustainable agriculture as a tool for increasing plant variability and providing new lines for selection. This necessitates a comparison, by using suitable stress markers, of the newly created lines with some well-established varieties, which are stress tolerant or susceptible. Drought is one of the most frequently encountered stresses with deleterious effects on plant performance and crop yield. Winter wheat seedlings (soil cultures at 3–4th leaf stage) from one mutant line (M181/1338K), one drought-tolerant (Guinness) and one sensitive variety (Farmer) were subjected to severe drought stress by water withholding, followed by recovery. Changes in leaf protein profiles, the amount of Rubisco large subunit (RLS), some specific chloroplast proteins such as Rubisco binding protein (RPB), Rubisco activase (RA), the chaperone subunit clpA/C of clp protease, as well as the activities of exo- and endo-proteases were analyzed. At the protein level, some differences were found in the drought response of genotypes – stability of RLS and RBP in M181/1338K and Guinness, diminution of RLS and increase in RBP in Farmer. RA presented strong up-regulation at recovery in Guinness but decreased in content under drought in M181/1338K and Farmer. Increase in ClpA/C level was found in all compared varieties under stress. Strong increase in total proteolytic activity was detected under drought only in Farmer. Inhibitory analysis revealed a predominance of cysteine and serine protease types. Aminopeptidase activities remained higher at recovery in M181/1338K and Farmer. Results are discussed in terms of genotype-linked different stress coping strategies

Assessment of sclerocorneal incision architecture after phacoemulsification using AS-OCT

Introduction The construction of the main incision is crucial for the outcome of cataract surgery.  There are many considerations including: wound preparation and stability, surgically induced astigmatism, stability of anterior chamber, and wound closure stability with rising intraocular pressure (IOP). Irrespective of modality, the main goal is to achieve stable watertight self-sealing wound in order to avoid possible intra- and postoperative complications. Therefore, evaluating the architecture and healing of the surgical wound would be of benefit, as the integrity of incisions may decrease the risk of endophthalmitis or other problems. Anterior segment OCT (AS-OCT) provides the opportunity to visualize anterior chamber structures and cornea in particular. In the interest of the current study this was used to examine the anatomy of the main incision in vivo and evaluate its changes over time.AimThe aim of this article is to examine the architecture of the main incision in vivo and evaluate its changes over time, using anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT). Materials and MethodsPatients diagnosed with senile cataract, scheduled for surgery, were enrolled in this prospective study. All underwent uneventful cataract surgery with phacoemulsification and intraocular lens (IOL) implantation, performed by the same experienced surgeon. A standardized technique of cataract extraction, under local anesthesia, was used. Patients with previous ocular surgery or trauma, and other ocular pathology, as well as cases with complications were not included in the study. Wound anatomy was visualized using AS-OCT (Topcon 3D SD OCT 2000) at three postoperative visits: day 1, day 7, and day 30. The following features were examined and analyzed: external gaping, endothelial (internal) alignment and gaping, localized DMD, loss of coaptation, wound retraction, and other changes on the external or the internal side of the wound.ResultsSixty eyes of 51 patients were examined, of whom 23 were men and 28 women, aged between 53 and 87 years (mean 72 years). The scleral tunnel incisions had a three-plane architecture and all of them were watertight with no leakage at any time. Several architectural features were assessed, including epithelial gaping, endothelial gaping and misalignment, local Descemet`s membrane detachment (DMD).ConclusionAS-OCT is a risk-free, quick, high-informative method for visualization of the morphological characteristics of cataract surgical incisions and their evolution over time. Hence, this technology is indispensable in evaluating the integrity of the wound, and the information obtained could be used to develop a consistent technique to create self-sealing incisions and decrease the risk of endophthalmitis