Tritiated elongation factors 1 and 2 (EF-1 and EF-2) were obtained from Krebs II ascites cells which had been grown in mice injected with radioactive amino acids. The highly purified factors were sufficiently radioactive to be used in a study of the interactions between ribosomes and elongation factors. The following results were obtained. 1. EF-1 binding to ribosomes requires the presence of a polynucleotide, an aminoacyl-tRNA specified by the latter and a guanosine nucleotide carrying three phosphate groups. The hydrolysis of the GTP molecule involved in the binding reaction leads to the immediate release of EF-1. If GTP is replaced by Guo-5'-P2-CH2-P the factor remains bound to the ribosome and can be detected by sucrose gradient centrifugation techniques. 2. Likewise EF-2 binding to ribosomes can only be detected in the presence of GUO-5'-P2-CH2-P. 3. The affinity of ribosomes for EF-2 appears to be higher than for EF-1: PREINCUBATION OF RIBOSOMES WITH EF-2 inhibits the subsequent attachment of EF-1 almost completely. EF-1 prebound to ribosomes in the presence of GUO-5'-P2-CH2-P, POLY(URIDYLIC ACID) AND Phe-tRNA-Phe is partially removed from the ribosomes together with Phe-tRNA during a second incubation with EF-2. 4. Although EF-2 binding to ribosomes precludes any stable association between ribosomes and EF-1 it does not prevent the insertion of aminoacyl-tRNA into the ribosomal A-site. The attachment of aminoacyl-tRNA under these conditions enhances the binding of EF-2 to the ribosome. 5. The antibiotic showdomycin strongly inhibits the attachment of EF-1 to ribosomes and to a lesser degree impairs the binding of EF-2. 6. A-site ribosomes display a strong preference for the attachment of EF-2 and bind EF-1 only very poorly. The reverse is true for P-site ribosomes which are good substrates for the binding of EF-1 and bind EF-2 less efficiently than A-site ribosomes. These results and a number of additional findings made in this and in previous studies are discussed in the general context of the structure and function of mammalian elongation factors 1 and 2.


In this paper we will present the results of development of test battery to measure anxiety in patients in whom vascular procedures using prosthetic grafts are indicated. In our research it is necessary to assess anxiety before and after operation and distinguish situational anxiety form anxiety as a personal trait. It is also important to be aware of the fact that the patients are usually older people and it is possible to anticipate cognitive decline or even mild cognitive impairment. Therefore the battery must be understandable and not time-consuming. Preparation of test battery consisted of two phases. In both phases patients were given an MMSE (Mini Mental State Examination) at the very beginning in order to exclude patients with dementia. At first phase, the semi-structured interview was created. The second phase was focused on choosing the appropriate questionnaires. Three questionnaires were administered to patients (N=5, average age was 69). Before operation it was STAI (measures situational and trait anxiety) and KSAT – form C (focuses on classic fears, social situations fears and fears related to illness and hospitalisation). After the operation patients were given STAI (only situational anxiety) and ABI (fear coping strategies). It was found that the whole battery is not time-consuming. STAI and KSAT were also understandable and there were no difficulties during the administration. ABI consist of two parts: ABI-E focuses on fears related to situations in which self-image was threatened and ABI-P focuses on fears related to physical threat. ABI-E was not understandable and probands had difficulties, one refused filling the questionnaire. Therefore it will be excluded and in further research only ABI-P will be administered.


—We present the first accelerated implementation of BWA-MEM, a popular genome sequence alignment algorithm widely used in next generation sequencing genomics pipelines. The Smith-Waterman-like sequence alignment kernel requires a significant portion of overall execution time. We propose and evaluate a number of FPGA-based systolic array architectures, presenting optimizations generally applicable to variable length Smith-Waterman execution. Our kernel implementation is up to 3x faster, compared to software-only execution. This translates into an overall application speedup of up to 45%, which is 96% of the theoretically maximum achievable speedup when accelerating only this kernel.


A novel Yb3+-doped double-clad fibre laser based on a double-clad fibre Bragg grating is presented. The fibre Bragg grating, as the output mirror, has been formed in Yb3+-doped double-clad fibre with the phase-mask method. When the input pump power is 2.8 W, the maximum laser output power is 570 mW, with <0.2 nm in line-width at the wavelength of 1.058 μm, over 40 dB signal-to-noise ratio and 24% slope efficiency.


This paper introduces the generalized excited pair coherent state (GEPCS). Using the entangled state |η〉 representation of Wigner operator, it obtains the Wigner function for the GEPCS. In the ρ-γ phase space, the variations of the Wigner function distributions with the parameters q, α, k and l are discussed. The tomogram of the GEPCS is calculated with the help of the Radon transform between the Wigner operator and the projection operator of the entangled state |η1, η2, τ1, τ2〉. The entangled states |η〉 and η1, η2, τ1, τ2〉 provide two good representative space for studying the Wigner functions and tomograms of various two-mode correlated quantum states.


Abstract Many educational agents offer paths that allow school to turn itself into a 'third space'. Caritas Ambrosiana, based on a 'pedagogy of facts', proposes interventions to promote soft skills in schools. This non-formal education agency committed Research Center about Media Education, Innovation and Technology (CREMIT) of Catholic University for a project to improve their school programme and training effectiveness. We chose the participatory action research paradigm to verify how to design an educational path by applying third-space principles in the school context and how digital media can be embedded into the practice to enable a more porous exchange of experiences and expertise between students, educators and the school curriculum. The accompanying plan was designed on the basis of the initial questionnaire data analysis: sociomateriality was the main focus because it was considered by Caritas educators as one of the least important elements to include in the design process. The second reason is the need to rethink on-site training formats to face the challenges of the Covid-19 emergency. As expected, after the training intervention, sociomateriality had a significant growth in the design practices. The other third-space pedagogy elements (peering, experiential orientation, motivation, pleasure of making together) are maintained and reinforced, thanks to digital literacy.


For monitoring of warfarin treatment only analyses with documented International Sensitivity Index should be used. Until further studies clarify the matter, we recommend the therapeutic intervals proposed by the American College of Chest Physicians and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. For induction of treatment, a daily warfarin dose of 10 mg is useful. Overlapping heparin therapy is recommended for at least five days. Day-to-day variation of dietary vitamin K intake of less than 250-500 micrograms and an alcohol consumption below 47 g/day will not disturb anticoagulation. Bleeding is more common during long-term treatment, among elderly patients and in patients with cerebral arteriosclerotic disease, especially in combination with uncontrolled hypertension. Bleeding patients often have underlying pathology which should be looked for.


This article explores Baroque works, authors, artists and themes as represented by Television Espanola during the Francoist dictatorship. It has viewed the available sources and studied scheduling information. The Baroque did not enjoy its own space on television during this time. Only Quevedo was included; Tirso, Gongora and Calderon were considered examples of other sensibilities. This is not simply an effect of the medium, which certainly values characters over the abstraction of movements and aesthetics, because space was devoted to romanticism, romanic or gothic culture. The alternative to the Baroque was the Golden Age, which was a more popular and comprehensible referent. The Baroque had its place in a Spain in decline: writers and painters were the only figures who could provide a note of honour. The television programmes focused on them (on their lives and works), and not on their epoch or historical context. So the Baroque was presented as a sanitized form of popular culture, consonant with the ...


We consider the problem of preemptively scheduling jobs to minimize mean response time of an M/G/1 queue. When we know each job's size, the shortest remaining processing time (SRPT) policy is optimal. Unfortunately, in many settings we do not have access to each job's size. Instead, we know only the job size distribution. In this setting the Gittins policy is known to minimize mean response time, but its complex priority structure can be computationally intractable. A much simpler alternative to Gittins is the shortest expected remaining processing time (SERPT) policy. While SERPT is a natural extension of SRPT to unknown job sizes, it is unknown whether or not SERPT is close to optimal for mean response time.


Abstract A hypothesis is introduced under which a compact complex analytic space, X, viewed as a structure in the language of analytic sets, is essentially saturated. It is shown that this condition is met exactly when the irreducible components of the restricted Douady spaces of all the cartesian powers of X  are compact. Some implications of saturation on Kähler-type spaces, which by a theorem of Fujiki meet the above condition, are discussed. In particular, one obatins a model-theoretic proof of the fact that relative algebraic reductions exist in the class of Kähler-type spaces.


Low energy ion beams are known to have stimulation effects on plant generation and to improve plants' intrinsic quality. In the present study, the growth and physiological index of licorice implanted with 0, 8, 10, 12 and 14× (2.6×1015) ions/cm2 were investigated under well-watered and drought-stress conditions. The results showed that a proper dose of ion implantation was particularly efficient in stimulating the licorice growth and improving the plant biomass significantly in both the well-watered and drought-stress conditions. The physiological results of licorice measured by leaf water potential, lipid oxidation, soluble protein and antioxidant system showed a significant correlation between ion implantation and water regime except for leaf water potential. Therefore, the study indicated that ion implantation can enhance licorice's drought tolerance by increasing the activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT) and DPPH (1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl) radical scavenging ability to lower oxidative damage to lipids in plants. Ion beam implantation, therefore, provides an alternative method to enhance licorice drought tolerance.


Genetic relationships were investigated among several populations of Pleurotus tuberregium from Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia. Intrastock mating compatibility studies using progeny from two collections demonstrated a tetrapolar mating system for P. tuberregium. Interstock matings among the geographically distinct populations were compatible. All isolates were found to be intersterile with tester strains of other Pleurotus species, showing that P. tuberregium represents a unique intersterility group in Pleurotus. Nucleotide sequences of the ITS region of the rDNA gene were determined for 30 isolates and used to infer phylogenetic structure of populations. Phylogenetic analysis shows that African and Australasian-Pacific isolates form at least two distinct evolutionary lineages. Higher genetic divergence was observed among ITS sequences from the Australasian-Pacific region than among African isolates, which suggests a possible origin of P. tuberregium in the Australasian-Pacific region.


We experimentally study photonic crystal L3 nanocavities whose design Q factors (Qdesign) have been improved with the visualization of leaky components design method. The experimental Q values (Qexp) are monotonically increased from 6,000 to 2,100,000 by iteratively modifying the positions of some of the air holes, as determined by the referred design method. We investigate the Qexp tolerance to imperfections in the fabricated samples, which reveals that the cavities improved by the visualization method tend to lose some tolerance to structural differences between the fabricated samples and the design values.


Paddy is the main food crop consumed by most of the Indonesian daily. It is supported by the fact that rice consumption reached up to 1.55 tons in 2018, and Sukabumi Regency is among the five largest rice producer in Indonesia. The goal of this study is to determine the rice crop phenology and estimate rice productivity in one year of the planting season. The rice crop phenology was analyzed by comparing vegetation indices such as NDVI, ARVI, and MSAVI in different temporal situations. Vegetation indices derived from Sentinel-2 imageries via Google Earth Engine. A rice crop productivity model developed from the statistical relationship between in-situ-based productivity data and vegetation indices applied to estimate productivity per each paddy field at a sub-district level. Also, the estimation will be associated with elevation data. The results of this study are the pattern of the rice crop phenology and the number of harvesting time in one year-planting season. The rice productivity in the Cikakak sub-district estimates at the range between 6.50 to 8.87 tonnes per hectare. Estimation models utilizing NDVI and MSAVI are showing similar results, which averagely at 8.89 and 8.87 tonnes per hectare, respectively. Rice fields with high productivity are mostly located at 250 to 500 meters above sea level.


Rice is one of the major cereal grain consumed more than half of the world's population. Aromatic rice is one of the most widely accepted rice due its pleasant aroma. Traditionally, many varieties of aromatic rice are grown by the farmers of Assam maintaining a diverse gene pool. In the present study, morphological variation was studied in 22 aromatic rice landraces using qualitative and quantitative traits. Keteki Joha is very popular indigenous aromatic rice grown in a small pocket of Assam for its high yield. Though Kola Kunkuni Joha is relatively smaller grain size and low yield but have high demand due to its high aroma as compared to other landraces. Significant positive correlations was occurred at 0.05 level between kernel length and seed weight with seed width (r = 0.6734*) and (0.5881*) as well as seed weight with kernel width (r = 0.5433*). The correlation between seed width and kernel width (0.9663**) showed significantly positive relationship which shown at 0.01 level. Characterization of aromatic rice landraces of Assam would be a boon for the breeders for designing further rice improvement programme.


Iron is essential to living cells, acting as a cofactor in a number of essential enzymes in metabolism; however, iron requires proper storage or it can be dangerous to the cell. In both yeast and plants, iron is stored in a vacuole through the action of a vacuolar iron transporter (VIT). This transporter is conserved in the apicomplexan family of obligate intracellular parasites, including in Toxoplasma gondii, a pathogen of medical and veterinary importance. Here, we assess the role of VIT in T. gondii. We show that deletion of VIT causes a slight growth defect in vitro, however leads to hypersensitivity in the presence of excess iron, confirming its essential role in iron detoxification in the parasite. In the absence of VIT, parasites contain less iron and are at a growth disadvantage when moving into an iron-depleted environment. We show parasite VIT expression is regulated by environmental iron levels at both the transcript and protein level, and by altering the distribution of VIT within the cell. In the absence of VIT, we find that the T. gondii responds by altering expression of genes with a role in iron metabolism and by increasing the activity of the antioxidant protein catalase. We also show that iron detoxification has an important role both in parasite survival within macrophages and in pathogenesis in a mouse model. Together, by demonstrating a critical role for VIT during iron detoxification in T. gondii, we reveal the importance of iron storage in the parasite and provide the first insight into the machinery involved.


Aspergillus flavus accumulates carcinogenic aflatoxins in peanuts, mainly in immature kernels during drought. Aspergillus flavus invasion induces accumulation of phytoalexins, mostly stilbenoids in peanut, as a plant defence mechanism. Because fungal laccases are often related to pathogenicity and can degrade stilbenoids, this study reports for the first time the expression of A. flavus laccases in the presence of kernels, hulls and low water potential in relation to the accumulation of phytoalexins in peanut kernels. Packed-cell volume (PCV) of A. flavus biomass was significantly higher (P ≤ 0·01) in the presence of mature kernels, dead kernels, and mature and immature peanut hulls than the control. The presence of kernels and hulls lowered the level of expression of three A. flavus laccases by 4–6-fold (P < 0·01), whereas 3% sucrose up-regulated them by 35–304-fold, and low water potential (−1·1 MPa) up-regulated them by 85–248-fold (P < 0·01). Phytoalexins that accumulated in peanut kernels in the presence of A. flavus and were quantified by HPLC-DAD-MS were primarily the stilbenoids: 3′-isopentadienyl-3,5,4′-trihydroxystilbene (IPD), chiricanine-A, arachidin-2, arachidin-3 and arahypin-1. Apparent degradation of phytoalexins was observed when using a priori induction of phytoalexins in seeds in combination with a priori induction of laccases in A. flavus. The up-regulation of laccase expression observed at −1·1 MPa and at high sucrose concentration could be contributing to peanut invasion in immature kernels under drought conditions.


This work presents a dynamic formulation of the boundary element method for the computation of stresses in internal points of anisotropic thin plates. The formulations uses elastostatic fundamental solutions and inertia terms are treated as body forces. Domain integrals that come from body forces are transformed into boundary integrals using the radial integration method (RIM). In the RIM, the augmented thin plate spline is used as the approximation function. The time integration is carried out using the Houbolt method. In order to compute stresses, integral equations for the second derivatives of deflection are developed and all derivatives of fundamental solutions are computed analytically. Only the boundary is discretized in the formulation. Numerical results show good agreement with results available in literature.


Noise removal in image processing is required in a variety of fields such as object tracking, stereo vision and medical image reconstruction. To obtain accurate results, various video pre-processing is required. We propose a hardware architecture using FPGA to improve the processing speed with the Total Variation algorithm for noise removing images. In the proposed system, we can process images with a resolution of 640 × 480. We remove noise from the input noisy image, after 10 cycles of operations. In the first step, we obtain the right, bottom and center pixel values and the differences to obtain. In the second step, we add pixels to the center of the operation parameters, and the difference between the values are obtained central pixel. The operation parameters and the difference of the values of the surrounding pixels are reflected in the following operations. We repeat this process 10 times to remove the noise in the image. The noise removal performance is better than prior results, but the operation is complex and requires considerable computing power. We implemented the proposed system in hardware that requires high computing power for real-time processing with these processes. The processing delay is 0.8ms. We designed pipeline architecture to delay the operation. The proposed system can operate on image resolution of 640 × 480 with a speed of 250Mhz.


The aim of the present study was to identify suitable prebiotics for multiplicating representative probiotics from the bifidobacterium genera. Six different types of prebiotics were screened for their effects on the growth of B. bifidum. The addition of prebiotics (v/v) was 0.20%, 0.40%, 0.60%, 0.80%, and 1.0%. Growth of cultures was studied by measuring optical density, pH and viable count using MRS media as the control. The results showed that three kinds of oligosaccharides and inulin(as polysaccharide) could promote the growth of B. bifidum. The optimum concentration of fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) and xylo-oligosaccharides (XOS) in MRS media was 0.40%, which was higher than inulin(0.20%)and lower than Galacto-oligosaccharide(GOS) (0.60%). Besides this, two other kinds of oligosaccharides (IMO and stachyose) have almost no effect on growth of B. bifidum BB01. The results of this study indicate that several prebiotics can enhance the growth of this representative probiotic strains in vitro.


Projects in the commercial software industry are often characterized by frenzied attempts to leapfrog the competition. Companies try to deliver innovative products quickly, and in their ill-fated attempts to serve two masters, both development time and product innovation suffer. A history of the GigaCorp company describes the current situation in more detail.


By viewing memories as first-person internal sensations, it was possible to derive a potential mechanism of nervous system functions. Accordingly, a spectrum inter-postsynaptic (inter-dendritic spine) functional LINKs (IPLs) are the key structural changes responsible for encoding learning-changes in physiological time-scales of milliseconds that can be retained for different lengths of time and can be used for inducing first-person inner sensation of memory. The objective of this study was to examine a) where preconditions existed for an accident to trigger sparking of internal sensations, b) what conditions might have promoted the formation and selection of IPLs, and c) how the synaptically-connected neuronal circuitry accommodated the formation of IPLs through the simple steps of variations and selection. Sequence of events during the development of the nervous system was examined for the feasible sequence of steps that led to the formation of IPLs and optimization of the system. A stage of significant spine loss and neuronal death during the early stages of development indicate about a corresponding stage of inter-spine fusion that led to neuronal loss during evolution. When the generation of internal sensations by the IPLs started to become advantageous to the system, it started preserving the circuitry by developing an adaptation to prevent inter-spine fusion. This can be achieved only if a stage of transient inter-neuronal inter-spine fusion "turn on" certain mechanism to prevent the intermediate stage of inter-spine hemifusion from progressing to fusion. In summary, the derived IPL mechanism is capable to have evolved. An adaptation to prevent IPL hemifusion from progressing to fusion is a likely evolutionary adaptation. Since the IPL mechanism is utilized during every event of learning, any age-related factors that weaken the maintenance of this adaptation to prevent IPL fusion can lead to neurodegeneration.


On the basis of multiple costumer projects restricted each other in the requirements and resources for the software organizations with complex business workflows, presents an organizational lever requirement management process oriented to multi-projects and the information support system. In the process solutions are framed against the requirements from various customers by consultation and service departments, initiating software requirement proposals. The proposals and their function implementation approaches are analyzed and planned by planning and development departments, allocating to specified software development projects. The customer business requirements and their status such as framing, analyzing or implementing are managed by the information system.