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Joyce Dreyer posted an update 6 months, 4 weeks ago
These results provide not only novel insights into drought stress responses, but also valuable genomic resources to improve drought tolerance of oil palm by both genetic modification and selective breeding.The wavelet local multiple correlation (WLMC) is introduced for the first time in the study of climate dynamics inferred from multivariate climate time series. To exemplify the use of WLMC with real climate data, we analyse Last Millennium (LM) relationships among several large-scale reconstructed climate variables characterizing North Atlantic i.e. sea surface temperatures (SST) from the tropical cyclone main developmental region (MDR), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and tropical cyclone counts (TC). We examine the former three large-scale variables because they are known to influence North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity and because their underlying drivers are still under investigation. WLMC results obtained for these multivariate climate time series suggest that (1) MDRSST and AMO show the highest correlation with each other and with respect to the TC record over the last millennium, and (2) MDRSST is the dominant climate variable that explains TC temporal variability. WLMC results confirm that this method is able to capture the most fundamental information contained in multivariate climate time series and is suitable to investigate correlation among climate time series in a multivariate context.User-friendly phenotypic antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) methods are urgently needed in many fields including clinical medicine, epidemiological studies and drug research. Herein, we report a convenient and cost-effective phenotypic AST method based on online monitoring bacterial growth with a developed 8-channel contactless conductometric sensor (CCS). Using E. coli and V. parahaemolyticus as microorganism models, as well as enoxacin, florfenicol, ampicillin, kanamycin and sulfadiazine as antibiotic probes. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) determination was validated in comparison with standard broth microdilution (BMD) assay. The total essential agreements between the CCS AST assays and the reference BMD AST assays are 68.8-92.3%. The CCS has an approximate price of $9,000 (USD). Requiring neither chemical nor biotic auxiliary materials for the assay makes the cost of each sample less then $1. The MICs obtained with the automated CCS AST assays are more precise than those obtained with the manual BMD. Moreover, in 72 percent of the counterpart, the MICs obtained with the CCS AST assays are higher than that obtained with the BMD AST assays. The proposed CCS AST method has advantages in affordability, accuracy, sensitivity and user-friendliness.Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) produced by Gram-negative bacteria have roles in cell-to-cell signaling, biofilm formation, and stress responses. Here, the effects of abiotic stressors on OMV contents and composition from biofilm cells of the plant health-promoting bacterium Pseudomonas chlororaphis O6 (PcO6) are examined. Two stressors relevant to this root-colonizing bacterium were examined CuO nanoparticles (NPs)-a potential fertilizer and fungicide- and H2O2-released from roots during plant stress responses. Atomic force microscopy revealed 40-300 nm diameter OMVs from control and stressed biofilm cells. Raman spectroscopy with linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was used to identify changes in chemical profiles of PcO6 cells and resultant OMVs according to the cellular stressor with 84.7% and 83.3% accuracies, respectively. All OMVs had higher relative concentrations of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids than PcO6 cells. The nucleic acid concentration in OMVs exhibited a cellular stressor-dependent increase CuO NP-induced OMVs > H2O2-induced OMVs > control OMVs. Biochemical assays confirmed the presence of lipopolysaccharides, nucleic acids, and protein in OMVs; however, these assays did not discriminate OMV composition according to the cellular stressor. selleck products These results demonstrate the sensitivity of Raman spectroscopy using LDA to characterize and distinguish cellular stress effects on OMVs composition and contents.Serotonin (5-HT) and dopamine are critical neuromodulators known to regulate a range of behaviors in invertebrates and mammals, such as learning and memory. Effects of both serotonin and dopamine are mediated largely through their downstream G-protein coupled receptors through cAMP-PKA signaling. While the role of dopamine in olfactory learning in Drosophila is well described, the function of serotonin and its downstream receptors on Drosophila olfactory learning remain largely unexplored. In this study we show that the output of serotonergic neurons, possibly through points of synaptic contacts on the mushroom body (MB), is essential for training during olfactory associative learning in Drosophila larvae. Additionally, we demonstrate that the regulation of olfactory associative learning by serotonin is mediated by its downstream receptor (d5-HT7) in a cAMP-dependent manner. We show that d5-HT7 expression specifically in the MB, an anatomical structure essential for olfactory learning in Drosophila, is critical for olfactory associative learning. Importantly our work shows that spatio-temporal restriction of d5-HT7 expression to the MB is sufficient to rescue olfactory learning deficits in a d5-HT7 null larvae. In summary, our results establish a critical, and previously unknown, role of d5-HT7 in olfactory learning.Multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MDR-TB) accounts for 3.7% of new cases of TB annually worldwide and is a major threat to global public health. Due to the prevalence of the MDR-TB and extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) cases, there is an urgent need for new drugs with novel mechanisms of action. CarD, a global transcription regulator in MTB, binds RNAP and activates transcription by stabilizing the transcription initiation open-promoter complex (RPo). CarD is required for MTB viability and it has highly conserved homologues in many eubacteria. A fluorescence polarization (FP) assay which monitors the association of MTB RNAP, native rRNA promoter DNA and CarD has been developed. Overall, our objective is to identify and characterize small molecule inhibitors which block the CarD/RNAP interaction and to understand the mechanisms by which CarD interacts with the molecules. We expect that the development of a new and improved anti-TB compound with a novel mechanism of action will relieve the burden of resistance.
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