Background and AimsThe germination test currently represents the most used method to assess seed viability in germplasm banks, despite the difficulties caused by the occurrence of seed dormancy. ...Furthermore, seed longevity can vary considerably across species and populations from different environments, and studies related to the eco-physiological processes underlying such variations are still limited in their depth. The aim of the present work was the identification of reliable molecular markers that might help in monitoring seed deterioration.MethodsDry seeds were subjected to artificial ageing and collected at different time points for molecular/biochemical analyses. DNA damage was measured using the RAPD (random amplified polymorphic DNA) approach while the seed antioxidant profile was obtained using both the DPPH (1,1-diphenyl, 2-picrylhydrazyl) assay and the Folin–Ciocalteu reagent method. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) provided profiles of free radicals. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (QRT-PCR) was used to assess the expression profiles of the antioxidant genes MT2 (type 2 metallothionein) and SOD (superoxide dismutase). A modified QRT-PCR protocol was used to determine telomere length.Key ResultsThe RAPD profiles highlighted different capacities of the two Silene species to overcome DNA damage induced by artificial ageing. The antioxidant profiles of dry and rehydrated seeds revealed that the high-altitude taxon Silene acaulis was characterized by a lower antioxidant specific activity. Significant upregulation of the MT2 and SOD genes was observed only in the rehydrated seeds of the low-altitude species. Rehydration resulted in telomere lengthening in both Silene species.ConclusionsDifferent seed viability markers have been selected for plant species showing inherent variation of seed longevity. RAPD analysis, quantification of redox activity of non-enzymatic antioxidant compounds and gene expression profiling provide deeper insights to study seed viability during storage. Telomere lengthening is a promising tool to discriminate between short- and long-lived species.
Measurements of different physical quantities are often correlated when they are performed by the same experiment, using the same data or the same detector. Correlations may also exist between the ...results of different experiments, for instance if they rely on the use of the same theoretical models. All these correlations must be properly taken into account to provide the best combined estimate of each measured quantity. A procedure used to combine the correlated results of different high-energy physics experiments is reviewed in this paper.
CORAL and COOL during the LHC long shutdown Valassi, A; Clemencic, M; Dykstra, D ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
01/2014, Letnik:
513, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
CORAL and COOL are two software packages used by the LHC experiments for managing detector conditions and other types of data using relational database technologies. They have been developed and ...maintained within the LCG Persistency Framework, a common project of the CERN IT department with ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. This presentation reports on the status of CORAL and COOL at the time of CHEP2013, covering the new features and enhancements in both packages, as well as the changes and improvements in the software process infrastructure. It also reviews the usage of the software in the experiments and the outlook for ongoing and future activities during the LHC long shutdown (LS1) and beyond.
The CORAL software is widely used by the LHC experiments for storing and accessing data using relational database technologies. CORAL provides a C++ abstraction layer that supports data persistency ...for several back-ends and deployment models, direct client access to Oracle servers being one of the most important use cases. Since 2010, several problems have been reported by the LHC experiments in their use of Oracle through CORAL, involving application errors, hangs or crashes after the network or the database servers became temporarily unavailable. CORAL already provided some level of handling of these instabilities, which are due to external causes and cannot be avoided, but this proved to be insufficient in some cases and to be itself the cause of other problems, such as the hangs and crashes mentioned before, in other cases. As a consequence, a major redesign of the CORAL plugins has been implemented, with the aim of making the software more robust against these database and network glitches. The new implementation ensures that CORAL automatically reconnects to Oracle databases in a transparent way whenever possible and gently terminates the application when this is not possible. Internally, this is done by resetting all relevant parameters of the underlying back-end technology (OCI, the Oracle Call Interface). This presentation reports on the status of this work at the time of the CHEP2012 conference, covering the design and implementation of these new features and the outlook for future developments in this area.
We discuss the effect of large positive correlations in the combinations of several measurements of a single physical quantity using the Best Linear Unbiased Estimate (BLUE) method. We suggest a new ...approach for comparing the relative weights of the different measurements in their contributions to the combined knowledge about the unknown parameter, using the well-established concept of Fisher information. We argue, in particular, that one contribution to information comes from the collective interplay of the measurements through their correlations and that this contribution cannot be attributed to any of the individual measurements alone. We show that negative coefficients in the BLUE weighted average invariably indicate the presence of a regime of high correlations, where the effect of further increasing some of these correlations is that of reducing the error on the combined estimate. In these regimes, we stress that assuming fully correlated systematic uncertainties is not a truly conservative choice, and that the correlations provided as input to BLUE combinations need to be assessed with extreme care instead. In situations where the precise evaluation of these correlations is impractical, or even impossible, we provide tools to help experimental physicists perform more conservative combinations.
The CORAL software is widely used at CERN by the LHC experiments to access the data they store on relational databases, such as Oracle. Two new components have recently been added to implement a ...model involving a middle tier "CORAL server" deployed close to the database and a tree of "CORAL server proxies", providing data caching and multiplexing, deployed close to the client. A first implementation of the two new components, released in the summer 2009, is now deployed in the ATLAS online system to read the data needed by the High Level Trigger, allowing the configuration of a farm of several thousand processes. This paper reviews the architecture of the software, its development status and its usage in ATLAS.
The LCG Persistency Framework consists of three software packages (CORAL, COOL and POOL) that address the data access requirements of the LHC experiments in several different areas. The project is ...the result of the collaboration between the CERN IT Department and the three experiments (ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) that are using some or all of the Persistency Framework components to access their data. POOL is a hybrid technology store for C++ objects, using a mixture of streaming and relational technologies to implement both object persistency and object metadata catalogs and collections. CORAL is an abstraction layer with an SQL-free API for accessing data stored using relational database technologies. COOL provides specific software components and tools for the handling of the time variation and versioning of the experiment conditions data. This presentation reports on the status and outlook in each of the three sub-projects at the time of the CHEP2012 conference, reviewing the usage of each package in the three LHC experiments.
The Persistency Framework consists of three software packages (CORAL, COOL and POOL) addressing the data access requirements of the LHC experiments in different areas. It is the result of the ...collaboration between the CERN IT Department and the three experiments (ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) that use this software to access their data. POOL is a hybrid technology store for C++ objects, metadata catalogs and collections. CORAL is a relational database abstraction layer with an SQL-free API. COOL provides specific software tools and components for the handling of conditions data. This paper reports on the status and outlook of the project and reviews in detail the usage of each package in the three experiments.
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