Bis-(3'-5')-cyclic dimeric guanosine monophosphate (c-di-GMP) modulates the transition between planktonic and biofilm life styles. In response to c-di-GMP, the enhancer binding protein FleQ from ...Pseudomonas aeruginosa derepresses the expression of Pel exopolysaccharide genes required for biofilm formation when a second protein, FleN is present. A model is that binding of c-di-GMP to FleQ induces its dissociation from the pelA promoter allowing RNA polymerase to access this site. To test this, we analyzed pelA DNA footprinting patterns with various combinations of FleQ, FleN and c-di-GMP, coupled to in vivo promoter activities. FleQ binds to two sites called box 1 and 2. FleN binds to FleQ bound at these sites causing the intervening DNA to bend. Binding of c-di-GMP to FleQ relieves the DNA distortion but FleQ remains bound to the two sites. Analysis of wild type and mutated versions of pelA-lacZ transcriptional fusions suggests that FleQ represses gene expression from box 2 and activates gene expression in response to c-di-GMP from box 1. The role of c-di-GMP is thus to convert FleQ from a repressor to an activator. The mechanism of action of FleQ is distinct from that of other bacterial transcription factors that both activate and repress gene expression from a single promoter.
Abstract
Grading is an important step of the Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) operation & maintenance activities. However, there are several grading difficulties for the High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) ...as well as the other type of NPPs causing by the lack of operational experiences and availability of the reliability data. Failure Mode & Effects Analysis (FMEA) is one of the mature techniques that are commonly used to solve such kinds of difficulties. Nevertheless, traditional FMEA has several issues and possibly become an obstacle in the grading process. The modified FMEA by utilizing expert judgment elicitation techniques combined with the fuzzy logic theory is proposed to solve those issues. As a study practice, the proposed methodology is applied by examining Japanese’s HTGR, Gas Turbine High Temperature Reactor 300 for Cogeneration (GTHTR300C) design carefully. This study establishing good practice especially for the future advanced NPP maintenance activities development.
Highly efficient ammonia synthesis at a low temperature is desirable for future energy and material sources. We accomplished efficient electrocatalytic low-temperature ammonia synthesis with the ...highest yield ever reported. The maximum ammonia synthesis rate was 30 099 μmol g
h
over a 9.9 wt% Cs/5.0 wt% Ru/SrZrO
catalyst, which is a very high rate. Proton hopping on the surface of the heterogeneous catalyst played an important role in the reaction, revealed by
IR measurements. Hopping protons activate N
even at low temperatures, and they moderate the harsh reaction condition requirements. Application of an electric field to the catalyst resulted in a drastic decrease in the apparent activation energy from 121 kJ mol
to 37 kJ mol
. N
dissociative adsorption is markedly promoted by the application of the electric field, as evidenced by DFT calculations. The process described herein opens the door for small-scale, on-demand ammonia synthesis.
Andromonoecy, the presence of perfect and staminate flowers in the same individual, has evolved repeatedly in angiosperms. The staminate flowers are generally smaller than the perfect flowers in ...species that produce staminate flowers plastically when resources are limited. The smaller staminate flowers are expected to be less attractive to pollinators and have reduced size‐matching with pollinators than perfect flowers. We hypothesized that these potential disadvantages of staminate versus perfect flowers facilitate the evolution of sex‐specific floral morphology, such as allometric relationship between flower size and male reproductive organ.
We compared six floral morphology traits, pollen production, pollinator visits and pollen removal from anthers between staminate and perfect flowers in several natural Commelina communis populations. Nectarless and zygomorphic C. communis flowers have polymorphic stamens with attracting, feeding and pollinating anthers and were visited by diverse pollinators.
Staminate flowers were significantly smaller than perfect flowers, despite a large overlap in size between sexes. The lengths of pollinating stamens did not differ between staminate and perfect flowers, and staminate flowers produced significantly more pollen. We observed significantly more pollinator visits to perfect flowers than to staminate flowers. By contrast, pollen removal from pollinating stamens was significantly higher in staminate flowers than in perfect flowers.
There is sexual dimorphism in flower morphology in C. communis. Staminate flowers with smaller attraction organs, similar pollinating stamens and higher pollen production assure higher pollen donor success relative to perfect flowers. Our results suggest that the morphological changes in staminate flowers enhance pollination success, even with limited resources.
Andromonoecious Commelina communis has smaller staminate flowers with similar pollination stamen length and more pollen production compared to perfect flowers, suggesting resource limitation and pollinator‐mediated selection shapes the inter‐sexual floral difference.
A number of recent medical procedures such as histotripsy rely on inertially-dominated oscillating gas cavities (i.e. bubbles) inside soft tissue. As a first approximation, soft tissue can be modeled ...by linear or nonlinear elasticity models and the equations describing bubble dynamics in such media have been derived in previous works. However, these models assume that the bubble remains perfectly spherical at all times for all initial conditions, which is in contradiction with any practical setting or experiments. Ignoring non-spherical behavior could for instance lead to inaccurate predictions for the extent of tissue damage generated during these procedures. The use of such models in practice thus requires one to predict departures from spherical behavior. In this article, departures from sphericity are expressed by non-spherical perturbations. Two sets of equations describing the dynamics of all non-spherical modes are derived for a bubble surrounded by a medium described using linear elasticity and Neo-Hookean hyperelasticity. For both elasticity models and for given initial conditions, bubble shape stability is shown to be controlled by five dimensionless parameters: the Weber number We, the Cauchy number Ca, the dimensionless vapor pressure inside the bubble, the dimensionless initial non-condensible gas pressure inside the bubble and the dimensionless far-field pressure. A growth criterion indicating whether the amplitude of a given non-spherical mode increases exponentially with time is also derived for both models. Bubble shape stability is then compared for both elasticity models during a Rayleigh collapse. Overall, it is found that shape stability is promoted when the shear modulus of the surrounding medium is increased and when the initial step increase in the external pressure is reduced. It is also established that the bubble shape during a Rayleigh collapse is stable over a much wider range of parameters for a surrounding medium described using Neo-Hookean hyperelasticity as opposed to linear elasticity with a similar shear modulus. This could lead to the overprediction of the occurrence of bubble shape instabilities if the surrounding medium is described using linear elasticity, which is particularly problematic during violent bubble collapse.
Periodontitis is a multifactorial disease that progresses via dynamic interaction between bacterial and host-derived genetic factors. The recent trend of omics analyses has discovered many ...periodontitis-related risk factors. However, how much the individual factor affects the pathogenesis of periodontitis is still unknown. This article aims to identify multiple key factors related to the pathogenesis of periodontitis and quantitatively predict the influence of each factor on alveolar bone resorption by omics analysis and mathematical modeling. First, we induced periodontitis in mice (n = 3 or 4 at each time point) by tooth ligation. Next, we assessed alveolar bone resorption by micro–computed tomography, alterations in the gene expression by RNA sequencing, and the microbiome of the gingivae by 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing during disease pathogenesis. Omics data analysis identified key players (bacteria and molecules) involved in the pathogenesis of periodontitis. We then constructed a mathematical model of the pathogenesis of periodontitis by employing ordinary differential equations that described the dynamic regulatory interplay between the key players and predicted the alveolar bone integrity as output. Finally, we estimated the model parameters using our dynamic experimental data and validated the model prediction of influence on alveolar bone resorption by in vivo experiments. The model predictions and experimental results revealed that monocyte recruitment induced by bacteria-mediated Toll-like receptor activation was the principal reaction regulating alveolar bone resorption in a periodontitis condition. On the other hand, osteoblast-mediated osteoclast differentiation had less impact on bone integrity in a periodontitis condition.
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