DNA barcoding of non-avian reptiles based on the cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene is still in a very early stage, mainly due to technical problems. Using a newly developed set of ...reptile-specific primers for COI we present the first comprehensive study targeting the entire reptile fauna of the fourth-largest island in the world, the biodiversity hotspot of Madagascar.
Representatives of the majority of Madagascan non-avian reptile species (including Squamata and Testudines) were sampled and successfully DNA barcoded. The new primer pair achieved a constantly high success rate (72.7-100%) for most squamates. More than 250 species of reptiles (out of the 393 described ones; representing around 64% of the known diversity of species) were barcoded. The average interspecific genetic distance within families ranged from a low of 13.4% in the Boidae to a high of 29.8% in the Gekkonidae. Using the average genetic divergence between sister species as a threshold, 41-48 new candidate (undescribed) species were identified. Simulations were used to evaluate the performance of DNA barcoding as a function of completeness of taxon sampling and fragment length. Compared with available multi-gene phylogenies, DNA barcoding correctly assigned most samples to species, genus and family with high confidence and the analysis of fewer taxa resulted in an increased number of well supported lineages. Shorter marker-lengths generally decreased the number of well supported nodes, but even mini-barcodes of 100 bp correctly assigned many samples to genus and family.
The new protocols might help to promote DNA barcoding of reptiles and the established library of reference DNA barcodes will facilitate the molecular identification of Madagascan reptiles. Our results might be useful to easily recognize undescribed diversity (i.e. novel taxa), to resolve taxonomic problems, and to monitor the international pet trade without specialized expert knowledge.
Systemic acquired resistance (SAR) is a defence mechanism that induces protection against a wide range of pathogens in distant, pathogen-free parts of plants after a primary inoculation. Multiple ...mobile compounds were identified as putative SAR signals or important factors for influencing movement of SAR signalling elements in
and tobacco. These include compounds with very different chemical structures like lipid transfer protein DIR1 (DEFECTIVE IN INDUCED RESISTANCE1), methyl salicylate (MeSA), dehydroabietinal (DA), azelaic acid (AzA), glycerol-3-phosphate dependent factor (G3P) and the lysine catabolite pipecolic acid (Pip). Genetic studies with different SAR-deficient mutants and silenced lines support the idea that some of these compounds (MeSA, DIR1 and G3P) are activated only when SAR is induced in darkness. In addition, although AzA doubled in phloem exudate of
(TMV) infected tobacco leaves, external AzA treatment could not induce resistance neither to viral nor bacterial pathogens, independent of light conditions. Besides light intensity and timing of light exposition after primary inoculation, spectral distribution of light could also influence the SAR induction capacity. Recent data indicated that TMV and CMV (
) infection in tobacco, like bacteria in
caused massive accumulation of Pip. Treatment of tobacco leaves with Pip in the light, caused a drastic and significant local and systemic decrease in lesion size of TMV infection. Moreover, two very recent papers, added in proof, demonstrated the role of FMO1 (FLAVIN-DEPENDENT-MONOOXYGENASE1) in conversion of Pip to
-hydroxypipecolic acid (NHP). NHP systemically accumulates after microbial attack and acts as a potent inducer of plant immunity to bacterial and oomycete pathogens in
. These results argue for the pivotal role of Pip and NHP as an important signal compound of SAR response in different plants against different pathogens.
•A new framework with multi-learning processes and specified rules is introduced for demand-driven cooling controls.•The proposed control can automatically adapt to occupancy scenarios without prior ...calibration and knowledge.•7–52% energy savings were achieved in case study offices as compared to scheduled cooling operations.
Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) are among the major energy demand in the buildings sector globally. Improving the energy efficiency of such systems is a critical objective for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and transitioning towards renewable sources of energy supply. The interest of this paper is to explore means to increase the efficiency of HVAC systems in accommodating occupants’ behavior in real time. For instance, rooms in office buildings are not always occupied by occupants during scheduled HVAC service periods. This offers an opportunity to reduce unnecessary energy demands of HVAC systems associated with occupants’ behavior. An in-depth analysis of occupants’ stochastic behavior within an office building is conducted in this paper. A demand-driven control strategy is proposed that automatically responds to occupants’ energy-related behavior for reducing energy consumption and maintains room temperature for occupants with similar performances as a static cooling. In this control strategy, two types of machine learning methods – unsupervised and supervised learning – are applied to learn occupants’ behavior in two learning processes. The occupancy-related information learned by the algorithms is used by a set of specified rules to infer real-time room setpoints for controlling the office's space cooling system. This learning-based approach intends to reduce the need for human intervention in the cooling system’s control. The proposed strategy was applied to control the cooling system of the office building under real-world conditions. Eleven case study office spaces were selected, representing three typical office uses: single person offices, multi-person offices, and meeting rooms. The experimental results report between 7% and 52% energy savings as compared to the conventionally-scheduled cooling systems.
Parton shower event generators typically approximate evolution of QCD color so that only contributions that are leading in the limit of an infinite number of colors are retained. Our parton shower ...generator, Deductor, has used an “LC+” approximation that is better, but still quite limited. In this paper, we introduce a new scheme for color in which the approximations can be systematically improved. That is, one can choose the theoretical accuracy level, but the accuracy level that is practical is limited by the computer resources available.
Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) are vital components in providing a comfortable indoor climate for the occupants of buildings. In commercial buildings, HVAC setpoints are set ...according to average comfort temperatures. However, individual temperature preferences may be different. The purpose of this study is to explore the means of making HVAC systems respond automatically to local occupant temperature preferences. To create an occupant-centric indoor temperature environment, we propose an online-learning-based control strategy together with its design process. Four essential variables from four domains—time, indoor and outdoor climates, and occupant behavior—are extracted to construct datasets for preference models. A neural network algorithm and corresponding hyperparameters are suggested to model temperature preferences. According to time-dependent setpoints learned from dynamic contexts, a set of specified rules is used to determine setpoints for HVAC systems. For a period of five months, the resulting learning-based temperature preference control (LTPC) was applied to a cooling system of an office space under real-world conditions. The four case study rooms consisted of typical office uses: single-person and multi-person offices. The experimental results indicate that occupant preferences in the individual rooms differ from each other in both time horizon and temperature levels. The results report energy savings of between 4% and 25% as compared to static temperature setpoints at the low values of preferred temperature ranges. Meanwhile, during LPTC, the need for occupant interventions for adjusting room temperatures to fit their preferences was reduced from four to nine weekdays a month to a maximum of one weekday a month.
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•An intelligent control strategy using machine learning techniques was proposed together with its design process for creating occupant-centric indoor climate.•4%–25% potential energy savings and the temperature comfort improvement were verified through a real-world test.•Applicability for commercial buildings was presented.
Background
There exist several fMRI quality assurance measures to assess scanner stability. Because they have practical and/or theoretical limitations, a different and more practical measure for ...instability would be desirable.
Purpose
To develop and test a sensitive, reliable and widely applicable temporal instability measure (TIM) for fMRI quality assurance.
Study Type
Technical development.
Phantom
Spherical gel phantom.
Population
A total of 120 datasets from a local Philips scanner with two different receive‐only head coils (32ch and 8ch, 60 datasets per coil) were collected as well as 29 additional datasets with three different receive‐only head coils (20ch, 32ch, and 64ch) from two additional sites with GE (seven runs with 32ch) and Siemens scanners (seven runs with 32ch and Multiband imaging, five runs with 20ch, 32ch, and 64ch) were borrowed.
Field Strength/Sequence
2D Echo‐planar‐imaging (EPI).
Assessment
A new TIM was proposed that is based on the eigenratio of the correlation coefficient matrix, where each entry of the matrix is a correlation coefficient between two time‐points of the time‐series.
Statistical Tests
Nonparametric bootstrap resampling was used twice to estimate confidence intervals (CI) of the TIM values and to assess the improved sensitivity of this measure. Differences in coil performance were assessed via a nonparametric bootstrap two‐sample t‐test. P‐values <0.05 were considered significant.
Results
The TIM values ranged between 60 parts‐per‐million and 10,780 parts‐per‐million across all 149 experiments. The mean CI was 2.96% and 2.16% for the 120 and 29 fMRI datasets, respectively (the repeated bootstrap analysis gave 2.9% and 2.19%, respectively). The 32ch coils of the local Philips data provided more stable measurements than the 8ch coil (observed two‐sample t‐values = 26.36, −0.2 and −6.2 for TIM, tSNR, and RDC, respectively. PtSNR = 0.58).
Data Conclusion
The proposed TIM is particularly useful for multichannel coils with spatially nonuniform receive sensitivity and overcomes several limitations of other measures. As such, it provides a reliable test for ascertaining scanner stability for fMRI experiments.
Evidence Level
5.
Technical Efficacy
Stage 1.
The study aimed at a quantitative evaluation of macular vasculature after primary repair of rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD) in correlation with the elapsed postoperative time. Optical ...coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A) was performed in 66 eyes of 33 patients in a retrospective case-control study: superficial and deep retinal vessel density (VD) of the whole image, fovea, parafovea, non-flow area, and foveal avascular zone (FAZ) were measured. Data of eyes with RRD were compared to the healthy fellow eyes in 3 groups according to the elapsed time after surgery: RD1: 6–12 months (n = 10), RD2: 1–2 years (n = 10), and RD3: 2–10 years (n = 13). In RD1 VD was significantly lower in the superficial parafoveal, deep parafoveal, and deep whole area compared to the fellow eyes. In RD3 VD was significantly lower in the superficial fovea, parafovea, whole image, and deep fovea, the non-flow area was significantly enlarged. OCT-A demonstrated a significant reduction in the superficial and deep regions of the macular vasculature after the repair of RRD. The deep area is more affected in the early postoperative period and the superficial region and the extent of the non-flow area are more involved after a longer postoperative time.
We propose a method to examine how a parton shower sums large logarithms. In this method, one works with an appropriate integral transform of the distribution for the observable of interest. Then, ...one reformulates the parton shower so as to obtain the transformed distribution as an exponential for which one can compute the terms in the perturbative expansion of the exponent. We apply this general program to the thrust distribution in electron-positron annihilation, using several shower algorithms. Of the approaches that we use, the most generally applicable is to compute some of the perturbative coefficients in the exponent by numerical integration and to test whether they are consistent with next-to-leading-log summation of the thrust logarithms.
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