Dinoflagellates constitute one of the most important groups of primary producers and micro-zooplankton on earth, common in both marine and freshwater environments. Despite their prominent position ...among phytoplankton, they are difficult to grow into dense cultures in the laboratory. This discrepancy between field and laboratory indicates serious limitations caused by the laboratory culturing conditions. A difficult to study but important factor is the constraints of enclosure in a limited volume of water. We conducted an experiment wherein the dinoflagellate
Scrippsiella lachrymosa
was grown in “flow cells” – 100 cm
3
cylindrical cages constructed from plankton net, inserted in larger volumes of growth medium, allowing an exchange of medium without dilution of the culture. Cell numbers far exceeding the normal for culturing of this species and dinoflagellates in general were attained, even though the experiment was terminated before cultures reached stationary phase. A cell number ten times higher than under regular batch culturing was achieved (up to 340,000 cells mL
−1
). Pattern formation was distinct in cultures when cells were plentiful and water movements caused cell accumulation, not dispersion. High cell density concurrent with access to new growth medium promoted induction of the sexual cell cycle. The results indicate serious limitations to growth set by enclosure in a limited water volume in laboratory experiments; thus, maximum growth rates of dinoflagellates in favourable field conditions may be vastly underestimated. Cell accumulation behavior of dinoflagellates during the sexual life cycle may together with physical transport by larger forces in nature explain sudden bloom occurrences.
Abstract
The Planteome project (http://www.planteome.org) provides a suite of reference and species-specific ontologies for plants and annotations to genes and phenotypes. Ontologies serve as common ...standards for semantic integration of a large and growing corpus of plant genomics, phenomics and genetics data. The reference ontologies include the Plant Ontology, Plant Trait Ontology and the Plant Experimental Conditions Ontology developed by the Planteome project, along with the Gene Ontology, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Phenotype and Attribute Ontology, and others. The project also provides access to species-specific Crop Ontologies developed by various plant breeding and research communities from around the world. We provide integrated data on plant traits, phenotypes, and gene function and expression from 95 plant taxa, annotated with reference ontology terms. The Planteome project is developing a plant gene annotation platform; Planteome Noctua, to facilitate community engagement. All the Planteome ontologies are publicly available and are maintained at the Planteome GitHub site (https://github.com/Planteome) for sharing, tracking revisions and new requests. The annotated data are freely accessible from the ontology browser (http://browser.planteome.org/amigo) and our data repository.
Olfactory dysfunction often has severe consequences on patients’ quality of life. The most common complaint in these patients is their reduced enjoyment of food in both patients with olfactory loss ...and parosmia. How the different types of olfactory dysfunction differ in relation to food and cooking habits, sensory awareness, and food-related quality of life has not yet received much attention. By applying questionnaires on cooking, food, olfactory function, weight changes, sensory awareness, and food-related quality of life, we investigated how various aspects of eating differ between participants with olfactory loss (n = 271), parosmia (n = 251), and normosmic controls (n = 166). Cooking habits in olfactory dysfunction revealed pronounced differences as compared with normosmic controls. Cooking with olfactory dysfunction was associated with, e.g., a lack of comfort and inspiration for cooking and an inability to make new foods successfully. Significant differences in cooking were also found between olfactory loss and parosmia. Food items were less familiar in participants with olfactory loss and parosmia, while the ratings of liking food items differed between olfactory loss and parosmia, indicating the importance of adapting ingredients in meals separately for olfactory loss and parosmia. Parosmia was associated with a higher incidence of weight loss, but we found no difference in food-related quality of life between participants with olfactory loss and parosmia. While olfactory loss and parosmia have wide-ranging consequences on patients’ cooking and food habits, adapting meals to include ‘safer food items’ and integrating multisensory stimulation may be a possible avenue for improving the enjoyment of food.
A museum or gallery is usually thought of as a space containing objects arranged in a chosen way. Understanding the multisensory factors that modulate an audience's experiences of artworks in their ...settings offers museum curators and architects opportunities to enhance visitors’ sensory engagement with their collections. Barry C Smith, Director of the Institute of Philosophy, Centre for the Study of the Senses, School of Advanced Study, University of London, considers a number of ways this can happen.
The efficient utilization of mixed-precision numerical linear algebra algorithms can offer attractive acceleration to scientific computing applications. Especially with the hardware integration of ...low-precision special-function units designed for machine learning applications, the traditional numerical algorithms community urgently needs to reconsider the floating point formats used in the distinct operations to efficiently leverage the available compute power. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of mixed-precision numerical linear algebra routines, including the underlying concepts, theoretical background, and experimental results for both dense and sparse linear algebra problems.
Millimeter-wave imaging systems used in airports, government buildings, and other facilities for personnel screening use advanced imaging technology (AIT) to detect explosives and weapons concealed ...under clothing. Additional information in the imaging data can be applied to identify the composition of the detected objects. The method described here demonstrates that material data in the form of the dielectric constant can be derived from the variation of reflectivity in millimeter waves over a range of frequencies from 18 to 40 GHz. By fitting the reflectivity to an optical model, the thickness and dielectric constant, including attenuation, can be computed. The method is applied to samples of inert substances and a military sheet explosive to show that detected anomalies can be distinguished as distinct materials through their dielectric constants. For absorptive materials, a frequency band of lower frequencies, 2-18 GHz, can be applied to detect the dielectric, as is demonstrated in the case of a commercial explosive. Used with AIT, the technique can facilitate the evaluation of threats at personnel checkpoints.
While representation learning techniques have shown great promise in application to a number of different NLP tasks, they have had little impact on the problem of ontology matching. Unlike past work ...that has focused on feature engineering, we present a novel representation learning approach that is tailored to the ontology matching task. Our approach is based on embedding ontological terms in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. This embedding is derived on the basis of a novel phrase retrofitting strategy through which semantic similarity information becomes inscribed onto fields of pre-trained word vectors. The resulting framework also incorporates a novel outlier detection mechanism based on a denoising autoencoder that is shown to improve performance.
An ontology matching system derived using the proposed framework achieved an F-score of 94% on an alignment scenario involving the Adult Mouse Anatomical Dictionary and the Foundational Model of Anatomy ontology (FMA) as targets. This compares favorably with the best performing systems on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative anatomy challenge. We performed additional experiments on aligning FMA to NCI Thesaurus and to SNOMED CT based on a reference alignment extracted from the UMLS Metathesaurus. Our system obtained overall F-scores of 93.2% and 89.2% for these experiments, thus achieving state-of-the-art results.
Our proposed representation learning approach leverages terminological embeddings to capture semantic similarity. Our results provide evidence that the approach produces embeddings that are especially well tailored to the ontology matching task, demonstrating a novel pathway for the problem.
•Discusses different needs of wine consumers.•Explores gap between wine experts and novices.•Compares wine apps and wine critics’ recommendations.•Combines sensory evaluation and recommender ...systems.•Distinguishes objective wine quality and subjective liking.
How do consumers decide which wines to buy from the bewildering range on offer to them? Who should they turn to for advice? The answers to these questions are of interest not just to consumers but also to producers and wine merchants who hope to influence consumers’ choices and develop their interests in wine. At one time, consumers looked to the points awarded by authoritative wine critics but increasingly, they use wine apps to extend their wine choices. Reliance on digital technology is meant to replace reliance on expert wine tasters whose judgments can be questioned or whose verdicts on what count as good quality wines may not line-up with the tastes and preferences of ordinary wine consumers. Wine apps’ recommendations based on the wisdom of the crowd favour what most people like but offer little insight into why they like it. It is here that sensory science can play a role in identifying the drivers of liking; however liking should be distinguished from quality. Wine experts aim to identify wine quality; wine apps mostly aim at average liking. To get more out of wine consumers need a way to go beyond liking.
Harmful algal blooms (HAB) are natural environmental occurrences that can disrupt ecosystem function that supports fisheries and aquaculture, as well as rendering harvested seafood, especially ...shellfish, unsafe for consumption by humans or wildlife species. Many dinoflagellates that cause HAB have a life cycle with a sexually produced resting stage called the resting cyst. The resting cyst enables the species to persist in an area where conditions for growth vary seasonally. These species often are found as vegetative stages only during a short period of the year. Most of the time is spent dormant or quiescent as thick-walled resting cysts with very low metabolic activity. By summarizing findings from an iterative series of research projects investigating different parts of the sexual life cycle, a more complete picture of the role of the sexual stages emerges, illuminating the consequences of life cycle within the environmental context. Gametes, the sexual stages, are formed at the end of the growing season in response to environmental signals which remain largely unknown. Gametes have lower cell-specific density and different swimming behavior compared to vegetative cells. Specifically, vegetative cells perform daily vertical migrations; whereas, gametes accumulate in patterns influenced by lower cell-specific density, changed swimming behavior, and attraction to each other. The patterns and patches of accumulated gametes (sexually induced cells) aggregate into larger and larger patterns. Together with large-scale hydrographic water movements, such as upwelling, water stratification, and fronts, cells originating from a low vegetative cell density background distribution assemble and become concentrated within a constricted space, thus forming a dense "bloom." This process is distinctly different from the paradigm of blooms resulting from simple, vegetative cell divisions. Undisturbed blooms of cyst-producing dinoflagellate gametes end with gamete fusion into diploid zygotes that transform into resting cysts. The resting cysts sink according to shape and cell-specific density into the silt fraction of the sediment. Cyst preservation depends upon the oxygenation level of the sediment and the presence of fauna. Hypoxic/anoxic conditions lower cyst mortality from benthic grazers. The reestablishment of motile, vegetative cells occurs under seasonally favorable conditions, and successful population growth depends upon environmental conditions, such as weather and nutrient availability. Factors that increase HAB risks of resting cyst-producing dinoflagellates are eutrophication leading to high cell numbers and high cyst preservation in hypoxic benthic zones. Hydrographic factors causing increased cell accumulation also are important, and intensified water stratification can amplify encystment success. These insights underscore mechanisms by which climate change is affecting HAB ecology and subsequent effects upon marine and coastal fisheries and aquaculture.
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