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Many herbicide-resistant weed species are polyploids, but far too little about the evolution of resistance mutations in polyploids is understood. Hexaploid wild oat (Avena fatua) is a global crop weed and many populations have evolved herbicide resistance. We studied plastidic acetyl-coenzyme A carboxylase (ACCase)-inhibiting herbicide resistance in hexaploid wild oat and revealed that resistant individuals can express one, two or three different plastidic ACCase gene resistance mutations (Ile-1781-Leu, Asp-2078-Gly and Cys-2088-Arg). Using ACCase resistance mutations as molecular markers, combined with genetic, molecular and biochemical approaches, we found in individual resistant wild-oat plants that (1) up to three unlinked ACCase gene loci assort independently following Mendelian laws for disomic inheritance, (2) all three of these homoeologous ACCase genes were transcribed, with each able to carry its own mutation and (3) in a hexaploid background, each individual ACCase resistance mutation confers relatively low-level herbicide resistance, in contrast to high-level resistance conferred by the same mutations in unrelated diploid weed species of the Poaceae (grass) family. Low resistance conferred by individual ACCase resistance mutations is likely due to a dilution effect by susceptible ACCase expressed by homoeologs in hexaploid wild oat and/or differential expression of homoeologous ACCase gene copies. Thus, polyploidy in hexaploid wild oat may slow resistance evolution. Evidence of coexisting non-target-site resistance mechanisms among wild-oat populations was also revealed. In all, these results demonstrate that herbicide resistance and its evolution can be more complex in hexaploid wild oat than in unrelated diploid grass weeds. Our data provide a starting point for the daunting task of understanding resistance evolution in polyploids.

Abstract. Southeast Asian rivers convey large amounts of organic carbon, but little is known about the fate of this terrestrial material in estuaries. Although Southeast Asia is, by area, considered a hotspot of estuarine carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, studies in this region are very scarce. We measured dissolved and particulate organic carbon, as well as CO2 partial pressures and carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations in two tropical estuaries in Sarawak, Malaysia, whose coastal area is covered by carbon-rich peatlands. We surveyed the estuaries of the rivers Lupar and Saribas during the wet and dry season, respectively. Carbon-to-nitrogen ratios suggest that dissolved organic matter (DOM) is largely of terrestrial origin. We found evidence that a large fraction of this carbon is respired. The median pCO2 in the estuaries ranged between 640 and 5065 µatm with little seasonal variation. CO2 fluxes were determined with a floating chamber and estimated to amount to 14–268 mol m−2 yr−1, which is high compared to other studies from tropical and subtropical sites. Estimates derived from a merely wind-driven turbulent diffusivity model were considerably lower, indicating that these models might be inappropriate in estuaries, where tidal currents and river discharge make an important contribution to the turbulence driving water–air gas exchange. Although an observed diurnal variability of CO concentrations suggested that CO was photochemically produced, the overall concentrations and fluxes were relatively moderate (0.4–1.3 nmol L−1 and 0.7–1.8 mmol m−2 yr−1) if compared to published data for oceanic or upwelling systems. We attributed this to the large amounts of suspended matter (4–5004 mg L−1), limiting the light penetration depth and thereby inhibiting CO photoproduction. We concluded that estuaries in this region function as an efficient filter for terrestrial organic carbon and release large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere. The Lupar and Saribas rivers deliver 0.3 ± 0.2 Tg C yr−1 to the South China Sea as organic carbon and their mid-estuaries release approximately 0.4 ± 0.2 Tg C yr−1 into the atmosphere as CO2.

Abstract Anatase supported heterogeneous photocatalyst consisting of RuO2, MnO2 and Co3O4 (1:13:13 ratio) was synthesized by a precipitation method and tested for photoelectrocatalytic (PEC) oxidation of methanol in 0.1 M KOH under visible light irradiation. The as-prepared photocatalyst was characterized by FTIR, UV–vis, XRD, Raman spectroscopy, FESEM/EDX, TEM, BET, XPS and TPR. The PEC studies by cyclic voltammetry indicated that the oxidation of methanol to CO2 and H2O upon exposure to visible light occurs between 400 and 800 nm. The smaller value of the charge transfer resistance (Rct) of the RuO2 MnO2 Co3O4 supported anatase TiO2 electrode indicates a faster rate of charge transfer at the electrode-electrolyte interface compared to the Pt/C catalyst, which could be promising for direct methanol fuel cell application.

Estrogens, such as the 17β-estradiol (E2) and the 17α-ethinylestradiol (EE2), have been regarded as a global threat to aquatic ecosystems due to their pseudo-persistence, their high estrogenic activity and their toxicity towards non-target species. Data regarding their ecotoxicological effects on marine calanoid copepods are very scarce. In this study, the calanoid copepod Acartia clausi was used as a model organism for estrogens exposure in marine pelagic ecosystems. Lethal effects of estrogens on A. clausi life-stages (Embryos, one day old nauplii: N1, three day old nauplii: N3, copepodites: C1-C3 and adults: C6) were investigated using 48 h acute tests. Copepods showed stage-specific responses against E2 and EE2 acute exposure. The most resistant life stage was N1 with LC50 values > 1500 μg L-1 and >5000 μg L-1, respectively for E2 and EE2. For N3, C1-C3, and C6, sensitivity to estrogens decreased with age and survival was affected at concentrations above those detected in the environment reflecting low estrogens acute toxicity for these life stages. In contrast, embryonic stage revealed high vulnerability to E2 and EE2 acute effects. Embryos showed non-monotonic dose-response and hatching success was significantly reduced at low realistic concentrations of E2 (0.005, 0.5, and 5 μg L-1) and EE2 (0.05 and 5 μg L-1).Survival, development and sex ratio of A. clausi to EE2 exposure at 1 and 100 μg L-1 were also determined during a life cycle experiment. Fitness of the females of the generation F0 was evaluated by measuring lifespan, prosome length and egg production. The main observed effects were the decrease of females’ prosome length, the feminization of the population and the reduction of the egg production for the generation F0 at 100 μg L-1 of EE2. This concentration is above those reported in the environment indicating the tolerance of A. clausi to EE2 at environmentally relevant concentrations. International audience

Estuaries are coastal areas controlled by hydrodynamic factors such as sea-level changes, waves and tidal currents, and river discharge. This study focuses on the Vilaine Estuary which is strongly impacted by human activity after construction of Arzal dam in 1970. The purpose of this research is to differentiate the role of natural from anthropogenic factors on sediment dynamics within the Vilaine Estuary. We are proposing a hypothetical model based on the hydrodynamic modification and morpho-sedimentary development by analyzing the natural estuarine evolution and the impact of human alteration to the natural system by utilizing datasets including river discharge, tidal currents, winds and wave activities to further combine with photographic, bathymetric, topographic and sedimentary surveys. Results show that waves carry sediment from the sea and rework local sediments. The river damming is reducing the tidal prims and leads to the fall of tidal currents. This new situation supports the sediment deposition and reduces at the same time the accommodation space which decrease tidal currents in feed-back. The Vilaine Estuary is therefore coming close to a bay-type functioning which leads to a channel narrowing, a drastic increase of the tidal flat zone, an acceleration of erosional processes affecting the main channel, salt marsh and all associated depositional systems. We propose a hypothetical model showing that this evolution took place in two steps and we show that the dam has an effect to accelerate a natural infilling of the estuary. International audience

Abstract Vital to the task of Sentiment Analysis (SA), or automatically mining sentiment expression from text, is a sentiment lexicon. This fundamental lexical resource comprises the smallest sentiment-carrying units of text, words, annotated for their sentiment properties, and aids in SA tasks on larger pieces of text. Unfortunately, digital dictionaries do not readily include information on the sentiment properties of their entries, and manually compiling sentiment lexicons is tedious in terms of annotator time and effort. This has resulted in the emergence of a large number of research works concentrated on automated sentiment lexicon generation. The dictionary-based approach involves leveraging digital dictionaries, while the corpus-based approach involves exploiting co-occurrence statistics embedded in text corpora. Although the former approach has been exhaustively investigated, the majority of works focus on terms. The few state-of-the-art models concentrated on the finer-grained term sense level remain to exhibit several prominent limitations, e.g., the proposed semantic relations algorithm retrieves only senses that are at a close proximity to the seed senses in the semantic network, thus prohibiting the retrieval of remote sentiment-carrying senses beyond the reach of the ‘radius’ defined by number of iterations of semantic relations expansion. The proposed model aims to overcome the issues inherent in dictionary-based sense-level sentiment lexicon generation models using: (1) null seed sets, and a morphological approach inspired by the Marking Theory in Linguistics to populate them automatically; (2) a dual-step context-aware gloss expansion algorithm that ‘mines’ human defined gloss information from a digital dictionary, ensuring senses overlooked by the semantic relations expansion algorithm are identified; and (3) a fully-unsupervised sentiment categorization algorithm on the basis of the Network Theory. The results demonstrate that context-aware in-gloss matching successfully retrieves senses beyond the reach of the semantic relations expansion algorithm used by prominent, well-known models. Evaluation of the proposed model to accurately assign senses with polarity demonstrates that it is on par with state-of-the-art models against the same gold standard benchmarks. The model has theoretical implications in future work to effectively exploit the readily-available human-defined gloss information in a digital dictionary, in the task of assigning polarity to term senses. Extrinsic evaluation in a real-world sentiment classification task on multiple publically-available varying-domain datasets demonstrates its practical implication and application in sentiment analysis, as well as in other related fields such as information science, opinion retrieval and computational linguistics.

Abstract Data on the mineral composition and content of one heavy metal measured in three different fruit flours prepared from ripe and unripe fruits (pulp and peel) are presented. The mineral composition (sodium (Na), potassium (K), magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), iron (Fe) and manganese (Mn)) and content of one heavy metal (lead (Pb)) of the flours were analyzed by atomic absorption spectrophotometry. The analysis showed that the data can be used for differentiation between different fruits and stages of ripeness, as revealed by discriminant analysis and cluster analysis. The data provided can be used by researchers and scientists in the differentiation of fruits based on major and minor mineral elements.

Abstract The chemical-catalyzed transesterification process to produce biofuels i.e. pentyl valerate (PeVa) is environmentally unfriendly, energy-intensive with tedious downstream treatment. The present work reports the use of Rhizomucor miehei lipase (RML) crosslinked onto magnetic chitosan/chitin nanoparticles (RML-CS/CH/MNPs). The approach used to immobilize RML onto the CS/CH/MNPs yielded RML-CS/CH/MNPs with an immobilized protein loading and specific activity of 7.6 mg/g and 5.0 U·g−1, respectively. This was confirmed by assessing data of field emission scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, thermal gravimetric analysis and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. A three-level-four-factor Box-Behnken design (incubation time, temperature, substrate molar ratio, and enzyme loading) was used to optimize the RML-CS/CH/MNP-catalyzed esterification synthesis of PeVa. Under optimum condition, the maximum yield of PeVa (97.8%) can be achieved in 5 h at 50 °C using molar ratio valeric acid:pentanol (1:2) and an enzyme load of 2 mg/mL. Consequently, operational stability experiments showed that the protocol adopted to prepare the CS/CH/MNP nanoparticles had increased the durability of RML. The RML-CS/CH/MNP could catalyze up to eight successive esterification cycles to produce PeVa. The study also demonstrated the functionality of CS/CH/MNP nanoparticles as an eco-friendly support matrix for improving enzymatic activity and operational stability of RML to produce PeVa.