The sigma54-dependent transcriptional regulator NorR of Ralstonia eutropha H16 activates gene expression in response to nitric oxide (NO). The N-terminal domain of NorR is thought to be involved in signal perception. A C112S exchange within this domain abolished promoter activation by the mutated protein, indicating that Cys(112) is essential for the signalling mechanism of NorR. The DNA region...

Although numerous lifecycle assessments (LCA) of microalgae-based biofuels have suggested net reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, limited experimental data exist on direct emissions from microalgae cultivation systems. For example, nitrous oxide (N(2)O) is a potent greenhouse gas that has been detected from microalgae cultivation. However, little quantitative experimental data exist on dire...

NtrYX is a sensor-histidine kinase/response regulator two-component system that has had limited characterization in a small number of Alphaproteobacteria. Phylogenetic analysis of the response regulator NtrX showed that this two-component system is extensively distributed across the bacterial domain, and it is present in a variety of Betaproteobacteria, including the human pathogen Neisseria go...

Unsupervised discovery of latent representations, in addition to being useful for density modeling, visualisation and exploratory data analysis, is also increasingly important for learning features relevant to discriminative tasks. Autoencoders, in particular, have proven to be an effective way to learn latent codes that reflect meaningful variations in data. A continuing challenge, however, is...

The goal of this study was to compare the microbial ecology, gene expression, biokinetics, and N2O emissions from a lab-scale bioreactor operated sequentially in full-nitrification and partial-nitrification modes. Based on sequencing of 16S rRNA and ammonia monooxygenase subunit A (amoA) genes, ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB) populations during full- and partial-nitrification modes were distin...

Antibiotic resistance Staphylococcus aureus strains cause several life threatening infections. New drug treatment options are needed, but are slow to develop because 50% of the S. aureus genome is hypothetical. The goal of this is to aid in the annotation of the S. aureus NCTC 8325 genome by identifying hypothetical proteins related to the Major Facilitator Superfamily (MFS). The MFS is a broad...

In the present study, we assessed the composition of Bacteria in four biotopes namely sediment, seawater and two sponge species (Stylissa massa and Xestospongia testudinaria) at four different reef sites in a coral reef ecosystem in West Java, Indonesia. In addition to this, we used a predictive metagenomic approach to estimate to what extent nitrogen metabolic pathways differed among bacterial...

abstract: fifteen non-aflatoxigenic strains of aspergillus flavus, represent a wide range of geographic regions of iran (six provinces include fars, ardebil, guilan, golestan, kerman and semnan) and vegetative compatibility groups (vcgs), were collected from corn (zea mays l.), peanut (arachis hypogaea l.) and pistachio (pistachia vera l.) soils and kernels, were screened for the presence of af...

Bacterial NOR (nitric oxide reductase) is a major source of the powerful greenhouse gas N2O. NorBC from Paracoccus denitrificans is a heterodimeric multi-haem transmembrane complex. The active site, in NorB, comprises high-spin haem b3 in close proximity with non-haem iron, FeB. In oxidized NorBC, the active site is EPR-silent owing to exchange coupling between FeIII haem b3 and FeBIII (both S=...

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently regained popularity, with major achievements such as beating the European game of Go champion. Here, for the first time, we show that RL can be used efficiently to train a spiking neural network (SNN) to perform object recognition in natural images without using an external classifier. We used a feedforward convolutional SNN and a temporal coding scheme ...