Aerobic methanotrophic bacteria can use methane as their sole energy source. The discovery of "Ca. Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum" strain SolV and other verrucomicrobial methanotrophs has revealed that the ability of bacteria to oxidize CH(4) is much more diverse than has previously been assumed in terms of ecology, phylogeny, and physiology. A remarkable characteristic of the methane-oxidizing...

Convolutional neural networks have achieved good recognition results on image datasets while being computationally efficient, i.e., scaling well with the number of training patterns and the resolution of the patterns. Here we investigate a neural network model that has a similar hierarchical structure, but does not employ weight sharing. Instead, each neuron has a fixed receptive field with uni...

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a powerful greenhouse gas implicated in climate change. The dominant source of atmospheric N2O is incomplete biological dentrification, and the enzymes responsible for the release of N2O are NO reductases. It was recently reported that ambient emissions of N2O from the Great Boiling Spring in the United States Great Basin are high, and attributed to incomplete denitrifica...

Reduction of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N(2)O) occurs in soil environments by the action of denitrifying bacteria possessing nitrous oxide reductase (N(2)OR), a dimeric copper (Cu)-dependent enzyme producing environmentally benign dinitrogen (N(2)). We examined the effects of increasing Cu concentrations on the transcription and activity of nitrite reductase (NIR), nitric oxide re...

Standards-based COTS middleware has been shown to be effective in meeting a range of functional and QoS requirements for distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. Each standard makes limiting assumptions, often implicit, about the fundamental set of system capabilities and constraints typical of the domain to which the standard applies. When the characteristics of a particular class of ...

Production of nitric oxide (NO) and the presence of NO metabolism genes, nitrous oxide reductase (nosZ), nitrous oxide reductase regulator (nosR) and nitric oxide reductase (norB) were identified in the plant-associated bacterium (PAB) Azospirillum brasilense SM. NO presence was confirmed in all overexpressing strains, while improvement in the plant growth response of these strains was mediated...

Salt marshes provide many key ecosystem services that have tremendous ecological and economic value. One critical service is the removal of fixed nitrogen from coastal waters, which limits the negative effects of eutrophication resulting from increased nutrient supply. Nutrient enrichment of salt marsh sediments results in higher rates of nitrogen cycling and, commonly, a concurrent increase in...

Aerobic methane-oxidizing bacteria (MOB) are a diverse group of microorganisms that are ubiquitous in natural environments. Along with anaerobic MOB and archaea, aerobic methanotrophs are critical for attenuating emission of methane to the atmosphere. Clearly, nitrogen availability in the form of ammonium and nitrite have strong effects on methanotrophic activity and their natural community str...

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 aflatoxin bi...