scholarly journals Representation and participation across 20 years of plant genome sequencing

Nature Plants ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose A. Marks ◽  
Scott Hotaling ◽  
Paul B. Frandsen ◽  
Robert VanBuren
Keyword(s):  
Genome Sequencing ◽  
Land Plant ◽  
Plant Genome ◽  
Plant Genomics ◽  
Assembly Quality ◽  
Global North ◽  
National Affiliation ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Wide Geographic Distribution

AbstractThe field of plant genome sequencing has grown rapidly in the past 20 years, leading to increases in the quantity and quality of publicly available genomic resources. The growing wealth of genomic data from an increasingly diverse set of taxa provides unprecedented potential to better understand the genome biology and evolution of land plants. Here we provide a contemporary view of land plant genomics, including analyses on assembly quality, taxonomic distribution of sequenced species and national participation. We show that assembly quality has increased dramatically in recent years, that substantial taxonomic gaps exist and that the field has been dominated by affluent nations in the Global North and China, despite a wide geographic distribution of study species. We identify numerous disconnects between the native range of focal species and the national affiliation of the researchers studying them, which we argue are rooted in colonialism—both past and present. Luckily, falling sequencing costs, widening availability of analytical tools and an increasingly connected scientific community provide key opportunities to improve existing assemblies, fill sampling gaps and empower a more global plant genomics community.

scholarly journals Lessons from 20 years of plant genome sequencing: an unprecedented resource in need of more diverse representation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose A Marks ◽  
Scott Hotaling ◽  
Paul B. Frandsen ◽  
Robert VanBuren
Keyword(s):  
Plant Genome ◽  
Plant Genomics ◽  
Focal Species ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global North ◽  
National Affiliation ◽  
Genome Assemblies ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Wide Geographic Distribution

The field of plant genomics has grown rapidly in the past 20 years, leading to dramatic increases in both the quantity and quality of publicly available genomic resources. With an ever-expanding wealth of genomic data from an increasingly diverse set of taxa, unprecedented potential exists to better understand the evolution and genome biology of plants. Here, we provide a contemporary view of plant genomics, including analyses on the quality of existing plant genome assemblies, the taxonomic distribution of sequenced species, and how national participation has influenced the fields development. We show that genome quality has increased dramatically in recent years, that substantial taxonomic gaps exist, and that the field has been dominated by affluent nations in the Global North, despite a wide geographic distribution of sequenced species. We identify multiple inconsistencies between the range of focal species and the national affiliation of the researchers studying the plants, which we argue are rooted in colonialism--both past and present. Falling sequencing costs paired with widening availability of analytical tools and an increasingly connected scientific community provide key opportunities to improve existing assemblies, fill sampling gaps, and, most importantly, empower a more global plant genomics community.

scholarly journals Advances in Cereal Crop Genomics for Resilience under Climate Change

Life ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 502
Author(s):  
Tinashe Zenda ◽  
Songtao Liu ◽  
Anyi Dong ◽  
Huijun Duan
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Genome Sequencing ◽  
Gene Editing ◽  
Agronomic Traits ◽  
Cereal Crops ◽  
Agricultural System ◽  
Plant Genomics ◽  
Crop Species ◽  
Underutilized Species ◽  
Recent Developments

Adapting to climate change, providing sufficient human food and nutritional needs, and securing sufficient energy supplies will call for a radical transformation from the current conventional adaptation approaches to more broad-based and transformative alternatives. This entails diversifying the agricultural system and boosting productivity of major cereal crops through development of climate-resilient cultivars that can sustainably maintain higher yields under climate change conditions, expanding our focus to crop wild relatives, and better exploitation of underutilized crop species. This is facilitated by the recent developments in plant genomics, such as advances in genome sequencing, assembly, and annotation, as well as gene editing technologies, which have increased the availability of high-quality reference genomes for various model and non-model plant species. This has necessitated genomics-assisted breeding of crops, including underutilized species, consequently broadening genetic variation of the available germplasm; improving the discovery of novel alleles controlling important agronomic traits; and enhancing creation of new crop cultivars with improved tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses and superior nutritive quality. Here, therefore, we summarize these recent developments in plant genomics and their application, with particular reference to cereal crops (including underutilized species). Particularly, we discuss genome sequencing approaches, quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping and genome-wide association (GWAS) studies, directed mutagenesis, plant non-coding RNAs, precise gene editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, and complementation of crop genotyping by crop phenotyping. We then conclude by providing an outlook that, as we step into the future, high-throughput phenotyping, pan-genomics, transposable elements analysis, and machine learning hold much promise for crop improvements related to climate resilience and nutritional superiority.

scholarly journals ResUHUrge: A Low Cost and Fully Functional Ventilator Indicated for Application in COVID-19 Patients

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (23) ◽  
pp. 6774
Author(s):  
Francisco José Vivas Fernández ◽  
José Sánchez Segovia ◽  
Ismael Martel Bravo ◽  
Carlos García Ramos ◽  
Daniel Ruiz Castilla ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Pulmonary Ventilation ◽  
Lung Infection ◽  
Health Condition ◽  
Multidisciplinary Research ◽  
Global North ◽  
Severity Of The Disease ◽  
Open Source Hardware ◽  
The University

Although the cure for the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) will come in the form of pharmaceutical solutions and/or a vaccine, one of the only ways to face it at present is to guarantee the best quality of health for patients, so that they can overcome the disease on their own. Therefore, and considering that COVID-19 generally causes damage to the respiratory system (in the form of lung infection), it is essential to ensure the best pulmonary ventilation for the patient. However, depending on the severity of the disease and the health condition of the patient, the situation can become critical when the patient has respiratory distress or becomes unable to breathe on his/her own. In that case, the ventilator becomes the lifeline of the patient. This device must keep patients stable until, on their own or with the help of medications, they manage to overcome the lung infection. However, with thousands or hundreds of thousands of infected patients, no country has enough ventilators. If this situation has become critical in the Global North, it has turned disastrous in developing countries, where ventilators are even more scarce. This article shows the race against time of a multidisciplinary research team at the University of Huelva, UHU, southwest of Spain, to develop an inexpensive, multifunctional, and easy-to-manufacture ventilator, which has been named ResUHUrge. The device meets all medical requirements and is developed with open-source hardware and software.

If things go South: The renewed policy of sport mega events allocation and its implications for future research

2021 ◽  
pp. 101269022098134
Author(s):  
Billy Graeff ◽  
Jorge Knijnik
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Public Expenditure ◽  
Global South ◽  
International Olympic Committee ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Construction Costs ◽  
Mega Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global North ◽  
Analytical Tools

The past few decades have seen an increase of sport mega events (SMEs) held outside the Global North. This tendency has been accompanied by a growing public expenditure in these events. This paper employs selected Global South SMEs to discuss this trend. By critically analysing public documents, biddings and reports, the study traces comparisons between 21st-century Global South and Global North SMEs expenditures, in the revenue of franchise owners (FIFA and the International Olympic Committee), in construction costs within the budgets and in the costs related to security. This comprehensive and intertwined investigation shows the need for new analytical tools – such as the Renewed Policy of Sport Mega Events Allocation, a concept developed here - to better capture the central questions posed by the challenges of ‘SMEs going South’.

When There Was No Aid

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah G. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
International Aid ◽  
Peace Building ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Global North ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
Civil Order ◽  
Peace And Development

For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. This book offers us one such example. Using evidence from Somaliland’s experience of peace-building, the book challenges two of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South. First, that intervention by actors in the global North is self-evidently useful in ending them, and second that the quality of a country’s governance institutions (whether formal or informal) necessarily determines the level of peace and civil order that the country experiences. The book explores how popular discourses about war, peace, and international intervention structure the conditions of possibility to such a degree that even the inability of institutions to provide reliable security can stabilize a prolonged period of peace. It argues that Somaliland’s post-conflict peace is grounded less in the constraining power of its institutions than in a powerful discourse about the country’s structural, temporal, and physical proximity to war. Through its sensitivity to the ease with which peace gives way to war, the book argues, this discourse has indirectly harnessed an apparent propensity to war as a source of order.

Deformation Analysis for Welding Assembly Processes of Automobile Panels

2010 ◽  
Vol 118-120 ◽  
pp. 70-74
Author(s):  
Yu Liu ◽  
Jian Xin Liu ◽  
Shu Yi Yan ◽  
Zhi Min Wang ◽  
Bing Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Numerical Simulation ◽  
Welding Process ◽  
Coupling Method ◽  
Welding Distortion ◽  
Deformation Analysis ◽  
Assembly Quality ◽  
Automobile Body ◽  
Dimensional Deviation ◽  
Assembly Deviation

Welding process of automobile panels is a key process in the manufacturing of automobile body and its quality directly impact on the appearance and quality of automobile. The causes of dimensional deviation of welded assembly could be workpieces variation, assembly tooling variation, and welding distortion. As a major source of assembly deviation, dimensional variations of workpieces have important effects on the assembly quality of automobile body. In this paper, pre-stressing was used to reflect the workpieces’ variation and the node coupling method was used in the numerical simulation to predict the deformation of assembly caused by the welding process of automobile panels. And further the computation results were listed and compared with the measured ones.

Development of reliable analytical tools for evaluating the influence of reductive winemaking on the quality of Lugana wines

2012 ◽  
Vol 732 ◽  
pp. 194-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fulvio Mattivi ◽  
Bruno Fedrizzi ◽  
Alberto Zenato ◽  
Paolo Tiefenthaler ◽  
Silvano Tempesta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Tools

scholarly journals Number of Clusters and the Quality of Hybrid Predictive Models in Analytical CRM

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariusz Łapczyński ◽  
Bartłomiej Jefmański
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Models ◽  
Cluster Validity ◽  
Number Of Clusters ◽  
Model Combining ◽  
Cluster Validity Indices ◽  
Validity Indices ◽  
And Cluster Analysis ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
F Measure

Abstract Making more accurate marketing decisions by managers requires building effective predictive models. Typically, these models specify the probability of customer belonging to a particular category, group or segment. The analytical CRM categories refer to customers interested in starting cooperation with the company (acquisition models), customers who purchase additional products (cross- and up-sell models) or customers intending to resign from the cooperation (churn models). During building predictive models researchers use analytical tools from various disciplines with an emphasis on their best performance. This article attempts to build a hybrid predictive model combining decision trees (C&RT algorithm) and cluster analysis (k-means). During experiments five different cluster validity indices and eight datasets were used. The performance of models was evaluated by using popular measures such as: accuracy, precision, recall, G-mean, F-measure and lift in the first and in the second decile. The authors tried to find a connection between the number of clusters and models' quality.

scholarly journals Jornadas Diferenciadas

Plural ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-144
Author(s):  
Angelo Martins Junior
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Global South ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
Global North ◽  
Social Markers ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Different Levels

This article question generic homogenising representations of ‘the migrant’ by providing an examination of the multivalent ways in which social differences contours migration processes. Migration scholars often reproduce generic homogenising typologies of ‘migrants’, such as the two opposing migrant analogies ‘from the Global South’ (‘the transnational migrant’, who flows through social networks from the Global South to the developed North, seeking economic gains) and ‘from the Global North’ (‘the lifestyle migrant’, who chooses to migrate from developed countries to places they believe offers them the potential of a better quality of life). Through the examination of the journeys of Brazilians in London, this article draws attention to the connections and contexts of both sending and receiving societies, as well as the diversity existing within the Brazilian population abroad. As is argued within this paper, such an analysis allows for better understanding of how the experiences of Brazilians in London are directly shaped by the intersection of multiple social markers, resulting in what I call ‘differentiated journeys’. Brazilians navigate different levels of constraints and constantly re-formulate their journeys due to their class, gender, nationality and documental status. This allow us to frame migratory experiences beyond generalizing and homogenising representations. The empirical research combines an 18-month ethnography in places of leisure with 33 in-depth interviews with Brazilians in London.

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