The complete chloroplast genome of Diarthron linifolium (Thymelaeaceae), a species found on a limestone outcrop in eastern Asia

Diarthron linifolium Turcz. is an annual herb usually found in sandy soil or limestone areas. Plants in the genus Diarthron are known to have toxic chemicals that may, however, be potentially useful as an anticancer treatment. Diarthron linifolium is a unique species among the species of the genus distributed in Korea. Here, we determine the genetic variation of D. linifolium collected in Korea with a full chloroplast genome and investigate its evolutionary status by means of a phylogenetic analysis. The chloroplast genome of Korean D. linifolium has a total length of 172,644 bp with four subregions; 86,158 bp of large single copy and 2,858 bp of small single copy (SSC) regions are separated by 41,814 bp of inverted repeat (IR) regions. We found that the SSC region of D. linifolium is considerably short but that IRs are relatively long in comparison with other chloroplast genomes. Various simple sequence repeats were identified, and our nucleotide diversity analysis suggested potential marker regions near ndhF. The phylogenetic analysis indicated that D. linifolium from Korea is a sister to the group of Daphne species.

Breathless Beasts and Stuffed Savages

This chapter takes the reader deep into the nineteenth-century afterlife of the Classical construction of nature, the wild, and the primitive and civilized, foundational to Victorian ideas of progress and to the nascent sciences that claimed the study of humanity as their own. It shows how the Natural History Courts of London’s Crystal Palace presented the marvels of ethnology and natural history, and how these displays were received in the context of nineteenth-century social evolutionist thought, which was itself built upon Classical foundations such as the account of primitive man in Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Against the Courts’ taxidermic dioramas of ‘savage life’, the ethnological casts displayed to the Victorian public prompted comparative questions about the evolutionary status of the non-European Other, while the ‘primitive’ nakedness of the casts created further parallels with the idealized nudity of Greek and Roman sculpture casts, engendering destabilizing dissonance with the connotations of civilization inscribed in the Classical ideal.

Genomic Analysis of a Novel Active Prophage of Hafnia Paralvei

Relatively little is known about the prophages in Enterobacterales bacteria except Escherichia coli. A novel phage, Hafnia phage yong2, was induced from Hafnia paralvei by mitomycin C. The phage has an elliptical head of approximately 45 × 38 nm, a long noncontractile tail of approximately 157 × 4 nm. The complete genome of Hafnia phage yong2 is a 39,546 bp double-stranded DNA with a G+C content of 49.9%, containing 59 opening reading frames (ORFs), and having at least one fixed terminus (GGGGCAGCGACA) with R=107>100. In phylogenetic analysis, Hafnia phage yong2 clustered with 4 predicted Hafnia prophages and 1 predicted Enterobacteriaceae prophage. The prophages cluster and Drexlerviridae family together formed two distinct subclades nested within a clade, suggesting the existence of a novel class of prophages with conserved sequences and unique evolutionary status not yet studied before in Hafniaceae and Enterobacteriaceae bacteria.

In Silico and Transcription Analysis of Trehalose-6-Phosphate Phosphatase Gene Family of Wheat: Trehalose Synthesis Genes Contribute to Salinity, Drought Stress and Leaf Senescence

Trehalose-6-phosphate phosphatase (TPP) genes take part in trehalose metabolism and also in stress tolerance, which has been well documented in many species but poorly understood in wheat. The present research has identified a family of 31 TPP genes in Triticum aestivum L. through homology searches and classified them into five clades by phylogenetic tree analysis, providing evidence of an evolutionary status with Hordeum vulgare, Brachypodium distachyon and Oryza sativa. The exon-intron distribution revealed a discrete evolutionary history and projected possible gene duplication occurrences. Furthermore, different computational approaches were used to analyze the physical and chemical properties, conserved domains and motifs, subcellular and chromosomal localization, and three-dimensional (3-D) protein structures. Cis-regulatory elements (CREs) analysis predicted that TaTPP promoters consist of CREs related to plant growth and development, hormones, and stress. Transcriptional analysis revealed that the transcription levels of TaTPPs were variable in different developmental stages and organs. In addition, qRT-PCR analysis showed that different TaTPPs were induced under salt and drought stresses and during leaf senescence. Therefore, the findings of the present study give fundamental genomic information and possible biological functions of the TaTPP gene family in wheat and will provide the path for a better understanding of TaTPPs involvement in wheat developmental processes, stress tolerance, and leaf senescence.

Prediction of COVID-19 Diagnosis Based on OpenEHR Artefacts

The complexity and momentum of monitoring COVID-19 patients calls for the usage of agile and scalable data structure methodologies. A system for tracking symptoms and health conditions of suspected or confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infected patients was developed based on the openEHR architecture. All data on the evolutionary status of patients in home care as well as the results of their COVID-19 test were used to train different machine learning algorithms, with the aim of developing a predictive model capable of identifying COVID-19 infections according to the severity of symptoms identified by patients. The results obtained were promising, with the best model achieving an accuracy of 96.25%, a precision of 99.91%, a sensitivity of 92.58%, and a specificity of 99.92%, using the Decision Tree algorithm and the Split Validation method.

Twin stars as tracers of binary evolution in the Kepler era

We present results of the combined photometric and spectroscopic analysis of four systems, which are eclipsing binaries with a twin–component (mass ratio q ≃ 1). These are exceptional tools to provide information for probing the internal structure of stars. None of the systems were previously recognized as twin binaries. We used a number of high–resolution optical spectra to calculate the radial velocities and later combined them with photometry to derive orbital parameters. Temperatures and metallicities of systems were estimated from high-resolution spectra. For each binary, we obtained a full set of orbital and physical parameters, reaching precision below 3 per cent in masses and radii for whole pairs. By comparing our results with PARSEC and MIST isochrones, we assess the distance, age and evolutionary status of the researched objects. The primary and/or secondary stars of EPIC 216075815 and EPIC 202843107 are one of the cases where asteroseismic parameters of δ Sct and γ Dor pulsators were confirmed by an independent method and rare examples of the twin–eclipsing binaries, therefore the following analyses and results concern the pulsating nature of the components.

Observing and modelling the young solar analogue EK Draconis: starspot distribution, elemental abundances, and evolutionary status

ABSTRACT Observations and modelling of stars with near-solar masses in their early phases of evolution are critical for a better understanding of how dynamos of solar-type stars evolve. We examine the chemical composition and the spot distribution of the pre-main-sequence solar analogue EK Dra. Using spectra from the HERMES Spectrograph (La Palma), we obtain the abundances of 23 elements with respect to the solar ones, which lead to a [Fe/H] = 0.03, with significant overabundance of Li and Ba. The s-process elements Sr, Y, and Ce are marginally overabundant, while Co, Ni, Cu, Zn are marginally deficient compared to solar abundances. The overabundance of Ba is most likely due to the assumption of depth-independent microturbulent velocity. Li abundance is consistent with the age and the other abundances may indicate distinct initial conditions of the pre-stellar nebula. We estimate a mass of 1.04 M⊙ and an age of $27^{+11}_{-8}$ Myr using various spectroscopic and photometric indicators. We study the surface distribution of dark spots, using 17 spectra collected during 15 nights using the CAFE Spectrograph (Calar Alto). We also conduct flux emergence and transport (FEAT) simulations for EK Dra’s parameters and produce 15-d-averaged synoptic maps of the likely starspot distributions. Using Doppler imaging, we reconstruct the surface brightness distributions for the observed spectra and FEAT simulations, which show overall agreement for polar and mid-latitude spots, while in the simulations there is a lack of low-latitude spots compared to the observed image. We find indications that cross-equatorial extensions of mid-latitude spots can be artefacts of the less visible southern-hemisphere activity.

Physical parameters of close binary systems: VIII

This paper presents the results of a combined spectroscopic and photometric study of 20 contact binary systems: HV Aqr, OO Aql, FI Boo, TX Cnc, OT Cnc, EE Cet, RW Com, KR Com, V401 Cyg, V345 Gem, AK Her, V502 Oph, V566 Oph, V2612 Oph, V1363 Ori, V351 Peg, V357 Peg, Y Sex, V1123 Tau and W UMa, which was conducted in the frame of the W UMa Project. Together with 51 already covered by the project and an additional 67 in the existing literature, these systems bring the total number of contact binaries with known combined spectroscopic and photometric solutions to 138. It was found that mass, radius and luminosity of the components follow certain relations along the MS and new empirical power relations are extracted. We found that 30 per cent of the systems in the current sample show extreme values in their parameters, expressed in their mass ratio or fill-out factor. This study shows that, among the contact binary systems studied, some have an extremely low mass ratio (q<0.1) or an ultra-short orbital period (Porb <0.25 d), which are expected to show evidence of mass transfer progress. The evolutionary status of these components is discussed with the aid of correlation diagrams and their physical and orbital parameters compared to those in the entire sample of known contact binaries. The existence of very short orbital periods confirms the very slow nature of the merging process, which seems to explain why their components still exist as MS stars in contact configurations even after several Gyr of evolution.