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In this study, methylene blue was removed from an aqueous solution using modified waste tea leaves. Temperature, pH, contact time, methylene blue concentration, and other adsorption mechanisms were studied. The characterization of the samples was performed using the FTIR and SEM analyses. The isotherm models were carrying out to analyzed the adsorption mechanisms and for representing data, the Freundlich isotherm model seemed more appropriate. The findings exhibited the highest adsorption capacity was 3.66 mg/g for the untreated biomass at 298 K, 5.46 mg/g for the 0.1 M HCl group at 318 K, and 5.98 mg/g for the 0.05 M NaOH group at 298 K. The adsorption kinetics were used and the pseudo-second-order model performed well for each group. As a natural substitute biomass for methylene blue adsorption from aqueous solution, used tea leaf residue may be employed.

Environmental responses are critical for plant growth and survival under different climate conditions. To elucidate the underlying biological mechanisms of environmental responses in Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica D. Don), the annual transcriptome dynamics of common clonal trees (Godai1) planted at three different climate sites (Yamagata, Ibaraki, and Kumamoto Prefectures) were analyzed using microarrays. Both principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering of the microarray data indicated the transition to dormant transcriptome status occurred earlier and the transition to active growth status later in the colder region. Interestingly, PCA also indicated that the transcriptomes of trees grown under three different conditions were similar during the growth period (June to September), whereas the transcriptomes differed between sites during the dormant period (January to March). In between-site comparisons, analyses of the annual expression profiles of genes for sites ‘Yamagata vs. Kumamoto’, ‘Yamagata vs. Ibaraki’, and ‘Ibaraki vs. Kumamoto’ identified 1,473, 1,137, and 925 targets exhibiting significantly different expression patterns, respectively. The total of 2,505 targets that exhibited significantly different expression patterns in all three comparisons may play important roles in enabling cuttings to adapt to local environmental conditions. Partial least-squares regression analysis and Pearson correlation coefficient analysis revealed that air temperature and day length were the dominant factors controlling the expression levels of these targets. GO and Pfam enrichment analyses indicated that these targets include genes that may contribute to environmental adaptation, such as genes related to stress and abiotic stimulus responses. This study provided fundamental information regarding transcripts that may play an important role in adaptation to environmental conditions at different planting sites.

Thermal flux loss (FL) is one of the important properties in applications of Nd–Fe–B magnets to electrical and electronic devices. FL is expected to occur inhomogeneously in magnets with a complex shape, because it depends on the strength of the local demagnetizing field. Thus, in terms of their applications, we need to predict the inhomogeneous FL from basic magnetic properties measured for a magnet with a simple shape such as a sphere. In this contribution, we propose a method of predicting inhomogeneous initial flux loss, FLint, in a magnet with a complex shape, and compare the predicted values of FLint with the measured ones for a model magnet. Consequently, the predicted and measured distributions agreed with each other. This result suggests that the proposed method can be applied to the prediction of FLint in magnets with a complicated shape used in electrical and electronic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) is an important tree for Japanese forestry. Male-sterile marker development in Japanese cedar would facilitate selection of male-sterile plus trees, addressing the widespread social problem of pollinosis and facilitating the identification of heterozygotes, which are useful for breeding. Results This study used next-generation sequencing for single-nucleotide polymorphism discovery in libraries constructed from several organs, including male-sterile and male-fertile strobili. The single-nucleotide polymorphisms obtained were used to construct a high-density linkage map, which enabled identification of a locus on linkage group 9 strongly correlated with male-sterile trait. Expressed sequence tags corresponding to 11 marker loci from 5 isotigs were associated with this locus within 33.4-34.5 cM. These marker loci explained 100% of the phenotypic variation. Several homologs of these sequences are associated with male sterility in rice or Arabidopsis, including a pre-mRNA splicing factor, a DEAD-box protein, a glycosyl hydrolase, and a galactosyltransferase. These proteins are thus candidates for the causal male-sterile gene at the ms-1 locus. After we used a SNaPshot assay to develop markers for marker-assisted selection (MAS), we tested F2 progeny between male-sterile and wild-type plus trees to validate the markers and extrapolated the testing to a larger plus-tree population. We found that two developed from one of the candidates for the causal gene were suitable for MAS. Conclusions More than half of the ESTs and SNPs we collected were new, enlarging the genomic basis for genetic research on Japanese cedar. We developed two SNP markers aimed at MAS that distinguished individuals carrying the male-sterile trait with 100% accuracy, as well as individuals heterozygous at the male-sterile locus, even outside the mapping population. These markers should enable practical MAS for conifer breeding.

Studying ex situ the fundamental processes involved during cesium low-energy molecular depth profiling of polymers is a hard task owing to the well-known cesium reactivity. Lately, we developed in-situ Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) on our ToF-SIMS IV instrument. Photons emitted from the sputtered area are monitored in the wavelength range 200 nm to 950 nm. Surprisingly, intense cesium atomic lines are detected throughout the depth profile of a polymer (polystyrene) deposited on a silicon substrate, at 852 nm and 894 nm. However, no optical signals were detected from 200 nm to 950 nm when xenon or oxygen primary ions were used to depth profile polymers. This efficient infrared channel of energy dissipation is unique to the cesium sputtering process. We assume it can play an important role in the way the local energy density is transferred to the material contrary to the use of other primary ions for sputtering. We will show that ToF-SIMS and OES depth profiles can be recorded simultaneously. Finally, cesium-xenon cosputtering experiments on silicon will correlate the 852-nm signal intensity to the cesium concentration in the primary ion beam. The importance of inelastic collisions and electron promotion leading to light emission is often shadowed in our understanding of the sputtering process. These experiments are a first insight of this fundamental process during cesium depth profiling. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate what kinds of syntactic, semantic and/or pragmatic cues children use in order to determine the focus of a sentence, by examining how Turkish-acquiring preschoolers interpret sentences that contain the restrictive focus particle sadece ("only"). Our study constitutes the first inquiry into the comprehension of focus particles in Turkish in the acquisition literature, and by utilizing unique syntactic properties of Turkish such as scrambling in designing the experimental materials, it maintains the view that the scope misassignment errors detected in previous studies on languages other than Turkish stem from a pragmatic bias that causes children to designate the object NP or the last NP of the sentence – which often coincides with the object NP – as the default focus, and not from instantiating a non-adult-like syntactic representation for sentences with focus particles.

Seasonal phenomena in plants are primarily affected by day length and temperature. The shoot transcriptomes of trees grown in the field and a controlled-environment chamber were compared to characterize genes that control annual rhythms and the effects of day length- and temperature-regulated genes in the gymnosperm Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica D. Don), which exhibits seasonally indeterminate growth. Annual transcriptome dynamics were clearly demonstrated by principal component analysis using microarray data obtained under field-grown conditions. Analysis of microarray data from trees grown in a controlled chamber identified 2,314 targets exhibiting significantly different expression patterns under short-day (SD) and long-day conditions, and 2,045 targets exhibited significantly different expression patterns at 15°C (LT; low temperature) versus 25°C. Interestingly, although growth was suppressed under both SD and LT conditions, approximately 80% of the SD- and LT-regulated targets differed, suggesting that each factor plays a unique role in the annual cycle. The top 1,000 up-regulated targets in the growth/dormant period in the field coincided with more than 50% of the SD- and LT-regulated targets, and gene co-expression network analysis of the annual transcriptome indicated a close relationship between the SD- and LT-regulated targets. These results indicate that the respective effects of day length and temperature interact to control annual transcriptome dynamics. Well-known upstream genes of signaling pathways responsive to environmental conditions, such as the core clock (LHY/CjLHYb and CCA1/CjLHYa) and PEBP family (MFT) genes, exhibited unique expression patterns in Japanese cedar compared with previous reports in other species, suggesting that these genes control differences in seasonal regulation mechanisms between species. The results of this study provide new insights into seasonal regulation of transcription in Japanese cedar.

Bu çalışma, son zamanlarda dilin biyolojik temelleri üzerine yapılan araştırmaları inceleyerek bu konuda gelinen noktaları Türkçe'den de örnekler vererek üç temel başlık altında sunmaktadır. Çalışmada incelenen konular şunlardır: i. dilin doğuştan olduğu varsayılan yapısı ve dil için önerilen genetik sınırlamaların yalnızca dile özgü olup olmadığı, ii. erken dil edinimi sürecinde sesin algılanması ve ezginin dilleri birbirinden ayırmada ve ana dile ilişkin sözdizimsel yapıları belirlemede oynadığı rol, iii. dilin diğer bilişsel yetilerden ne ölçüde ayrıldığı ve araştırma bulgularının beyinde kendine özgü bir dil alanı açısından ne gösterdiği. Bu çalışmalar ışığında, özellikle dilin ses yapısının edinimi ve dil özürleri konularında Türkçe üzerine yapılacak araştırmalar, insanlığın belki de en önemli edinimi olan dilin biyolojik temellerinin daha iyi anlaşılmasına katkıda bulunacaktır.