A Real-Time Quantitative PCR Assay for the Detection of Sphaeropsis sapinea from Inoculated Pinus nigra Shoots

Pinus nigra (Austrian pine) is a tree widely planted in central and southern Europe in the reforestation of areas with poor soils. One of the major constrains of P. nigra is a fungal disease caused by Sphaeropsis sapinea which causes shoot tip dieback and tree mortality. This paper describes a real‐time quantitative PCR assay based on the partial sequence of the small subunit ribosomal RNA of S. sapinea to detect and quantify DNA of the fungal pathogen in S. sapinea inoculated shoots. The study found that real‐time quantitative PCR was a reliable technique to diagnose this disease and suggests that it can also be used to study fungal behaviour in host tissue and particularly to quantify fungal growth in the latent or endophytic phase.     

Numerical Approaches to Life Cycle Interpretation - The case of the Ecoinvent’96 database (10 pp)

Goal, Scope and Background To strengthen the evaluative power of LCA, life cycle interpretation should be further developed. A previous contribution (Heijungs & Kleijn 2001) elaborated five examples of concrete methods within the subset of numerical approaches towards interpretation. These methods were: contribution analysis, perturbation analysis, uncertainty analysis, comparative analysis, and discernibility analysis. Developments in software have enabled the possibility to apply the five example methods to explore the much-used Ecoinvent”96 database.Discussion of Methods The numerical approaches implemented in this study include contribution analysis, perturbation analysis, uncertainty analysis, comparative analysis, discernibility analysis and the newly developed key issue analysis. The data used comes from a very large process database: Ecoinvent’96, containing 1163 processes, 1181 economic flows and 571 environmental flows. Conclusions Results are twofold: they serve as a benchmark to the usefulness and feasibility of these numerical approaches, and they shed light on the question of stability and structure in an often-used large system of interconnected processes. Most of the approaches perform quite well: computation time on a moderate PC is between a few seconds a few minutes. Only Monte Carlo analyses may require much longer, but even then it appears that most questions can be answered within a few hours. Moreover, analytical expressions for error propagation are much faster than Monte Carlo analyses, while giving almost identical results. Despite the fact that many processes are connected to each other, leading to the possibility of a very unstable system and very sensitive coefficients, the overall results show that most results are not extremely uncertain. There are, however, some exceptions to this positive message.     

Establishing Life Cycle Inventories of Chemicals Based on Differing Data Availability (9 pp)

Goal, Scope and Background In contrast to inventory data of energy and transport processes, public inventory data of chemicals are rather scarce. Chemicals are important to consider in LCA, because they are used in the production of many, if not all, products. Moreover, they may cause considerable environmental impacts. For these reasons, it was one goal of the new ecoinvent database to provide LCI data on chemicals. In this paper, the methods and procedures used for establishing LCIs of chemicals in ecoinvent are presented.Methods Three different approaches are suggested for situations of differing data availability. First, in the case of good data availability, the general quality guidelines of ecoinvent can be followed. Second, a procedure is proposed for the translation of aggregated inventory data (cumulative LCI results) from industry into the ecoinvent format. This approach was used, if adequate unit process data was not available. Third, a procedure is put forward for estimating inventory data using stoichiometric equations from technical literature as a main information source. This latter method was used if no other information was available. The application of each of the three procedures is illustrated with the help of a case study.Results and Conclusion When sufficient information is available to follow the general guidelines of ecoinvent, the resulting dataset is characterized by a high degree of detail, and it is thus of high quality. For chemicals, however, the application of the standard procedure is possible in only a few cases. When using industrial data, the main drawback is the fact that those data are often available only as aggregated data, thus being out of tune with the quality guidelines of ecoinvent and its main aim, the harmonization of LCI data. As a third approach, the use of the stoichiometric reaction equation is used for the compilation of LCI datasets of chemicals. This approach represents an alternative to neglecting chemicals completely, but it contains a high risk to not consider important aspects of the life cycle of the respective substance.Outlook Further work in the area of chemicals should focus on an improvement of datasets, so far established by either of the two estimation procedures (APME method; estimation based on technical literature) described. Besides the improvement of already established inventories, the compilation of further harmonized inventories of specific types of chemicals (e.g. solvents) or of chemicals for new industrial sectors (e.g. electronics industry) are in discussion.     

Human pescadillo induces large-scale chromatin unfolding

Pescadillo was initially identified in a genetic screen for mutations that affect embryonic develop-ment of the zebrafish Daniorerio[1]. Pescadillo-/- ze-brafish mutants showed abnormal embryonic devel-opment such as reduced brain, eye size and a lack of extension of the jaw on developmental day 3. Further study showed that the Pescadillo protein is mainly distributed in tissues containing a significant number of proliferating cells and dramatically elevated in ma-lignant human astrocytomas an…     

Analysis of electron thermal diffusivity and bootstrap current in ohmically heated discharges after boronization in the HT-7 tokamak

Significant improvements of plasma performance after ICRF boronization have been achieved in the full range of HT-7 operation parameters. Electron power balance is analyzed in the steady state ohmic discharges of the HT-7 tokamak. The ratio of the total radiation power to ohmic input power increases with increasing the central line-averaged electron density, but decreases with plasma current. It is obviously decreased after wall conditioning. Electron heat diffusivity χ_e deduced from the power balance analysis is reduced throughout the main plasma after boronization. χ_e decreases with increasing central line-averaged electron density in the parameter range of our study. After boronization, the plasma current profile is broadened and a higher current can be easily obtained on the HT-7 tokamak experiment. It is expected that the fact that the bootstrap current increases after boronization will explain these phenomena. After boronization, the plasma pressure gradient and the electron temperature near the boundary are larger than before, these factors influencing that the ratio of bootstrap current to total plasma current increases from several percent to above 10%.