Psilorhynchus ngathanu,a new torrent minnow species (Teleostei: Psilorhynchidae) from the Chindwin Basin,Manipur, India

Psilorhynchus ngathanu, a new psilorhynchid species, is described from the Dutah River, Chindwin Basin in Manipur, India. The new species is distinct from its congeners in the absence of scales from the midventral region between the pectoral fins, the presence of two rows of spots on the dorsal-fin rays and two black bars on the caudal fin, v–vi unbranched pectoral-fin rays, and 10 + 9 principal caudal-fin rays.     

DIRAQ: scalable in situ data- and resource-aware indexing for optimized query performance

Scientific data analytics in high-performance computing environments has been evolving along with the advancement of computing capabilities. With the onset of exascale computing, the increasing gap between compute performance and I/O bandwidth has rendered the traditional post-simulation processing a tedious process. Despite the challenges due to increased data production, there exists an opportunity to benefit from “cheap” computing power to perform query-driven exploration and visualization during simulation time. To accelerate such analyses, applications traditionally augment, post-simulation, raw data with large indexes, which are then repeatedly utilized for data exploration. However, the generation of current state-of-the-art indexes involves a compute- and memory-intensive processing, thus rendering them inapplicable in an in situ context. In this paper we propose DIRAQ, a parallel in situ, in network data encoding and reorganization technique that enables the transformation of simulation output into a query-efficient form, with negligible runtime overhead to the simulation run. DIRAQ’s effective core-local, precision-based encoding approach incorporates an embedded compressed index that is 3–6 \(\times \) smaller than current state-of-the-art indexing schemes. Its data-aware index adjustmentation improves performance of group-level index layout creation by up to 35 % and reduces the size of the generated index by up to 27 %. Moreover, DIRAQ’s in network index merging strategy enables the creation of aggregated indexes that speed up spatial-context query responses by up to \(10\times \) versus alternative techniques. DIRAQ’s topology-, data-, and memory-aware aggregation strategy results in efficient I/O and yields overall end-to-end encoding and I/O time that is less than that required to write the raw data with MPI collective I/O.     

Stability of Adult Emergence and Activity/Rest Rhythms in Fruit Flies Drosophila melanogaster under Semi-Natural Condition

Here we report the results of a study aimed at examining stability of adult emergence and activity/rest rhythms under semi-natural conditions (henceforth SN), in four large outbred fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster populations, selected for emergence in a narrow window of time under laboratory (henceforth LAB) light/dark (LD) cycles. When assessed under LAB, selected flies display enhanced stability in terms of higher amplitude, synchrony and accuracy in emergence and activity rhythms compared to controls. The present study was conducted to assess whether such differences in stability between selected and control populations, persist under SN where several gradually changing time-cues are present in their strongest form. The study revealed that under SN, emergence waveform of selected flies was modified, with even more enhanced peak and narrower gate-width compared to those observed in the LAB and compared to control populations in SN. Furthermore, flies from selected populations continued to exhibit enhanced synchrony and accuracy in their emergence and activity rhythms under SN compared to controls. Further analysis of zeitgeber effects revealed that enhanced stability in the rhythmicity of selected flies under SN was primarily due to increased sensitivity to light because emergence and activity rhythms of selected flies were as stable as controls under temperature cycles. These results thus suggest that stability of circadian rhythms in fruit flies D. melanogaster, which evolved as a consequence of selection for emergence in a narrow window of time under weak zeitgeber condition of LAB, persists robustly in the face of day-to-day variations in cycling environmental factors of nature.     

Integrated continuous processing of proteins expressed as inclusion bodies: GCSF as a case study

Affordability of biopharmaceuticals continues to be a challenge, particularly in developing economies. This has fuelled advancements in manufacturing that can offer higher productivity and better economics without sacrificing product quality in the form of an integrated continuous manufacturing platform. While platform processes for monoclonal antibodies have existed for more than a decade, development of an integrated continuous manufacturing process for bacterial proteins has received relatively scant attention. In this study, we propose an end‐to‐end integrated continuous downstream process (from inclusion bodies to unformulated drug substance) for a therapeutic protein expressed in Escherichia coli as inclusion body. The final process consisted of a continuous refolding in a coiled flow inverter reactor directly coupled to a three‐column periodic counter‐current chromatography for capture of the product followed by a three‐column con‐current chromatography for polishing. The continuous bioprocessing train was run uninterrupted for 26 h to demonstrate its capability and the resulting output was analyzed for the various critical quality attributes, namely product purity (>99%), high molecular weight impurities (<0.5%), host cell proteins (<100 ppm), and host cell DNA (<10 ppb). All attributes were found to be consistent over the period of operation. The developed assembly offers smaller facility footprint, higher productivity, fewer hold steps, and significantly higher equipment and resin utilization. The complexities of process integration in the context of continuous processing have been highlighted. We hope that the study presented here will promote development of highly efficient, universal, end‐to‐end, fully continuous platforms for manufacturing of biotherapeutics. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog., 33:998–1009, 2017