Role of Soils in Determining Sites for Lowland Heathland Reconstruction in England

No guidelines are currently available that advise which soil properties of arable land can be used to suggest suitable locations for heathland reconstruction. This paper reviews studies comparing soil properties of heathland or semi-natural grassland with those of adjacent arable fields, investigations in the autecology of the dominant heathland plant, Calluna vulgaris (common heather), and long-term experiments of fertilizer inputs on arable soils. Three properties must be assessed before the suitability of a field can be determined: extractable phosphorus, exchangeable calcium, and pH. A number of other nutrients may also be important, but evidence is currently insufficient to substantiate this. Natural changes in levels of extractable phosphorus, exchangeable calcium, and pH appear to be very slow, so nutrient stripping and acidification will be necessary where recommended levels are exceeded to successfully restore heathland vegetation.     

Mayday - integrative analytics for expression data

Background  

DNA Microarrays have become the standard method for large scale analyses of gene expression and epigenomics. The increasing complexity and inherent noisiness of the generated data makes visual data exploration ever more important. Fast deployment of new methods as well as a combination of predefined, easy to apply methods with programmer's access to the data are important requirements for any analysis framework. Mayday is an open source platform with emphasis on visual data exploration and analysis. Many built-in methods for clustering, machine learning and classification are provided for dissecting complex datasets. Plugins can easily be written to extend Mayday's functionality in a large number of ways. As Java program, Mayday is platform-independent and can be used as Java WebStart application without any installation. Mayday can import data from several file formats, database connectivity is included for efficient data organization. Numerous interactive visualization tools, including box plots, profile plots, principal component plots and a heatmap are available, can be enhanced with metadata and exported as publication quality vector files.     

Overview of thermostable DNA polymerases for classical PCR applications: from molecular and biochemical fundamentals to commercial systems

During the genomics era, the use of thermostable DNA polymerases increased greatly. Many were identified and described—mainly of the genera Thermus, Thermococcus and Pyrococcus. Each polymerase has different features, resulting from origin and genetic modification. However, the rational choice of the adequate polymerase depends on the application itself. This review gives an overview of the most commonly used DNA polymerases used for PCR application: KOD, Pab (Isis?), Pfu, Pst (Deep Vent?), Pwo, Taq, Tbr, Tca, Tfi, Tfl, Tfu, Tgo, Tli (Vent?), Tma (UITma?), Tne, Tth and others.