Flowers of the hop plant provide both bitterness and “hoppy” flavor to beer. Hops are, however, both a water and energy intensive crop and vary considerably in essential oil content, making it challenging to achieve a consistent hoppy taste in beer. Here, we report that brewer’s yeast can be engineered to biosynthesize aromatic monoterpene molecules that impart hoppy flavor to beer by incorporating recombinant DNA derived from yeast, mint, and basil. Whereas metabolic engineering of biosynthetic pathways is commonly enlisted to maximize product titers, tuning expression of pathway enzymes to affect target production levels of multiple commercially important metabolites without major collateral metabolic changes represents a unique challenge. By applying state-of-the-art engineering techniques and a framework to guide iterative improvement, strains are generated with target performance characteristics. Beers produced using these strains are perceived as hoppier than traditionally hopped beers by a sensory panel in a double-blind tasting.
This study investigates the manner in which syntax, prosody, and context interact when second- and fourth-semester college-level English-French learners process relative clause (RC) attachment to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2) in complex nominal expressions such asle secrétaire du psychologue qui se promène (au centre ville)“the secretary of the psychologist who takes a walk (downtown).” Learners' interpretations were affected by the length of the RC, specifically its phonological weight. Effects of intonation contour were found only in a subset of learners. In a response time (RT) experiment that manipulated contexts, fourth-semester learners showed a final bias for NP1 attachment in interpretation but an initial RT bias for NP2 attachment. Second-semester learners also produced a NP2 attachment bias in RTs, but no asymmetry in interpretation was found. We argue that the processing of RC attachment by English-French learners requires a task-specific algorithm that implicates autonomous syntactic and prosodic computations and specific interactions among them.
This study examined how native and near-native speakers of Hexagonal French make reference to future events in a corpus of informal conversations. A concept-oriented analysis reveals that no fewer than 13 different finite verb forms appeared in future-time contexts. A qualitative analysis of the use of the present in future-time contexts in the two portions of the corpus points to similarities in the native-speaker and near-native-speaker use. This analysis contributes to the understanding of future-time expression in Hexagonal French and to discussions concerning near-nativeness in second language acquisition.
This study examines aspects of the syntax‐discourse interface in near‐native French. Two cleft structures—c’est clefts and avoir clefts—are examined in experimental and spontaneous conversational data from 10 adult Anglophone learners of French and ten native speakers of French. C’est clefts mark focus, and avoir clefts introduce new discourse referents. Although previous research on the syntax‐discourse interface has revealed residual difficulties in near‐native speakers, the near‐natives in the present study evinced nativelike behavior on a range of measures, a finding that suggests complete acquisition of aspects of the syntax‐discourse interface.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.