Lolium perenne cultivars differing in their capacity to accumulate water soluble carbohydrates (WSCs) were infected with three strains of fungal Neotyphodium lolii endophytes or left uninfected. The endophyte strains differed in their alkaloid profiles. Plants were grown at two different levels of nitrogen (N) supply in a controlled environment. Metabolic profiles of blades were analyzed using a variety of analytical methods. A total of 66 response variables were subjected to a principle components analysis and factor rotation. The first three rotated factors (46% of the total variance) were subsequently analyzed by analysis of variance. At high N supply nitrogenous compounds, organic acids and lipids were increased; WSCs, chlorogenic acid (CGA), and fibers were decreased. The high-sugar cultivar 'AberDove' had reduced levels of nitrate, most minor amino acids, sulfur, and fibers compared to the control cultivar 'Fennema', whereas WSCs, CGA, and methionine were increased. In plants infected with endophytes, nitrate, several amino acids, and, magnesium were decreased; WSCs, lipids, some organic acids, and CGA were increased. Regrowth of blades was stimulated at high N, and there was a significant endophyte 3 cultivar interaction on regrowth. Mannitol, a fungal specific sugar alcohol, was significantly correlated with fungal biomass. Our findings suggest that effects of endophytes on metabolic profiles of L. perenne can be considerable, depending on host plant characteristics and nutrient supply, and we propose that a shift in carbon/N ratios and in secondary metabolite production as seen in our study is likely to have impacts on herbivore responses.

Variations in diet, age and castration were employed to generate a range of flavours that were chemically analysed to find the cause of 'pastoral' flavour in sheepmeat and its relationship to species flavour. Lambs were raised on pasture (ram or castrate) or on a maize-based or lucerne-based concentrate diet (ram only). They were slaughtered at 132 and 232 days. Fat from animals raised on concentrates had lower proportions of fat-hardening stearic acid and higher proportions of oxidationprone fat-softening oleic and linoleic acids. Concentrations of species-characterising short branchedchain fatty acids (BCFAs), typified by 4-methyloctanoic acid, were lower for pasture-fed lambs, particularly at 232 days, although between-animal variation was high. Castration did not statistically affect BCFA concentration at this age. Correlations between BCFAs and testes weight were not significant, suggesting that they were not acting as sex pheromones. Concentrations of 3-methylindole (skatole) in perirenal fat were higher for the pasture diet at both slaughter dates. Concentrations of 4-methylphenol in the fat were not affected by diet. However, 3-methylphenol was more abundant in pasture treatments. A sensory panel found that the intensity of 'sheepmeat' flavour was higher for pasture-raised animals, but that associations of 'barnyard' flavour (which has been linked to pastoral flavour) with diet were more complex. The issue was resolved by fat sniffing. Panel responses to heated subcutaneous fat were recorded as frequency of descriptive terms drawn from a limited lexicon. Volatiles from fats pooled by treatment were resolved on a gas chromatographic column whose effluent was monitored by odourport sniffing. Compounds were identified by parallel chromatographic/mass spectrometric runs. The headspace concentrations of these compounds were then measured for individual animals. These data were related to frequency data by the principal component method. 'Mutton' and 'sheepmeat' odour notes were clearly linked to indoles (skatole particularly) and, to a lesser extent, methylphenol, setting these notes apart from 'lamb', an odour note more associated with lucerne and maize diets through higher concentrations of BCFAs. It was concluded that 3-methylindole was the major cause of pastoral flavour in sheepmeat, and that fat oxidation products represented a background flavour that varied quantitatively but not qualitatively with fatty acid profile.

Proanthocyanidins (PAs) are oligomeric flavonoids and one group of end products of the phenylpropanoid pathway. PAs have been reported to be beneficial for human and animal health and are particularly important in pastoral agricultural systems for improved animal production and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. However, the main forage legumes grown in these systems, such as Trifolium repens and Medicago sativa, do not contain any substantial amounts of PAs in leaves. We have identified from the foliar PA-accumulating legume Trifolium arvense an R2R3-MYB transcription factor, TaMYB14, and provide evidence that this transcription factor is involved in the regulation of PA biosynthesis in legumes. TaMYB14 expression is necessary and sufficient to up-regulate late steps of the phenylpropanoid pathway and to induce PA biosynthesis. RNA interference silencing of TaMYB14 resulted in almost complete cessation of PA biosynthesis in T. arvense, whereas Nicotiana tabacum, M. sativa, and T. repens plants constitutively expressing TaMYB14 synthesized and accumulated PAs in leaves up to 1.8% dry matter. Targeted liquid chromatography-multistage tandem mass spectrometry analysis identified foliar PAs up to degree of polymerization 6 in leaf extracts. Hence, genetically modified M. sativa and T. repens plants expressing TaMYB14 provide a viable option for improving animal health and mitigating the negative environmental impacts of pastoral animal production systems.

Neotyphodium sp. Lp1, an endophytic fungus from perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne), produces the mycotoxin ergovaline in infected grasses, whereas a mutant in which a particular peptide synthetase gene is knocked out does not. We examined the impact of this knockout on other constituents of the ergot alkaloid pathway. Two simple lysergic acid amides, ergine and a previously undescribed amide, were eliminated by the knockout. Lysergic acid accumulated in the knockout endophyte, but quantities were only 13% of the total lysergic acid derivatives accumulated in the wild type. Concentrations of several clavines were not substantially affected. However, a novel clavine accumulated to higher concentrations in perennial ryegrass containing the knockout strain. The results indicate that production of simple lysergic acid amides requires the activity or products of the ergovaline-associated peptide synthetase and that the regulation of ergot alkaloid production is modified in response to the relatively late block in the pathway.

This paper is concerned with the global asymptotic stability analysis problem for a class of uncertain stochastic Hopfield neural networks with discrete and distributed time-delays. By utilizing a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, using the well-known S-procedure and conducting stochastic analysis, we show that the addressed neural networks are robustly, globally, asymptotically stable if a convex optimization problem is feasible. Then, the stability criteria are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be effectively solved by some standard numerical packages. The main results are also extended to the multiple time-delay case. Two numerical examples are given to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed global stability condition.

Epichloë festucae Fl1 in association with Lolium perenne synthesizes a diverse range of indole‐diterpene bioprotective metabolites, including lolitrem B, a potent tremorgen. The ltm genes responsible for the synthesis of these metabolites are organized in three clusters at a single sub‐telomeric locus in the genome of E. festucae. Here we resolve the genetic basis for the remarkable indole‐diterpene diversity observed in planta by analyzing products that accumulate in associations containing ltm deletion mutants of E. festucae and in cells of Penicillium paxilli containing copies of these genes under the control of a P. paxilli biosynthetic gene promoter. We propose a biosynthetic scheme to account for this metabolic diversity.

No abstract

Exponential stability analysis for discrete-time switched linear systems with time-delay," Int. J. Innov. Comput., Inform. Control, vol. 3, no. 6, pp. 1557-1564 [7] L. Zhang, P. Shi, and E. Boukas, " H output-feedback control for switched linear discrete-time systems with time-varying delays," Int. J. Control, vol. 80, no. 8, pp. 1354Control, vol. 80, no. 8, pp. -1365Control, vol. 80, no. 8, pp. , 2007 [8] W. P. Dayawansa and C. F. Martin, "A converse Lyapunov theorem for a class of dynamical systems which undergo switching," IEEE Trans. Automat. Control, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 751-760, Apr. 1999 Control, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 555-559, Apr. 1998. [11] J. Geromel and P. Colaneri, "Stability and stabilization of discrete time switched systems," Int. J. Control, vol. 79, no. 7, pp. 719-728, 2006 [28] H. Gao, J. Lam, C. Wang, and S. Xu, " H model reduciton for discrete time-delay systems: Delay-independent and dependent approaches," Int. J. Control, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 321-335, 2004.[29] S. Xu and J. Lam, " H model reduction for discrete-time singular systems," Syst. Control Lett., vol. 48, pp. 121-133, 2002.[30] C. Gong and B. Su, "Robust L 0 L filtering of convex polyhedral uncertain time-delay fuzzy systems," Int. J. Innov. Comput., Inform. Control, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 793-802, 2008.[31] L. Zhang, P. Shi, E. Boukas, and C. Wang, "Robust l 0 l filtering for switched linear discrete time-delay systems with polytopic uncertainties," IET Control Theory Appl., vol. Automatica, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 221-229, 2001. Filtering for Nonlinear Genetic Regulatory Networks With Stochastic DisturbancesZidong Wang, James Lam, Guoliang Wei, Karl Fraser, and Xiaohui LiuAbstract-In this paper, the filtering problem is investigated for nonlinear genetic regulatory networks with stochastic disturbances and time delays, where the nonlinear function describing the feedback regulation is assumed to satisfy the sector condition, the stochastic perturbation is in the form of a scalar Brownian motion, and the time delays exist in both the translation process and the feedback regulation process. The purpose of the addressed filtering problem is to estimate the true concentrations of the mRNA and protein. Specifically, we are interested in designing a linear filter such that, in the presence of time delays, stochastic disturbances as well as sector nonlinearities, the filtering dynamics of state estimation for the stochastic genetic regulatory network is exponentially mean square stable with a prescribed decay rate lower bound . By using the linear matrix inequality (LMI) technique, sufficient conditions are first derived for ensuring the desired filtering performance for the gene regulatory model, and the filter gain is then characterized in terms of the solution to an LMI, which can be easily solved by using standard software packages. A simulation example is exploited in order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design procedures.