No abstract

The molecular basis of anhydrobiosis, the state of suspended animation entered by some species during extreme desiccation, is still poorly understood despite a number of transcriptome and proteome studies. We therefore conducted functional screening by RNA interference (RNAi) for genes involved in anhydrobiosis in the holo-anhydrobiotic nematode Panagrolaimus superbus. A new method of survival analysis, based on staining, and proof-of-principle RNAi experiments confirmed a role for genes involved in oxidative stress tolerance, while a novel medium-scale RNAi workflow identified a further 40 anhydrobiosis-associated genes, including several involved in proteostasis, DNA repair and signal transduction pathways. This suggests that multiple genes contribute to anhydrobiosis in P. superbus.

The Kullback-Leibler distance (or relative entropy) is applied in the analysis of functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) data series. Our study is designed for event-related (ER) experiments, where a brief stimulus is presented and a long period of rest is followed. In particular, this relative entropy is used as a measure of the "distance" between the probability distributions p 1 and p 2 of the signal levels related to stimulus and non-stimulus. In order to avoid undesirable divergences of the Kullback-Leibler distance, a small positive parameter δ is introduced in the definition of the probability functions in such a way that it does not bias the comparison between both distributions. Numerical simulations are performed so as to determine the probability densities of the mean Kullback-Leibler distance D (throughout the N epochs of the whole experiment). For small values of N (N < 30), such probability densities f (D) are found to be fitted very well by Gamma distributions (χ 2 < 0.0009). The sensitivity and specificity of the method are evaluated by construction of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for some values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The functional maps corresponding to real data series from an asymptomatic volunteer submitted to an ER motor stimulus is obtained by using the proposed technique. The maps present activation in primary and secondary motor brain areas. Both simulated and real data analyses indicate that the relative entropy can be useful for fMRI analysis in the information measure scenario.

h i g h l i g h t s• New measurements based on the concept of activity per agent are proposed.• The variance of the system activity can be used to indicate the critical points of the transition.• The frequency distribution of system activity is able to show the order of the phase transition. • A power law dependence between cluster activity and cluster size is verified. a b s t r a c tAxelrod's model was proposed to study interactions between agents and the formation of cultural domains. It presents a transition from a monocultural to a multicultural steady state which has been studied in the literature by evaluation of the relative size of the largest cluster. In this article, we propose new measurements based on the concept of activity per agent to study the Axelrod's model on the square lattice. We show that the variance of system activity can be used to indicate the critical points of the transition. Furthermore the frequency distribution of the system activity is able to show a coexistence of phases typical of a first order phase transition. Finally, we verify a power law dependence between cluster activity and cluster size for multicultural steady state configurations at the critical point.