Canine Olfactory Detection of a Non-Systemic Phytobacterial Citrus Pathogen of International Quarantine Significance

For millennia humans have benefitted from application of the acute canine sense of smell to hunt, track and find targets of importance. In this report, canines were evaluated for their ability to detect the severe exotic phytobacterial arboreal pathogen Xanthomonas citri pv. citri (Xcc), which is the causal agent of Asiatic citrus canker (Acc). Since Xcc causes only local lesions, infections are non-systemic, limiting the use of serological and molecular diagnostic tools for field-level detection. This necessitates reliance on human visual surveys for Acc symptoms, which is highly inefficient at low disease incidence, and thus for early detection. In simulated orchards the overall combined performance metrics for a pair of canines were 0.9856, 0.9974, 0.9257 and 0.9970, for sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy, respectively, with 1–2 s/tree detection time. Detection of trace Xcc infections on commercial packinghouse fruit resulted in 0.7313, 0.9947, 0.8750, and 0.9821 for the same performance metrics across a range of cartons with 0–10% Xcc-infected fruit despite the noisy, hot and potentially distracting environment. In orchards, the sensitivity of canines increased with lesion incidence, whereas the specificity and overall accuracy was >0.99 across all incidence levels; i.e., false positive rates were uniformly low. Canines also alerted to a range of 1–12-week-old infections with equal accuracy. When trained to either Xcc-infected trees or Xcc axenic cultures, canines inherently detected the homologous and heterologous targets, suggesting they can detect Xcc directly rather than only volatiles produced by the host following infection. Canines were able to detect the Xcc scent signature at very low concentrations (10,000× less than 1 bacterial cell per sample), which implies that the scent signature is composed of bacterial cell volatile organic compound constituents or exudates that occur at concentrations many fold that of the bacterial cells. The results imply that canines can be trained as viable early detectors of Xcc and deployed across citrus orchards, packinghouses, and nurseries.     

Long-Time Accuracy for Approximate Slow Manifolds in a Finite-Dimensional Model of Balance

We study the slow singular limit for planar anharmonic oscillatory motion of a charged particle under the influence of a perpendicular magnetic field when the mass of the particle goes to zero. This model has been used by the authors as a toy model for exploring variational high-order approximations to the slow dynamics in rotating fluids. In this paper, we address the long time validity of the slow limit equations in the simplest nontrivial case. We show that the first-order reduced model remains O(ε) accurate over a long 1/ε timescale. The proof is elementary, but involves subtle estimates on the nonautonomous linearized dynamics.     

Errata to ``Totally positive Toeplitz matrices and quantum cohomology of partial flag varieties'

We make a correction to Remark 4.3 and the proof of Theorem 4.2 (Peterson's Theorem) which identifies with the coordinate ring of a certain affine stratum of the Peterson variety . Explicitly, we introduce additional coordinates to obtain a complete coordinate system on and then show that they lie in the defining ideal of the Peterson variety , hence play no role in the presentation of .

     

Palladium-catalyzed total synthesis of euchrestifoline using a one-pot Wacker oxidation and double aromatic C-H bond activation

We describe the total synthesis of euchrestifoline featuring an unprecedented one-pot Wacker oxidation and double aromatic C-H bond activation.     

Clustering in the absence of attractions: density functional theory and computer simulations

We numerically investigate the formation of stable clusters of overlapping particles in certain systems interacting via purely repulsive, bounded pair potentials. In close vicinity of a first-order phase transition between a disordered and an ordered structure, clusters are encountered already in the fluid phase which then freeze into crystals with multiply occupied lattice sites. These hyper-crystals are characterized by a number of remarkable features that are in clear contradiction to our experience with harshly repulsive systems: upon compression, the lattice constant remains invariant, leading to a concomitant linear growth in the cluster population with density; further, the freezing and melting lines are to high accuracy linear in the density-temperature plane, and the conventional indicator that announces freezing, that is, the Hansen-Verlet value of the first peak of the structure factor, attains for these soft systems much higher values than for their hard-matter counterparts. Our investigations are based on the generalized exponential model of index 4 (i.e., Phi(r) approximately exp[-(r/sigma)4]). The properties of the phases involved are calculated via liquid state theory and classical density functional theory. Monte Carlo simulations for selected states confirm the theoretical results for the structural and thermodynamic properties of the system. These numerical data, in turn, fully corroborate an approximate theoretical framework that was recently put forward to explain the clustering phenomenon for systems of this kind (Likos, C. N.; Mladek, B. M.; Gottwald, D.; Kahl, G. J. Chem. Phys. 2007, 126, 224502).     

A study on the stereoselectivity of C,O bond formation in esterification of cyclic thiohydroxamic acids

Esterification of cyclic thiohydroxamic acids, for example, N-hydroxypyridine-2(1H)-thione, N-hydroxy-4-methylthiazole-2(3H)-thione, and N-hydroxy-4-(p-chlorophenyl)-thiazole-2(3H)-thione, occurred with inversion of configuration at the attacked stereocenter, as evident from the use of chiral alcohols, alkyl p-toluene sulfonates, and cyclic sulfates. Stereochemical analysis of enantiomerically pure O-alkyl thiohydroxamates was performed on the basis of CD-spectroscopy and chemical derivatization. The assignment of the relative configuration in cyclic O-esters was feasible via NMR spectroscopy, whereas chiral aliphatic glycolato monoesters required hydroxyl group derivatization with chloro-(4R,5R)-bis[(1R,2S,5R)-menth-1-yloxycarbonyl)]-1,3,2-dioxaphospholane for this purpose.