Direct cryopreservation of winter buds of nine cultivars of blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum L)

Direct cryopreservation of overwintering, dormant buds has been applied to nine blackcurrant cultivars, using a 7 day dehydration period at c.-20° C before plunging directly into liquid nitrogen. The buds on shoots thawed from -20° C showed normal development simply by standing them in water and all the cultivars could be successfully recovered (> 58%) by grafting. None of the shoots thawed from liquid nitrogen showed any development after standing in water and all of the grafts failed. Shoots thawed from liquid nitrogen showed significant damage to xylem transport, and the cortical tissues necessary fro successful grafting showed significant loss of membrane semipermeability. However, buds excised from shoots immediately after thawing from liquid nitrogen were viable and could be recovered using in vitro culture. Survival ranged from 88 to 55%, depending upon cultivar.     

An integrated mass spectrometry imaging and digital pathology workflow for objective detection of colorectal tumours by unique atomic signatures

Tumours are abnormal growths of cells that reproduce by redirecting essential nutrients and resources from surrounding tissue. Changes to cell metabolism that trigger the growth of tumours are reflected in subtle differences between the chemical composition of healthy and malignant cells. We used LA-ICP-MS imaging to investigate whether these chemical differences can be used to spatially identify tumours and support detection of primary colorectal tumours in anatomical pathology. First, we generated quantitative LA-ICP-MS images of three colorectal surgical resections with case-matched normal intestinal wall tissue and used this data in a Monte Carlo optimisation experiment to develop an algorithm that can classify pixels as tumour positive or negative. Blinded testing and interrogation of LA-ICP-MS images with micrographs of haematoxylin and eosin stained and Ki67 immunolabelled sections revealed Monte Carlo optimisation accurately identified primary tumour cells, as well as returning false positive pixels in areas of high cell proliferation. We analysed an additional 11 surgical resections of primary colorectal tumours and re-developed our image processing method to include a random forest regression machine learning model to correctly identify heterogenous tumours and exclude false positive pixels in images of non-malignant tissue. Our final model used over 1.6 billion calculations to correctly discern healthy cells from various types and stages of invasive colorectal tumours. The imaging mass spectrometry and data analysis methods described, developed in partnership with clinical cancer researchers, have the potential to further support cancer detection as part of a comprehensive digital pathology approach to cancer care through validation of a new chemical biomarker of tumour cells.

Digital pathology and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) imaging reveals a unique elemental signature of colorectal cancer.     

Total synthesis of the marine natural product (-)-clavosolide A

[Structure: see text] The total synthesis of the marine metabolite clavosolide A is reported which confirms the structure and absolute configuration of the natural product as the symmetrical diolide glycosylated by permethylated D-xylose moieties, 2.     

Preparation of a psammaplysene-based library

A 28-member focused library, based on the pseudosymmetric template of the marine alkaloids psammaplysenes, was prepared from combinations of components that were, in turn, derived from 4-iodophenol.     

Structural impact of coordinating a helical 2,6-pyridyl diamide with divalent metals

[Structure: see text] The structural consequences of coordinating 2,6-bis[2-((4S)-4-methyl-4,5-dihydro-1,3-oxazol-2-yl)phenyl]carbamoylpyridines, 2, with divalent metals such as Cu(II), Ni(II), and Zn(II) are reported. Metal coordination occurs under mild conditions in a manner that preserves the helical bias of the parent ligand in the solid state and in solution. 1H NMR line-shape analysis indicates that metal coordination increases the helical interconversion barrier, thus rigidifying the dynamic helicity of 2.     

Decarboxylative ring contractions and olefin insertions of vinyl oxazinanones

[Structure: see text] 6-Vinyl oxazinanones undergo catalytic, diastereoselective, decarboxylative ring contraction to form vinyl azetidines in good yield. Performing the decarboxylation in the presence of Michael acceptors results in decarboxylative olefin insertion to provide diastereoenriched substituted vinyl piperidines.     

Coincidences of projections and linear n-valued maps of tori

We prove that the Nielsen fixed point number N(φ) of an n-valued map φ:X?X of a compact connected triangulated orientable q-manifold without boundary is equal to the Nielsen coincidence number of the projections of the graph of φ, a subset of X×X, to the two factors. For certain q×q integer matrices A, there exist “linear” n-valued maps Φn,A,σ:Tq?Tq of q-tori that generalize the single-valued maps fA:Tq→Tq induced by the linear transformations TA:Rq→Rq defined by TA(v)=Av. By calculating the Nielsen coincidence number of the projections of its graph, we calculate N(Φn,A,σ) for a large class of linear n-valued maps.     

Diophantine properties of IETs and general systems: quantitative proximality and connectivity

Three properties of dynamical systems (recurrence, connectivity and proximality) are quantified by introducing and studying the gauges (measurable functions) corresponding to each of these properties. The properties of the proximality gauge are related to the results in the active field of shrinking targets. The emphasis in the present paper is on the IETs (interval exchange transformations) $( \mathcal {I},T)$ , $\mathcal {I}=[0,1)$ . In particular, we prove that if an IET T is ergodic (relative to the Lebesgue measure λ), then the equality A1 $$ \liminf_{n\to\infty} \, n\, \bigl|T^n(x)-y \bigr|=0 $$ holds for λ×λ-a.a. $(x,y)\in \mathcal {I}^{2}$ . The ergodicity assumption is essential: the result does not extend to all minimal IETs. Also, the factor? n? in (A1) is optimal (e.g., it cannot be replaced by n?ln(ln(lnn))). On the other hand, for Lebesgue almost all 3-IETs $( \mathcal {I},T)$ we prove that for all ?>0 A2 $$ \liminf_{n\to\infty} \, n^ \epsilon \bigl |T^n(x)-T^n(y)\bigr| = \infty,\quad\text{for Lebesgue a.a.} \ (x,y)\in \mathcal {I}^2. $$ This should be contrasted with the equality lim?inf _n→∞?|T ⁿ (x)?T ⁿ (y)|=0, for a.a. $(x,y)\in \mathcal {I}^{2}$ , which holds since $( \mathcal {I}^{2}, T\times T)$ is ergodic (because generic 3-IETs $( \mathcal {I},T)$ are weakly mixing). We introduce the notion of τ-entropy of an IET which is related to obtaining estimates of type (A2). We also prove that no 3-IET is strongly topologically mixing.     

Transport equation on semidiscrete domains and Poisson–Bernoulli processes

In this paper, we consider a scalar transport equation with constant coefficients on domains with discrete space and continuous, discrete or general time. We show that on all these underlying domains, solutions of the transport equation can conserve sign and integrals both in time and space. Detailed analysis reveals that, under some initial conditions, the solutions correspond to counting stochastic processes and related probability distributions. Consequently, the transport equation could generate various modifications of these processes and distributions and provide some insights into corresponding convergence questions. Possible applications are suggested and discussed.