Estimativas de parâmetros genéticos em linhagens avançadas de soja

Pós-graduação em Agronomia (Genética e Melhoramento de Plantas) - FCAV

Simultaneous Determination of Iron and Copper in Ethanol Fuel Using Nafion/Carbon Nanotubes Electrode

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Voltammetric sensor for simultaneous determination of p-phenylenediamine and resorcinol in permanent hair dyeing and tap water by composite carbon nanotubes/chitosan modified electrode

p-Phenylenediamine (PPD) and resorcinol (RSN) are hair dye precursors of permanent dyeing more used worldwide. The present work describes a simple and economic voltammetric sensor for simultaneous determination of both components in commercial hair dyeing and tap water at low concentrations. PPD and RSN are oxidized at + 0.17 and + 0.61 V vs. Ag/AgCl at glassy carbon electrode coated by composites of multiwall carbon nanotubes with chitosan (MWNTs-CHT/GCE), which anodic currents density normalized are 10% and 70% higher in relation to the unmodified electrode, respectively. The calibration curve for simultaneous determination of PPD and RSN showed linearity between 0.55 and 21.2 mg L-1 with detection limits of 0.79 and 0.58 mg L-1 to PPD and RSN, respectively. The relative standard deviations found for ten determinations were of 0.73 and 2.35% to 2.70 mg L-1, and 0.87 and 1.08% to 15.96 mg L-1 to PPD and RSN, respectively. The voltammetric sensor was applied to determination of PPD and RSN in tap water and commercial hair dyeing samples and the average recovery for these samples was around 97%. The products generated from PPD and RSN reaction such as was p-quinonediimine and bandrowski base were detected by LC-MS/MS and UV-vis spectrophotometry. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.

The zero-inflated Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution: Bayesian inference, regression modeling and influence diagnostic

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Simultaneous determination of epinephrine and dopamine by electrochemical reduction on the hybrid material SiO2/graphene oxide decorated with Ag nanoparticles

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Simultaneous determination of chromium and nickel in medicinal plants by slurry sampling graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Maxillary sinus lift without grafting, and simultaneous implant placement: a prospective clinical study with a 51-month follow-up

A prospective clinical study of maxillary sinus lift procedures in the posterior region of the maxilla, using only blood clot as filling material, was conducted. Seventeen patients underwent a maxillary sinus lift procedure; 20 maxillary sinus regions were operated on and a total of 25 implants were placed. The sinus mucosa was lifted together with the anterior wall of the osteotomized maxilla and supported by the implants placed. Computed tomography (CT) scans were obtained immediately postoperative (T-initial) and at 3 (T-1) and 51(T-2) months postoperative for the measurement of linear bone height and bone density (by grey tones). Only one implant was lost in the first stage (96% success). After dental prosthesis placement and during up to 51 months of follow-up, no implant was lost (100% success, second stage). The difference in mean bone height between T-initial (5.94 mm) and T-1 (13.14 mm), and between T-initial and T-2 (11.57 mm), was statistically significant (both P < 0.001); comparison between T-1 and T-2 also presented a statistical difference (P < 0.001). Bone density had increased at the end of the period analyzed, but this was not statistically significant (P > 0.05). Thus, the maxillary sinus lift technique with immediate implant placement, filling with blood clot only, may be performed with a high success rate.

Synergy between polyaniline and OMt clay mineral in Langmuir-Blodgett films for the simultaneous detection of traces of metal ions

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Genome-wide association study of reproductive traits in Nellore heifers using Bayesian inference

An important goal of Zebu breeding programs is to improve reproductive performance. A major problem faced with the genetic improvement of reproductive traits is that recording the time for an animal to reach sexual maturity is costly. Another issue is that accurate estimates of breeding values are obtained only a long time after the young bulls have gone through selection. An alternative to overcome these problems is to use traits that are indicators of the reproductive efficiency of the herd and are easier to measure, such as age at first calving. Another problem is that heifers that have conceived once may fail to conceive in the next breeding season, which increases production costs. Thus, increasing heifer's rebreeding rates should improve the economic efficiency of the herd. Response to selection for these traits tends to be slow, since they have a low heritability and phenotypic information is provided only later in the life of the animal. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are useful to investigate the genetic mechanisms that underlie these traits by identifying the genes and metabolic pathways involved. Data from 1853 females belonging to the Agricultural Jacarezinho LTDA were used. Genotyping was performed using the BovineHD BeadChip (777 962 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)) according to the protocol of Illumina - Infinium Assay II ® Multi-Sample HiScan with the unit SQ ™ System. After quality control, 305 348 SNPs were used for GWAS. Forty-two and 19 SNPs had a Bayes factor greater than 150 for heifer rebreeding and age at first calving, respectively. All significant SNPs for age at first calving were significant for heifer rebreeding. These 42 SNPs were next or within 35 genes that were distributed over 18 chromosomes and comprised 27 protein-encoding genes, six pseudogenes and two miscellaneous noncoding RNAs. The use of Bayes factor to determine the significance of SNPs allowed us to identify two sets of 42 and 19 significant SNPs for heifer rebreeding and age at first calving, respectively, which explain 11.35 % and 6.42 % of their phenotypic variance, respectively. These SNPs provide relevant information to help elucidate which genes affect these traits.

A Model-Based Approach for Making Ecological Inference from Distance Sampling Data

We consider a fully model-based approach for the analysis of distance sampling data. Distance sampling has been widely used to estimate abundance (or density) of animals or plants in a spatially explicit study area. There is, however, no readily available method of making statistical inference on the relationships between abundance and environmental covariates. Spatial Poisson process likelihoods can be used to simultaneously estimate detection and intensity parameters by modeling distance sampling data as a thinned spatial point process. A model-based spatial approach to distance sampling data has three main benefits: it allows complex and opportunistic transect designs to be employed, it allows estimation of abundance in small subregions, and it provides a framework to assess the effects of habitat or experimental manipulation on density. We demonstrate the model-based methodology with a small simulation study and analysis of the Dubbo weed data set. In addition, a simple ad hoc method for handling overdispersion is also proposed. The simulation study showed that the model-based approach compared favorably to conventional distance sampling methods for abundance estimation. In addition, the overdispersion correction performed adequately when the number of transects was high. Analysis of the Dubbo data set indicated a transect effect on abundance via Akaike’s information criterion model selection. Further goodness-of-fit analysis, however, indicated some potential confounding of intensity with the detection function.

The Perception of Natural, Cell Phone, and Computer-Synthesized Speech During The Performance Of Simultaneous Visual-Motor Tasks

This study investigated the influence of top-down and bottom-up information on speech perception in complex listening environments. Specifically, the effects of listening to different types of processed speech were examined on intelligibility and on simultaneous visual-motor performance. The goal was to extend the generalizability of results in speech perception to environments outside of the laboratory. The effect of bottom-up information was evaluated with natural, cell phone and synthetic speech. The effect of simultaneous tasks was evaluated with concurrent visual-motor and memory tasks. Earlier works on the perception of speech during simultaneous visual-motor tasks have shown inconsistent results (Choi, 2004; Strayer & Johnston, 2001). In the present experiments, two dual-task paradigms were constructed in order to mimic non-laboratory listening environments. In the first two experiments, an auditory word repetition task was the primary task and a visual-motor task was the secondary task. Participants were presented with different kinds of speech in a background of multi-speaker babble and were asked to repeat the last word of every sentence while doing the simultaneous tracking task. Word accuracy and visual-motor task performance were measured. Taken together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the intelligibility of natural speech was better than synthetic speech and that synthetic speech was better perceived than cell phone speech. The visual-motor methodology was found to demonstrate independent and supplemental information and provided a better understanding of the entire speech perception process. Experiment 3 was conducted to determine whether the automaticity of the tasks (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977) helped to explain the results of the first two experiments. It was found that cell phone speech allowed better simultaneous pursuit rotor performance only at low intelligibility levels when participants ignored the listening task. Also, simultaneous task performance improved dramatically for natural speech when intelligibility was good. Overall, it could be concluded that knowledge of intelligibility alone is insufficient to characterize processing of different speech sources. Additional measures such as attentional demands and performance of simultaneous tasks were also important in characterizing the perception of different kinds of speech in complex listening environments.

Assessing the gain of biological data integration in gene networks inference

Background: A current challenge in gene annotation is to define the gene function in the context of the network of relationships instead of using single genes. The inference of gene networks (GNs) has emerged as an approach to better understand the biology of the system and to study how several components of this network interact with each other and keep their functions stable. However, in general there is no sufficient data to accurately recover the GNs from their expression levels leading to the curse of dimensionality, in which the number of variables is higher than samples. One way to mitigate this problem is to integrate biological data instead of using only the expression profiles in the inference process. Nowadays, the use of several biological information in inference methods had a significant increase in order to better recover the connections between genes and reduce the false positives. What makes this strategy so interesting is the possibility of confirming the known connections through the included biological data, and the possibility of discovering new relationships between genes when observed the expression data. Although several works in data integration have increased the performance of the network inference methods, the real contribution of adding each type of biological information in the obtained improvement is not clear. Methods: We propose a methodology to include biological information into an inference algorithm in order to assess its prediction gain by using biological information and expression profile together. We also evaluated and compared the gain of adding four types of biological information: (a) protein-protein interaction, (b) Rosetta stone fusion proteins, (c) KEGG and (d) KEGG+GO. Results and conclusions: This work presents a first comparison of the gain in the use of prior biological information in the inference of GNs by considering the eukaryote (P. falciparum) organism. Our results indicates that information based on direct interaction can produce a higher improvement in the gain than data about a less specific relationship as GO or KEGG. Also, as expected, the results show that the use of biological information is a very important approach for the improvement of the inference. We also compared the gain in the inference of the global network and only the hubs. The results indicates that the use of biological information can improve the identification of the most connected proteins.