Healthy Aging Update, February, 2015, Vol. 10, no. 1

This bimonthly electronic newsletter will provide information and resources on nutrition and health promotion and disease prevention. The Healthy Aging Update is produced for informal and educational purposes only. The newsletter will be distributed electronically and posted on the Department’s website at www.state.ia.us/elderaffairs.

Healthy Aging Update, October, 2014, Vol. 9, no. 4

This bimonthly electronic newsletter will provide information and resources on nutrition and health promotion and disease prevention. The Healthy Aging Update is produced for informal and educational purposes only. The newsletter will be distributed electronically and posted on the Department’s website at www.state.ia.us/elderaffairs.

Healthy Aging Update, December, 2014, Vol. 9, no. 5

This bimonthly electronic newsletter will provide information and resources on nutrition and health promotion and disease prevention. The Healthy Aging Update is produced for informal and educational purposes only. The newsletter will be distributed electronically and posted on the Department’s website at www.state.ia.us/elderaffairs.

Healthy Aging Update, February, 2013, Vol. 8, no. 1

This bimonthly electronic newsletter will provide information and resources on nutrition and health promotion and disease prevention. The Healthy Aging Update is produced for informal and educational purposes only. The newsletter will be distributed electronically and posted on the Department’s website at www.state.ia.us/elderaffairs.

The IBO germination quantitative trait locus encodes a phosphatase 2C-related variant with a nonsynonymous amino acid change that interferes with abscisic acid signaling.

Natural genetic variation is crucial for adaptability of plants to different environments. Seed dormancy prevents precocious germination in unsuitable conditions and is an adaptation to a major macro-environmental parameter, the seasonal variation in temperature and day length. Here we report the isolation of IBO, a quantitative trait locus (QTL) that governs c. 30% of germination rate variance in an Arabidopsis recombinant inbred line (RIL) population derived from the parental accessions Eilenburg-0 (Eil-0) and Loch Ness-0 (Lc-0). IBO encodes an uncharacterized phosphatase 2C-related protein, but neither the Eil-0 nor the Lc-0 variant, which differ in a single amino acid, have any appreciable phosphatase activity in in vitro assays. However, we found that the amino acid change in the Lc-0 variant of the IBO protein confers reduced germination rate. Moreover, unlike the Eil-0 variant of the protein, the Lc-0 variant can interfere with the activity of the phosphatase 2C ABSCISIC ACID INSENSITIVE 1 in vitro. This suggests that the Lc-0 variant possibly interferes with abscisic acid signaling, a notion that is supported by physiological assays. Thus, we isolated an example of a QTL allele with a nonsynonymous amino acid change that might mediate local adaptation of seed germination timing.

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, bi-phones, and bi-syllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users to either upload a set of words to receive their properties, or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal

Signaling pathways controlling induced resistance to insect herbivores in Arabidopsis.

Insect attack triggers changes in transcript level in plants that are mediated predominantly by jasmonic acid (JA). The implication of ethylene (ET), salicylic acid (SA), and other signals in this response is less understood and was monitored with a microarray containing insect- and defense-regulated genes. Arabidopsis thaliana mutants coi1-1, ein2-1, and sid2-1 impaired in JA, ET, and SA signaling pathways were challenged with the specialist small cabbage white (Pieris rapae) and the generalist Egyptian cotton worm (Spodoptera littoralis). JA was shown to be a major signal controlling the upregulation of defense genes in response to either insect but was found to suppress changes in transcript level only in response to P. rapae. Larval growth was affected by the JA-dependent defenses, but S. littoralis gained much more weight on coi1-1 than P. rapae. ET and SA mutants had an altered transcript profile after S. littoralis herbivory but not after P. rapae herbivory. In contrast, both insects yielded similar transcript signatures in the abscisic acid (ABA)-biosynthetic mutants aba2-1 and aba3-1, and ABA controlled transcript levels both negatively and positively in insect-attacked plants. In accordance with the transcript signature, S. littoralis larvae performed better on aba2-1 mutants. This study reveals a new role for ABA in defense against insects in Arabidopsis and identifies some components important for plant resistance to herbivory.

J2EE: Inter Golf

TFC de la carrera d'ETIS, que pretén mostrar els passos i pautes que es tenen que seguir per desenvolupar l'aplicació Inter Golf en l'arquitectura J2EE. Inter Golf serà una pàgina web destinada a la gestió dels tornejos realitzats en un camp de golf, fent servir J2EE, MVC, Struts2, Hibernate i Tiles.

Healthy Aging Update, April, 2015, Vol. 10, no. 2

This bimonthly electronic newsletter will provide information and resources on nutrition and health promotion and disease prevention. The Healthy Aging Update is produced for informal and educational purposes only. The newsletter will be distributed electronically and posted on the Department’s website at www.state.ia.us/elderaffairs.

Healthy Aging Update, June, 2015, Vol. 10, no. 2

This bimonthly electronic newsletter will provide information and resources on nutrition and health promotion and disease prevention. The Healthy Aging Update is produced for informal and educational purposes only. The newsletter will be distributed electronically and posted on the Department’s website at www.state.ia.us/elderaffairs.

Spanish E-Consumer Segmentation and Positioning in Virtual Supermarkets Sector

This article analyses different factors that influence the purchasing behaviour of online supermarket customers. These factors are related to both the appearance of the website as well as the processes that take place when making the purchase. Based on these analyses, the various groups of consumers with homogenous behaviour are studied and positioned according to their attitudes. The analysis also allows the quality of the service offered by this kind of establishment to be defined, as well as the main dimensions in which it develops. In the conclusions, factors which should influence the manager of an online supermarket to improve the quality of its service are given

Joint Enrollment Report, 2009

The Iowa Department of Education collects information on joint enrollment in Iowa’s 15 community colleges. Jointly enrolled students are high school students enrolled in community college credit coursework. Most jointly enrolled students enroll through Senior Year Plus programs such as PSEO (Postsecondary Enrollment Options) and concurrent enrollment. Others enroll independently by paying tuition or enrolling in courses delivered through contractual agreements that do not meet the definition of concurrent enrollment. For more information about Senior Year Plus programs, please refer to the department’s website. This report consists of fiscal year and trend data on joint enrollment including headcount enrollment, credit hours, student demographics, and enrollment by program type and offering arrangement. All data included in this report is taken from the Community College Management Information System (MIS) and confirmed by each college, unless otherwise noted.

An international university network for online teaching of pathology in Frenchspeaking countries

Introduction: Building online courses is a highly time consuming task for teachers of a single university. Universities working alone create high-quality courses but often cannot cover all pathological fields. Moreover this often leads to duplication of contents among universities, representing a big waste of teacher time and energy. We initiated in 2011 a French university network for building mutualized online teaching pathology cases, and this network has been extended in 2012 to Quebec and Switzerland. Method: Twenty French universities (see & for details), University Laval in Quebec and University of Lausanne in Switzerland are associated to this project. One e-learning Moodle platform (http://moodle.sorbonne-paris-cite.fr/) contains texts with URL pointing toward virtual slides that are decentralized in several universities. Each university has the responsibility of its own slide scanning, slide storage and online display with virtual slide viewers. The Moodle website is hosted by PRES Sorbonne Paris Cité, and financial supports for hardware have been obtained from UNF3S (http://www.unf3s.org/) and from PRES Sorbonne Paris Cité. Financial support for international fellowships has been obtained from CFQCU (http://www.cfqcu.org/). Results: The Moodle interface has been explained to pathology teachers using web-based conferences with screen sharing. The teachers added then contents such as clinical cases, selfevaluations and other media organized in several sections by student levels and pathological fields. Contents can be used as online learning or online preparation of subsequent courses in classrooms. In autumn 2013, one resident from Quebec spent 6 weeks in France and Switzerland and created original contents in inflammatory skin pathology. These contents are currently being validated by senior teachers and will be opened to pathology residents in spring 2014. All contents of the website can be accessed for free. Most contents just require anonymous connection but some specific fields, especially those containing pictures obtained from patients who agreed for a teaching use only, require personal identification of the students. Also, students have to register to access Moodle tests. All contents are written in French but one case has been translated into English to illustrate this communication (http://moodle.sorbonne-pariscite.fr/mod/page/view.php?id=261) (use "login as a guest"). The Moodle test module allows many types of shared questions, making it easy to create personalized tests. Contents that are opened to students have been validated by an editorial committee composed of colleagues from the participating institutions. Conclusions: Future developments include other international fellowships, the next one being scheduled for one French resident from May to October 2014 in Quebec, with a study program centered on lung and breast pathology. It must be kept in mind that these e-learning programs highly depend on teachers' time, not only at these early steps but also later to update the contents. We believe that funding resident fellowships for developing online pathological teaching contents is a win-win situation, highly beneficial for the resident who will improve his knowledge and way of thinking, highly beneficial for the teachers who will less worry about access rights or image formats, and finally highly beneficial for the students who will get courses fully adapted to their practice.

T cell receptor-ligand interactions: a conformational preequilibrium or an induced fit.

Kinetic parameters of T cell receptor (TCR) interactions with its ligand have been proposed to control T cell activation. Analysis of kinetic data obtained has so far produced conflicting insights; here, we offer a consideration of this problem. As a model system, association and dissociation of a soluble TCR (sT1) and its specific ligand, an azidobenzoic acid derivative of the peptide SYIPSAEK-(ABA)I (residues 252-260 from Plasmodium berghei circumsporozoite protein), bound to class I MHC H-2K(d)-encoded molecule (MHCp) were studied by surface plasmon resonance. The association time courses exhibited biphasic patterns. The fast and dominant phase was assigned to ligand association with the major fraction of TCR molecules, whereas the slow component was attributed to the presence of traces of TCR dimers. The association rate constant derived for the fast phase, assuming a reversible, single-step reaction mechanism, was relatively slow and markedly temperature-dependent, decreasing from 7.0 x 10(3) at 25 degrees C to 1.8 x 10(2) M(-1).s(-1) at 4 degrees C. Hence, it is suggested that these observed slow rate constants are the result of unresolved elementary steps of the process. Indeed, our analysis of the kinetic data shows that the time courses of TCR-MHCp interaction fit well to two different, yet closely related mechanisms, where an induced fit or a preequilibrium of two unbound TCR conformers are operational. These mechanisms may provide a rationale for the reported conformational flexibility of the TCR and its unusual ligand recognition properties, which combine high specificity with considerable crossreactivity.

Screening of Brazilian soybean genotypes with high potential for somatic embryogenesis and plant regeneration

The aim of this work was to identify Brazilian soybean (Glycine max) genotypes with potential to respond to in vitro culture stimuli for primary somatic embryo induction, secondary embryo proliferation and plant regeneration. Differences among eight tested cultivars were observed at each stage. Two cultivars, IAS-5 and BRSMG 68 Vencedora, were selected for the evaluation of the capacity for embryo differentiation and plant regeneration. These cultivars had high embryo induction frequencies, repetitive embryogenic proliferation, and low precocious embryo germination in the initial experiment. The effect of abscisic acid (ABA) and charcoal addition on plant regeneration was investigated. The addition of ABA to proliferation medium and of ABA and activated charcoal to maturation medium increased embryo differentiation rates, which resulted in a higher number of regenerated plants. The BRSMG 68 Vencedora cultivar was found to have a high potential for embryo induction, embryo proliferation and plant regeneration. The potential of this cultivar for somatic embryogenesis was similar to that observed for cultivar IAS-5, which is currently used for soybean transformation in Brazil. BRSMG 68 Vencedora may be a good alternative genotype for soybean genetic engineering via somatic embryogenesis protocols.