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With a view to circular economy and environmental sustainability about the possible alternative uses of by-products from the cultivation of winter cereals, the chaff of soft wheat from an experimental plot located in the province of Lodi, Italy, was sent to a briquette pressing plant to assess the feasibility of producing high-density briquettes to make logistics more economical and provide farmers with a range of viable options. A prototype of chaff/straw separator applied as a retrofit to a commercial combine harvester with a conventional threshing apparatus was purpose designed and used. Energy and livestock alternative applications were identified and analyzed. The preliminary results were of interest: the density of the processed biomass was 4.4 times higher than that of the raw material suggesting good conditions of trasportability for medium-short range energy purposes, while from the point of view of their use as litter in cow barns cubicles, a slight preference of dairy cows over sawdust bedding was recorded., Proceedings of the 30th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition, 9-12 May 2022, Online, pp. 756-760

Sudden ionisation of a relatively large molecule can initiate a correlation-driven process dubbed charge migration, where the electron density distribution is expected to rapidly move along the molecular backbone. Capturing this few-femtosecond or attosecond charge redistribution would represent the real-time observation of electron correlation in a molecule with the enticing prospect of following the energy flow from a single excited electron to the other coupled electrons in the system. Here, we report a time-resolved study of the correlation-driven charge migration process occurring in the nucleic-acid base adenine after ionisation with a 15–35 eV attosecond pulse. We find that the production of intact doubly charged adenine – via a shortly-delayed laser-induced second ionisation event – represents the signature of a charge inflation mechanism resulting from many-body excitation. This conclusion is supported by first-principles time-dependent simulations. These findings may contribute to the control of molecular reactivity at the electronic, few-femtosecond time scale.

Fullerenes have unique physical and chemical properties that are associated with their delocalized conjugated electronic structure. Among them, there is a giant ultra-broadband - and therefore ultrafast - plasmon resonance, which for C60 is in the extreme-ultraviolet energy range. While this peculiar resonance has attracted considerable interest for the potential downscaling of nanoplasmonic applications such as sensing, drug delivery and photocatalysis at the atomic level, its electronic character has remained elusive. The ultrafast decay time of this collective excitation demands attosecond techniques for real-time access to the photoinduced dynamics. Here, we uncover the role of electron correlations in the giant plasmon resonance of C60 by employing attosecond photoemission chronoscopy. We find a characteristic photoemission delay of up to 200 attoseconds pertaining to the plasmon that is purely induced by coherent large-scale correlations. This result provides novel insight into the quantum nature of plasmonic resonances, and sets a benchmark for advancing nanoplasmonic applications.

Mechanical proprieties determine many cellular functions, such as cell fate specification, migration, or circulation through vasculature. Identifying factors governing cell mechanical phenotype is therefore a subject of great interest. Here we present a mechanomics approach for establishing links between mechanical phenotype changes and the genes involved in driving them. We employ a machine learning-based discriminative network analysis method termed PC-corr to associate cell mechanical states, measured by real-time deformability cytometry (RT-DC), with large-scale transcriptome datasets ranging from stem cell development to cancer progression, and originating from different murine and human tissues. By intersecting the discriminative networks inferred from two selected datasets, we identify a conserved module of five genes with putative roles in the regulation of cell mechanics. We validate the power of the individual genes to discriminate between soft and stiff cell states in silico, and demonstrate experimentally that the top scoring gene, CAV1, changes the mechanical phenotype of cells when silenced or overexpressed. The data-driven approach presented here has the power of de novo identification of genes involved in cell mechanics regulation and paves the way towards engineering cell mechanical properties on demand to explore their impact on physiological and pathological cell functions.

We demonstrate single-stage post-compression of an Ytterbium fiber laser to about 20 fs based on spectral broadening in a gas-filled multipass cell. A compression factor of seven has been achieved with a throughput of 86%.

Let n be either 2, or an odd integer greater than 1, and fix a prime p > 2(n + 1). Under standard "adequate image" assumptions, we show that the set of components of n-dimensional p-adic potentially semistable local Galois deformation rings that are seen by potentially automorphic compatible systems of polarizable Galois representations over some CM field is independent of the particular global situation. We also (under the same assumption on n) improve on the main potential automorphy result of [BLGGT14b], replacing "potentially diagonalizable" by "potentially globally realizable".

Structural integrity and cellular homeostasis of the embryonic stem cell niche are critical for normal tissue development. In the telencephalic neuroepithelium, this is controlled in part by cell adhesion molecules and regulators of progenitor cell lineage, but the specific orchestration of these processes remains unknown. Here, we studied the role of microRNAs in the embryonic telencephalon as key regulators of gene expression. By using the early recombinerRx-Cremouse, we identify novel and critical roles of miRNAs in early brain development, demonstrating they are essential to preserve the cellular homeostasis and structural integrity of the telencephalic neuroepithelium. We show thatRx-Cre;Dicer(F/F)mouse embryos have a severe disruption of the telencephalic apical junction belt, followed by invagination of the ventricular surface and formation of hyperproliferative rosettes. Transcriptome analyses and functional experimentsin vivoshow that these defects result from upregulation ofIrs2upon loss oflet-7miRNAs in an apoptosis-independent manner. Our results reveal an unprecedented relevance of miRNAs in early forebrain development, with potential mechanistic implications in pediatric brain cancer.

Summary: circSLC45A4 is the main RNA splice isoform produced from its genetic locus and one of the highest expressed circRNAs in the developing human frontal cortex. Knockdown of this highly conserved circRNA in a human neuroblastoma cell line is sufficient to induce spontaneous neuronal differentiation, measurable by increased expression of neuronal marker genes. Depletion of circSlc45a4 in the developing mouse cortex causes a significant reduction of the basal progenitor pool and increases the expression of neurogenic regulators. Furthermore, knockdown of circSlc45a4a induces a significant depletion of cells in the cortical plate. In addition, deconvolution of the bulk RNA-seq data with the help of single-cell RNA-seq data validates the depletion of basal progenitors and reveals an increase in Cajal-Retzius cells. In summary, we present a detailed study of a highly conserved circular RNA that is necessary to maintain the pool of neural progenitors in vitro and in vivo. : Suenkel et al. present a detailed study of the highly conserved circular RNA (circRNA) circSLC45A4 in human neuroblastoma cells and mouse embryonic cortex. They use perturbation experiments and RNA-seq to demonstrate that circSLC45A4 is required to keep neural cells in a progenitor state. Keywords: circular RNA, circRNA, neurogenesis, cortical development, neuronal differentiation, basal progenitor, RNA-seq