Miri Adler, Kohanim, Yael Korem, Tendler, Avichai , Mayo, Avi , ו Alon, Uri . 2019.
“Continuum Of Gene-Expression Profiles Provides Spatial Division Of Labor Within A Differentiated Cell Type”. Cell Systems, 8, Pp. 43–52.
Lukas Eickhoff, Dreischmeier, Katharina , Zipori, Assaf , Sirotinskaya, Vera , Adar, Chen , Reicher, Naama , Braslavsky, Ido , Rudich, Yinon , ו Koop, Thomas . 2019.
“Contrasting Behavior Of Antifreeze Proteins: Ice Growth Inhibitors And Ice Nucleation Promoters”. The Journal Of Physical Chemistry Letters, 10, 5, Pp. 966 - 972. .
Publisher's Version תקציר Several types of natural molecules interact specifically with ice crystals. Small antifreeze proteins (AFPs) adsorb to particular facets of ice crystals, thus inhibiting their growth, whereas larger ice-nucleating proteins (INPs) can trigger the formation of new ice crystals at temperatures much higher than the homogeneous ice nucleation temperature of pure water. It has been proposed that both types of proteins interact similarly with ice and that, in principle, they may be able to exhibit both functions. Here we investigated two naturally occurring antifreeze proteins, one from fish, type-III AFP, and one from beetles, TmAFP. We show that in addition to ice growth inhibition, both can also trigger ice nucleation above the homogeneous freezing temperature, providing unambiguous experimental proof for their contrasting behavior. Our analysis suggests that the predominant difference between AFPs and INPs is their molecular size, which is a very good predictor of their ice nucleation temperature.Several types of natural molecules interact specifically with ice crystals. Small antifreeze proteins (AFPs) adsorb to particular facets of ice crystals, thus inhibiting their growth, whereas larger ice-nucleating proteins (INPs) can trigger the formation of new ice crystals at temperatures much higher than the homogeneous ice nucleation temperature of pure water. It has been proposed that both types of proteins interact similarly with ice and that, in principle, they may be able to exhibit both functions. Here we investigated two naturally occurring antifreeze proteins, one from fish, type-III AFP, and one from beetles, TmAFP. We show that in addition to ice growth inhibition, both can also trigger ice nucleation above the homogeneous freezing temperature, providing unambiguous experimental proof for their contrasting behavior. Our analysis suggests that the predominant difference between AFPs and INPs is their molecular size, which is a very good predictor of their ice nucleation temperature.
Davide Zoccatelli, Marra, Francesco , Armon, Moshe , Rinat, Yair , Smith, James A. , ו Morin, Efrat . 2019.
“Contrasting Rainfall-Runoff Characteristics Of Floods In Desert And Mediterranean Basins”. Hydrology And Earth System Sciences Discussions, 12, Pp. 2665–2678. doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-2665-2019.
תקציר Abstract. Catchment scale hydrological studies on drylands are lacking because of the scarcity of consistent data: observations are often available at the plot scale, but their relevance for the catchment scale remains unclear. A database of 24 years of stream gauge discharge and homogeneous high-resolution radar data over the eastern Mediterranean allows to describe the properties of moderate floods over catchments spanning from Desert to Mediterranean climates. Comparing two climatic regions, Desert and Mediterranean, we are able to better identify specific rainfall-runoff properties. Despite the large differences in rainfall forcing between the two regions, the resulting unit peak discharges and runoff coefficients are comparable. In Mediterranean areas rain depth and antecedent conditions are the most important properties to shape flood response. In Deserts, instead, storm core properties display a strong correlation with unit peak discharge and, to a less extent, with runoff coefficient. In this region, an inverse correlation with mean catchment annual precipitation suggests also a strong influence of local surface properties. Preliminary analyses suggest that floods in catchments with wet headwater and dry lower section are more similar to desert catchments, with a strong influence of storm core properties on runoff generation.
Davide Zoccatelli, Marra, Francesco , Armon, Moshe , Rinat, Yair , Smith, James A. , ו Morin, Efrat . 2019.
“Contrasting Rainfall-Runoff Characteristics Of Floods In Desert And Mediterranean Basins”. Hydrology And Earth System Sciences Discussions, 12, Pp. 2665–2678. doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-2665-2019.
תקציר Abstract. Catchment scale hydrological studies on drylands are lacking because of the scarcity of consistent data: observations are often available at the plot scale, but their relevance for the catchment scale remains unclear. A database of 24 years of stream gauge discharge and homogeneous high-resolution radar data over the eastern Mediterranean allows to describe the properties of moderate floods over catchments spanning from Desert to Mediterranean climates. Comparing two climatic regions, Desert and Mediterranean, we are able to better identify specific rainfall-runoff properties. Despite the large differences in rainfall forcing between the two regions, the resulting unit peak discharges and runoff coefficients are comparable. In Mediterranean areas rain depth and antecedent conditions are the most important properties to shape flood response. In Deserts, instead, storm core properties display a strong correlation with unit peak discharge and, to a less extent, with runoff coefficient. In this region, an inverse correlation with mean catchment annual precipitation suggests also a strong influence of local surface properties. Preliminary analyses suggest that floods in catchments with wet headwater and dry lower section are more similar to desert catchments, with a strong influence of storm core properties on runoff generation.
Elisheva Michman, Langenberg, Marcel , Stenger, Roland , Oded, Meirav , Schvartzman, Mark , Müller, Marcus , ו Shenhar, Roy . 2019.
“Controlled Spacing Between Nano-Patterned Regions In Block Copolymer Films Obtained By Utilizing Substrate Topography For Local Film Thickness Differentiation”. Acs Applied Materials & Interfaces, 11, Pp. 35247-35254. .
Publisher's Version Various types of devices require hierarchically nano-patterned substrates, where spacing between patterned domains is controlled. Ultra-confined films exhibit extreme morphological sensitivity to slight variations in film thickness when the substrate is highly selective toward one of the blocks. Here, it is shown that using the substrate’s topography as a thickness differentiating tool enables the creation of domains with different surface patterns in a fully controlled fashion from a single, unblended block copolymer. This approach is applicable to block copolymers of different compositions and to different topographical patterns, and thus opens numerous possibilities for hierarchical construction of multifunctional devices.
Yihui He, Alexander, Grant C. B. , Das, Sanjib , Liu, Zhifu , Hadar, Ido , McCall, Kyle M. , Lin, Wenwen , Xu, Yadong , Chung, Duck Young , Wessels, Bruce W. , ו Kanatzidis, Mercouri G.. 2019.
“Controlling The Vapor Transport Crystal Growth Of Hg3Se2I2 Hard Radiation Detector Using Organic Polymer”. Crystal Growth & Design, 19, 4, Pp. 2074-2080. doi:10.1021/acs.cgd.8b01646.
Publisher's Version תקציר The chalcohalide compound Hg3Se2I2 with a defect anti-perovskite structure has been demonstrated to be a promising semiconductor for room temperature X- and γ-ray detection. In this work, we use transport agents during the vapor growth of Hg3Se2I2 crystals under gradient temperature profiles to dramatically improve the size and yield of Hg3Se2I2 single crystals. Various growth conditions with combinations of organic polymer (polyethylene) with elemental Hg, Se, or I2 are compared. The largest single crystals (with size up to 7 × 5 × 3.5 mm3) were obtained using both polyethylene and excess I2 as the transport agents. The as-prepared detector devices based on these crystals have excellent photo response to a series of radiation sources, including low flux X-ray source, alpha particles, and γ-rays. The X-ray induced photocurrent of Hg3Se2I2 detectors is 3 orders of magnitude higher than the dark current, indicating excellent X-ray photosensitivity. Under 241Am α particle source (5.5 MeV), the best energy resolution obtained is ∼8.1%. The Hg3Se2I2 device also shows improved detector performance under 57Co and 137Cs γ-ray sources. The improved crystal growth and detector performance using this polymer additive during the vapor transport process further confirms the great potential for the development of Hg3Se2I2 for radiation detection.
Spatial resolution enhancement is a pre-requisite for integrating unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) datasets with the data from other sources. However, the mobility of UAV platforms, along with radiometric and atmospheric distortions, makes the task difficult. In this paper, various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures are explored for resolving the issues related to sub-pixel classification and super-resolution of drone-derived datasets. The main contributions of this work are: 1) network-inversion based architectures for super-resolution and sub-pixel mapping of drone-derived images taking into account their spectral-spatial characteristics and the distortions prevalent in them 2) a feature-guided transformation for regularizing the inversion problem 3) loss functions for improving the spectral fidelity and inter-label compatibility of coarser to finer-scale mapping 4) use of multi-size kernel units for avoiding over-fitting. The proposed approach is the first of its kind in using neural network inversion for super-resolution and sub-pixel mapping. Experiments indicate that the proposed super-resolution approach gives better results in comparison with the sparse-code based approaches which generally result in corrupted dictionaries and sparse codes for multispectral aerial images. Also, the proposed use of neural network inversion, for projecting spatial affinities to sub-pixel maps, facilitates the consideration of coarser-scale texture and color information in modeling the finer-scale spatial-correlation. The simultaneous consideration of spectral bands, as proposed in this study, gives better super-resolution results when compared to the individual band enhancements. The proposed use of different data-augmentation strategies, for emulating the distortions, improves the generalization capability of the framework. Sensitivity of the proposed super-resolution and sub-pixel mapping frameworks with regard to the network parameters is thoroughly analyzed. The experiments over various standard datasets as well as those collected from known locations indicate that the proposed frameworks perform better when compared to the prominent published approaches. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd
Agricultural cooperatives in Russia have had an uneven evolution: from their initial form of service cooperatives based on classical principles of cooperation in the decades before 1929, they evolved to predominantly production cooperatives during the Soviet era and then back to service cooperatives with the rapid decline in the number and share of production cooperatives after 1992. The number of agricultural cooperatives providing product marketing, input supply, machinery and farm credit services matches the number of production cooperatives as of 2016 but formal membership in service cooperatives is minuscule. Yet, the potential membership in agricultural service cooperatives is conservatively estimated at between 3.8 and 7.5 million rural households, or between 29% and 56% of the rural households in 2017. These numbers represent the pool of small agricultural producers in Russia that are most likely to benefit from cooperation in farm services. More optimistic estimates put the potential number of cooperators at over 90% of all rural households. Examination of possible policy measures for the development of service cooperatives has led to a disturbing conclusion that cooperatives flourish in regions that provide ample budgetary support. No tendencies for significant bottom-up development of cooperatives are observed. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Much has been written since the early 1980s about the costs of regulation and the various ways to curb them, but thus far no one has examined empirically the rise or decline of other forms of legislation, mainly primary legislation, in the context of the “war on regulation.” This article examines the extent to which the decline in the rate of production of secondary legislation in Israel since 1985 has been driven by changes in the rate of production of primary legislation. Using an original longitudinal data set, we count, codify various dimensions, and compare the type and length of primary and secondary legislations and the number of delegated provisions that primary legislations contain. We find that the relationship between primary and secondary legislation is not hierarchic, as one might have expected, but has become partially substitutive. The decline in the rate of production of secondary legislation in Israel is, perhaps paradoxically, associated with the rise of primary legislation. This opens a new research agenda on the relationships between primary and secondary legislation that goes well beyond the Israeli case.
F. Kokou, Sasson, G. , Friedman, Jonathan , Eyal, S. , Ovadia, O. , Harpaz, S. , Cnaani, A. , ו Mizrahi, I.. 2019.
“Core Gut Microbial Communities Are Maintained By Beneficial Interactions And Strain Variability In Fish”. Nature Microbiology, 4, 12, Pp. 2456-2465. doi:10.1038/s41564-019-0560-0.
Publisher's Version תקציר The term core microbiome describes microbes that are consistently present in a particular habitat. If the conditions in that habitat are highly variable, core microbes may also be considered to be ecological generalists. However, little is known about whether metabolic competition and microbial interactions influence the ability of some microbes to persist in the core microbiome while others cannot. We investigated microbial communities at three sites in the guts of European seabass under four dietary conditions. We identified generalist core microbial populations in each gut site that are shared across fish, present under multiple diets and persistent over time. We found that core microbes tend to show synergistic growth in co-culture, and low levels of predicted and validated metabolic competition. Within core microbial species, we found high levels of intraspecific variability and strain-specific habitat specialization. Thus, both intraspecific variability and interspecific facilitation may contribute to the ecological stability of the animal core microbiome. © 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
Rimma Goldberg, Scotta, Cristiano , Cooper, Dianne , Nissim-Eliraz, Einat , Nir, Eilam , Tasker, Scott , Irving, Peter M, Sanderson, Jeremy , Lavender, Paul , Ibrahim, Fowzia , Corcoran, Jonathan , Prevost, Toby , Shpigel, Nahum Y, Marelli-Berg, Federica , Lombardi, Giovanna , ו Lord, Graham M. 2019.
“Correction Of Defective T-Regulatory Cells From Patients With Crohn's Disease By Ex Vivo Ligation Of Retinoic Acid Receptor Alpha.”. Gastroenterology. doi:10.1053/j.gastro.2019.01.025.
תקציר BACKGROUND & AIMS: Crohn's disease (CD) is characterized by an imbalance of effector and regulatory T cells in the intestinal mucosa. The efficacy of anti-adhesion therapies led us to investigate whether impaired trafficking of T-regulatory (Treg) cells contributes to the pathogenesis of CD. We also investigated whether proper function could be restored to Treg cells by ex vivo expansion in the presence of factors that activate their regulatory activities.
METHODS: We measured levels of the integrin α4β7 on Treg cells isolated from peripheral blood or lamina propria of patients with CD and healthy individuals (controls). Treg cells were expanded ex vivo and incubated with rapamycin with or without agonists of the retinoic acid receptor alpha (RARA) and their gene expression profiles were analyzed. We also studied the cells in cytokine challenge, suppression, and flow chamber assays and in SCID mice with human intestinal xenografts.
RESULTS: We found that Treg cells from patients with CD express lower levels of the integrin α4β7 than Treg cells from control patients. The pathway that regulates expression of integrin subunit alpha is induced by retinoic acid (RA). Treg cells from patients with CD incubated with rapamycin and an agonist of RARA (RAR568) expressed high levels of integrin α4β7, as well as CD62L and FOXP3, compared to cells incubated with rapamycin or rapamycin and ATRA. These Treg cells had increased suppressive activities in assays and migrated under conditions of shear flow; they did not produce inflammatory cytokines and RAR568 had no effect on cell stability or lineage commitment. Fluorescently labelled Treg cells incubated with RAR568 were significantly more likely to traffic to intestinal xenografts than Treg cells expanded in control medium.
CONCLUSIONS: Treg cells from patients with CD express lower levels of the integrin α4β7 than Treg cells from control patients. Incubation of patients' ex vivo expanded Treg cells with rapamycin and an RARA agonist induced expression of α4β7 and had suppressive and migratory activities in culture and in intestinal xenografts in mice. These cells might be developed for treatment of CD. clinicaltrials.gov no: NCT03185000.
