Explore the vast range of titles available.

Ligaments and tendons are fibrous tissues with poor vascularity and limited regeneration capacity. Currently, a ligament/tendon injury often require a surgical procedure using auto- or allografts that present some limitations. These inadequacies combined with the significant economic and health impact have prompted the development of tissue engineering approaches. Several natural and synthetic biodegradable polymers as well as composites, blends and hybrids based on such materials have been used to produce tendon and ligament scaffolds. Given the complex structure of native tissues, the production of fiber-based scaffolds has been the preferred option for tendon/ligament tissue engineering. Electrospinning and several textile methods such as twisting, braiding and knitting have been used to produce these scaffolds. This review focuses on the developments achieved in the preparation of tendon/ ligament scaffolds based on different biodegradable polymers. Several examples are overviewed and their processing methodologies, as well as their biological and mechanical performances, are discussed.

Snowshoe hares molt from a brown coat to a white coat in winter. In some populations, however, where winter snow is less extensive, hares molt from a brown coat to a brown coat. Jones et al. show that regulation of the pigmentation gene Agouti is responsible for the winter coat color change. Hybridization with jackrabbits has led to introgression around this gene that facilitates the brown winter morph. Hybridization appears to have provided important adaptive variation to the snowshoe hare. Science , this issue p. 1355 Exchange of genetic variants through hybridization can seed past and ongoing adaptation to rapidly changing environments. Snowshoe hares ( Lepus americanus ) maintain seasonal camouflage by molting to a white winter coat, but some hares remain brown during the winter in regions with low snow cover. We show that cis-regulatory variation controlling seasonal expression of the Agouti gene underlies this adaptive winter camouflage polymorphism. Genetic variation at Agouti clustered by winter coat color across multiple hare and jackrabbit species, revealing a history of recurrent interspecific gene flow. Brown winter coats in snowshoe hares likely originated from an introgressed black-tailed jackrabbit allele that has swept to high frequency in mild winter environments. These discoveries show that introgression of genetic variants that underlie key ecological traits can seed past and ongoing adaptation to rapidly changing environments.

A bstract The QCD axion is one of the most compelling solutions of the strong CP problem. There are major current efforts into searching for an ultralight, invisible axion, which is believed to be the only phenomenologically viable realization of the QCD axion. Visible axions with decay constants at or below the electroweak scale are believed to have been long excluded by laboratory searches. Considering the significance of the axion solution to the strong CP problem, we revisit experimental constraints on QCD axions in the O (10 MeV) mass window. In particular, we find a variant axion model that remains compatible with existing constraints. This model predicts new states at the GeV scale coupled hadronically, and a variety of low-energy axion signatures, such as rare meson decays, nuclear de-excitations via axion emission, and production in e + e − annihilation and fixed target experiments. This reopens the possibility of solving the strong CP problem at the GeV scale.

A bstract It has been long-understood that final state rescattering effects provide O (1) corrections to hadronic meson decays rates, such as η → πππ and η ′ → ηππ . Hence, one would expect that such effects would be just as important in axio-hadronic η and η ′ decays, such as η ( ′ ) → ππa , where a is an axion or axion-like particle (ALP). And indeed they are, as we show in this paper by using the treatment of dispersion relations to include the effects of strong final state interactions in several axio-hadronic processes, namely, η ( ′ ) → π 0 π 0 a , η ( ′ ) → π + π − a , and η ′ → ηπ 0 a . We also compute the perturbative, leading order decay rates for multiple ALP emission, such as in η ( ′ ) → π 0 aa , η ′ → ηaa and η ( ′ ) → aaa , and briefly discuss the expected corrections from strong interactions and the processes that must be considered for an accurate rate estimation of these multi-ALP decay channels.

In this paper, we introduce unitary flavour violation to produce multi-Higgs doublets models where all flavour par ameters are contained within three unitary matrices. After that, we identify two of its subclasses, the left and right models, which have naturally suppressed tree-lev el flavour changing neutral couplings that easily avoid the experimental constraints derived from neutral meson mi xing. Then, we show that left models can accomodate spontaneous CP violation when all quarks have flavour changing neutr al couplings. Finally, we illustrate these concepts by considering a specific implementation with three Higgs doublets.

Anaerobic dairy waste treatment requires effective control to avoid long-chain fatty acid (LCFA) inhibitory effects on anaerobic microorganisms, especially methanogens. The hybrid anaerobic baffled reactor (HABR) can provide system stability, but more needs to be done to understand how the microbial communities underpinning the HABR compartments behave and respond. Thus, this study aimed to examine the HABR’s microbial community correlating its performance when subjected to an increase in organic loading rate (OLR) during simulated dairy wastewater treatment. Besides the elevation in OLR, the system could maintain a high COD removal efficiency, nearly to 91%, and elevate the methane production to 53%. Almost all of the organic matter removal occurred mainly in C1 and C2 compartments. The genera Methanosaeta, an acetoclastic methanogen, and Methanobacterium, a hydrogenotrophic methanogen, were the HABR’s dominant species. The most representative phylum found was Bacteroidetes (12–28%), Firmicutes (3–20%), Chloroflexi (4–26%), and Proteobacteria (4–14%). Species capable of syntrophic partnership with methanogens were also identified, belonging to the family of Syntrophomonadaceae and Syntrophaceae. Microorganisms able to perform the AD process as HA73, VadinCA02, T78, Longilinea, Clostridium, and Syntrophomonas were present in the HABR.

A bstract We propose an adaptation of Entanglement Renormalization for quantum field theories that, through the use of discrete wavelet transforms, strongly parallels the tensor network architecture of the Multiscale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (a.k.a. MERA). Our approach, called wMERA, has several advantages of over previous attempts to adapt MERA to continuum systems. In particular, (i) wMERA is formulated directly in position space, hence preserving the quasi-locality and sparsity of entanglers; and (ii) it enables a built-in RG flow in the implementation of real-time evolution and in computations of correlation functions, which is key for efficient numerical implementations. As examples, we describe in detail two concrete implementations of our wMERA algorithm for free scalar and fermionic theories in (1+1) spacetime dimensions. Possible avenues for constructing wMERAs for interacting field theories are also discussed.

We introduce CellPhy, a maximum likelihood framework for inferring phylogenetic trees from somatic single-cell single-nucleotide variants. CellPhy leverages a finite-site Markov genotype model with 16 diploid states and considers amplification error and allelic dropout. We implement CellPhy into RAxML-NG, a widely used phylogenetic inference package that provides statistical confidence measurements and scales well on large datasets with hundreds or thousands of cells. Comprehensive simulations suggest that CellPhy is more robust to single-cell genomics errors and outperforms state-of-the-art methods under realistic scenarios, both in accuracy and speed. CellPhy is freely available at https://github.com/amkozlov/cellphy .

Our knowledge about the gut microbiota of pigs is still scarce, despite the importance of these animals for biomedical research and agriculture. Here, we present a collection of cultured bacteria from the pig gut, including 110 species across 40 families and nine phyla. We provide taxonomic descriptions for 22 novel species and 16 genera. Meta-analysis of 16S rRNA amplicon sequence data and metagenome-assembled genomes reveal prevalent and pig-specific species within Lactobacillus , Streptococcus , Clostridium , Desulfovibrio , Enterococcus , Fusobacterium , and several new genera described in this study. Potentially interesting functions discovered in these organisms include a fucosyltransferase encoded in the genome of the novel species Clostridium porci , and prevalent gene clusters for biosynthesis of sactipeptide-like peptides. Many strains deconjugate primary bile acids in in vitro assays, and a Clostridium scindens strain produces secondary bile acids via dehydroxylation. In addition, cells of the novel species Bullifex porci are coccoidal or spherical under the culture conditions tested, in contrast with the usual helical shape of other members of the family Spirochaetaceae . The strain collection, called ‘Pig intestinal bacterial collection’ (PiBAC), is publicly available at www.dsmz.de/pibac and opens new avenues for functional studies of the pig gut microbiota. The authors present a public collection of 117 bacterial isolates from the pig gut, including the description of 38 novel taxa. Interesting functions discovered in these organisms include a new fucosyltransferease and sactipeptide-like molecules encoded by biosynthetic gene clusters.

The application of anaerobic digestion technology is growing worldwide because of its economic and environmental benefits. As a consequence, a number of studies and research activities dealing with the determination of the biogas potential of solid organic substrates have been carrying out in the recent years. Therefore, it is of particular importance to define a protocol for the determination of the ultimate methane potential for a given solid substrates. In fact, this parameter determines, to a certain extent, both design and economic details of a biogas plant. Furthermore, the definition of common units to be used in anaerobic assays is increasingly requested from the scientific and engineering community. This paper presents some guidelines for biomethane potential assays prepared by the Task Group for the Anaerobic Biodegradation, Activity and Inhibition Assays of the Anaerobic Digestion Specialist Group of the International Water Association. This is the first step for the definition of a standard protocol.