MICROBIOLOGY: Patchwork Plasmid Poison

Graphene patchwork.

Graphene oxide (GO) holds tremendous potential for large-area electronics, high strength and conducting fillers in composites, and high-surface-area electrodes for energy storage. Graphene oxide for such applications will require manufacturing methods that are industrially compatible but also preserve its unique properties. Recent work by Korkut et al. describes a promising new scheme for conti...

Science fraud: from patchwork mouse to patchwork data.

Patchwork Terrains

We present a radically new method for the management, multi-resolution representation and rendering of large terrain databases. Our method has two main benefits: it provides a Ck representation of terrain, with k depending on the type of base patches; and it supports efficient updates of the database as new data come in. We assume terrain data to come as a collection of regularly sampled overla...

Poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac.

Autoregulation of the pTF-FC2 proteic poison-antidote plasmid addiction system (pas) is essential for plasmid stabilization.

The pasABC genes of the proteic plasmid addiction system of broad-host-range plasmid pTF-FC2 were autoregulated. The PasA antidote was able to repress the operon 25-fold on its own, and repression was increased to 100-fold when the PasB toxin was also present. Autoregulation appears to be an essential requirement for pas-mediated plasmid stabilization because when the pas genes were placed behi...