Several recent studies demonstrate that piRNAs guide Piwi protein to repress transposon transcription in fly ovaries, much as fission yeast use siRNAs to silence repeat sequences. Still mysterious though is how Piwi targets euchromatic transposons for silencing, but not the specialized heterochromatic loci that produce piRNA precursors.

In this paper, we study the Igusa’s local zeta functions of a class of hybrid polynomials with coefficients in a non-archimedean local field of positive characteristic. Such class of hybrid polynomial was first introduced by Hauser in 2003 to study the resolution of singularities in positive characteristic. We prove the rationality of these local zeta functions and describe explicitly their pol...

Evidence is rapidly accumulating that hybridization generates adaptive variation. Transgressive segregation in hybrids could promote the colonization of new environments. Here, we use an assay to select hybrid genotypes that can proliferate in environmental conditions beyond the conditions tolerated by their parents, and we directly compete them against parental genotypes in habitats across env...

Graphene oxide (GO) has been demonstrated as a nanostructure growth-directing template for the synthesis of fusiform zirconia nanostructures on GO planes. The obtained fusiform zirconia-GO hybrid composites (FZGO) have good dispersion ability and show highly selective capture of phosphopeptides from complex peptide mixtures.

Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite (OIHP) solar cells have achieved comparable efficiencies to those of commercial solar cells, although their instability hinders their commercialization. Although encapsulation techniques have been developed to protect OIHP solar cells from external stimuli such as moisture, oxygen, and ultraviolet light, understanding of the origin of the intrinsic instabilit...

The pace of on-going climate change calls for reliable plant biodiversity scenarios. Traditional dynamic vegetation models use plant functional types that are summarized to such an extent that they become meaningless for biodiversity scenarios. Hybrid dynamic vegetation models of intermediate complexity (hybrid-DVMs) have recently been developed to address this issue. These models, at the cross...

Two-hybrid methods detect interactions between two proteins fused at the C-termini of, respectively, a DNA-binding domain and the activation domain of a transcriptional activator. Thus the N-terminus of none of these proteins is available for interaction. We have tested whether a bait protein with a reverted polarity (i.e. N-bait-LexA-C) is suitable for two-hybrid interaction. We show that such...

Layered hybrid organic perovskites (HOPs) structures are a class of low-cost two-dimensional materials that exhibit outstanding optical properties, related to dielectric and quantum confinement effects. Whereas modeling and understanding of quantum confinement are well developed for conventional semiconductors, such knowledge is still lacking for 2D HOPs. In this work, concepts of effective mas...

The sterility and inviability of species hybrids is thought to evolve by the accumulation of genes that cause generally recessive, incompatible epistatic interactions between species. Most analyses of the loci involved in such hybrid incompatibilities have suffered from low genetic resolution. Here I present a fine-resolution genetic screen that allows systematic counting, mapping, and characte...

Morton-Firth and Bray's stochastic simulator (StochSim) and Gillespie's stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) are two important methods for stochastic modelling and simulation of biochemical systems. They have been widely applied to different biological problems. A key question is discussed here: Are these two methods equivalent? These two methods are compared using fundamental probability anal...