Transcriptome resources for social insects have the potential to provide new insight into polyphenism, i.e., how divergent phenotypes arise from the same genome. Here we present a transcriptome based on paired-end RNA sequencing data for the ant Formica exsecta (Formicidae, Hymenoptera). The RNA sequencing libraries were constructed from samples of several life stages of both sexes and female c...

Plantago ovata is an economically and medicinally important plant of the family Plantaginaceae. It is used extensively for the production of seed husk for its application in pharmaceutical, food and cosmetic industries. In the present study, the transcriptome of P. ovata ovary was sequenced using Illumina Genome Analyzer platform to characterize the mucilage biosynthesis pathway in the plant. D...

Oases in the Sahara Desert are undergoing rapid physical and socio-economic changes. High spatial resolution remote sensing data from the Landsat Thematic Mapper have been used in an attempt to monitor these changes, but because of their sparse temporal frequency, coupled with the significant intra-annual vegetation dynamics displayed by oases, such data are a poor sample from which to estimate...

A very large-scale logic simulation engine "VELVET" has been developed VELVET is a vectorized event-driven simulator which can handle simultaneously both gate-level logic and Register-Transfer Level structure. VELVET can process simulation jobs two orders of magnitude faster than a conventional gate-level simulator. This paper describes how to realize such high performance, an algoritha for vec...

Among other cues, the visual system uses shading to infer the 3D shape of objects. The shading pattern depends on the illumination and reflectance properties (BRDF). In this study, we compared 3D shape perception between identical shapes with different BRDFs. The stimuli were photographed 3D printed random smooth shapes that were either painted matte gray or had a gray velvet layer. We used the...

Velvet antler is one of the most important animal medicines, and has been used with a variety of functions, such as anti-fatigue, tissue repair and health promotion. In the past few years, the investigation on chemical compositions, bioactive components, and pharmacological effects has been performed, which demonstrates that velvet antlers could be used as an important health-promoting tonic wi...

Morphological development of fungi and their combined production of secondary metabolites are both acting in defence and protection. These processes are mainly coordinated by velvet regulators, which contain a yet functionally and structurally uncharacterized velvet domain. Here we demonstrate that the velvet domain of VosA is a novel DNA-binding motif that specifically recognizes an 11-nucleot...

The loosely defined terms hard fork and soft fork have established themselves as descriptors of different classes of upgrade mechanisms for the underlying consensus rules of (proof-of-work) blockchains. Recently, a novel approach termed velvet fork, which expands upon the concept of a soft fork, was outlined in [22]. Specifically, velvet forks intend to avoid the possibility of disagreement by ...

Velvet-domain-containing proteins are broadly distributed within the fungal kingdom. In the corn pathogen Fusarium verticillioides, previous studies showed that the velvet protein F. verticillioides VE1 (FvVE1) is critical for morphological development, colony hydrophobicity, toxin production, and pathogenicity. In this study, tandem affinity purification of FvVE1 revealed that FvVE1 can form a...