Paleoproductivity is reconstructed across a Mediterranean benchmark record, the Early/Middle Pleistocene Montalbano Jonico section, cropping out in southern Italy. High-resolution coccolithophore and alkenone data (C37 C37:2/C38:2 ratio) were collected order to extend set on paleoproductivity pattern forcing mechanisms. The multi-proxy record indicates low productivity during glacial stadial ph...

The genus Sulfobacillus is a cohort of mildly thermophilic or thermotolerant acidophiles within the phylum Firmicutes and requires extremely acidic environments and hypersalinity for optimal growth. However, our understanding of them is still preliminary partly because few genome sequences are available. Here, the draft genome of Sulfobacillus thermosulfidooxidans strain ST was deciphered to ob...

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is associated with fatty acid alterations characterized by low linoleic and docosahexaenoic acid. It is not clear whether these fatty acid alterations are directly linked to cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) dysfunction or result from nutrient malabsorption. We hypothesized that if fatty acid alterations are a result of CFTR dysfunction, those alter...

The Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome possesses homologues of the ruvC and yqgF genes that encode putative Holliday junction (HJ) resolvases. However, their gene expression profiles and enzymatic properties have not been experimentally defined. Here we report that expression of ruvC and yqgF is induced in response to DNA damage. Protein-DNA interaction assays with purified M. tuberculosis RuvC ...

We study panel data estimators based on a discretization of unobserved heterogeneity when individual heterogeneity is not necessarily discrete in the population. We focus on two-step grouped-fixed effects estimators, where individuals are classified into groups in a first step using kmeans clustering, and the model is estimated in a second step allowing for group-specific heterogeneity. We anal...

Enzymes of the Dnmt2 family of methyltransferases have yielded a number of unexpected discoveries. The first surprise came more than ten years ago when it was realized that, rather than being DNA methyltransferases, Dnmt2 enzymes actually are transfer RNA (tRNA) methyltransferases for cytosine-5 methylation, foremost C38 (m5C38) of tRNAAsp. The second unanticipated finding was our recent discov...

This paper studies estimation of a panel data model with latent structures where individuals can be classified into different groups where slope parameters are homogeneous within the same group but heterogeneous across groups. To identify the unknown group structure of vector parameters, we design an algorithm called Panel-CARDS which is a systematic extension of the CARDS procedure proposed by...