Marine Group II archaea are widely distributed in global oceans and dominate the total archaeal community within the upper euphotic zone of temperate waters. However, factors controlling the distribution of MGII are poorly delineated and the physiology and ecological functions of these still-uncultured organisms remain elusive. In this study, we investigated the planktonic MGII associated with ...

Throughout the world, large trees are increasingly rare. Cariniana legalis is the tallest tree species of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, reaching up to 60 m in height. Due to extensive deforestation of the Atlantic Forest, remnant C. legalis populations are small and spatially isolated, requiring the development of strategies for their conservation. For in situ and ex situ genetic conservation ...

OBJECTIVE To study responsiveness and meaningful change of the Myasthenia Gravis Impairment Index (MGII) and its relative efficiency compared to other measures. METHODS We enrolled 95 patients receiving prednisone, IV immunoglobulin (IVIg), or plasma exchange (PLEX) and 54 controls. Patients were assessed with the MGII and other measures-including the Quantitative Myasthenia Gravis Score, Mya...

Temperature, nutrients, and salinity are among the important factors constraining the distribution and abundance of microorganisms in the ocean. Marine Group II (MGII) belonging to Euryarchaeota commonly dominates the planktonic archaeal community in shallow water and Marine Group I (MGI, now is called Thaumarchaeota) in deeper water in global oceans. Results of quantitative PCR (qPCR) and 454 ...

There is nearly a factor of four difference in the number density of intervening MgII absorbers as determined from gamma-ray burst (GRB) and quasar lines of sight. We use a Monte-Carlo simulation to test if a dust extinction bias can account for this discrepancy. We apply an empirically determined relationship between dust column density and MgII rest equivalent width to simulated quasar sight-...

The incidence of strong MgII systems in gamma-ray burst (GRB) spectra is a few times higher than in quasar (QSO) spectra. We investigate several possible explanations for this effect, including: dust obscuration bias, clustering of the absorbers, different beam sizes of the sources, multiband magnification bias of GRBs, association of the absorbers with the GRB event or the circumburst environm...

The iron abundance relative to α-elements in the circumnuclear region of quasars is regarded as a clock of the star formation history and, more specifically, of the enrichment by type Ia supernovae (SNIa). We investigate the iron abundance in a sample of 22 quasars in the redshift range 3.0<z<6.4 by measuring their rest frame UV FeII bump, which is shifted into the near-IR, and by comparing it ...

In the manuscript by Wang et al., the authors claim that they have characterized the archaeal tetraether membrane lipids (GDGTs) produced by the marine euryarchaeota group II (MGII) and assess the effect of their synthesized lipids on the GDGT-based paleotemperature proxy TEX86. For that purposes, they analyzed core lipids (CL) and intact polar lipids (IPL) GDGTs, they performed 454 pyrosequenc...

Partially observable stochastic games (POSGs) are an attractive model for many multi-agent domains, but are computationally extremely difficult to solve. We present a new model, Markov games of incomplete information (MGII) which imposes a mild restriction on POSGs while overcoming their primary computational bottleneck. Finally we show how to convert a MGII into a continuous but bounded fully ...

Prochter et al. 2006 recently found that the number density of strong intervening 0.5 < z < 2 Mgii absorbers detected in gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglow spectra is nearly 4 times larger than in QSO spectra. We have conducted a similar study using Civ absorbers. Our Civ sample, consisting of a total of 19 systems, is drawn from 3 high resolution and high to moderate S/N VLT/UVES spectra of 3 lon...