The eBook “Applications of Plant Pathology in Genebank Collections” was developed in part by USDA-ARS and by grant 2020-70003-30930 from the USDA-NIFA-Higher Education Challenge Grant Program. Additional chapters will be added to this eBook when they are available. This eBook contains chapters that can be accessed in any order. Click on “Contents” in the upper left corner and then expand “Main Body” to access chapter titles; scrolling may be necessary to view all chapter titles. Chapters can also be navigated by using arrows at the bottom of each page. Each chapter has text, video and/or interactive content on a single page.

Short Description:
The current edition of the book may be downloaded from the Applied Bioinformatics site. Traffic analytics interactive report

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The primary learning objective of this textbook is to introduce the reader to the fundamental statistical methods and basic analytical procedures associated with processing data in regard to healthcare research. It is intended that by working through the applications and practice problems, readers should be able to understand and apply some of the methods for developing, implementing, and applying healthcare statistic principles in research.

Using the Hardy-Weinberg equation to calculate allele and genotype frequencies. Created by Sal Khan.

This video segment adapted from NOVA features a variety of scientific perspectives on the age old question, "Are we alone in the universe?" Animations make vivid the improbability that we could intercept a radio wave signaling extra terrestrial intelligence.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"It’s a feared moment for every scientist: the discovery that years of painstaking research has led to results that can't be repeated. Many think that poorly characterized antibodies have contributed to this reproducibility crisis more than any other laboratory tool. A new study published in Molecular Cell supports this hypothesis, at least in the context of chromatin immunoprecipitation. Although accurate ChIP interpretation depends on near-perfect antibody specificity, the report shows that many of these reagents are far less capable than their advertising suggests, which calls into question several widely accepted paradigms on genomic regulation. The study focused on histone post-translational modifications; specifically all three methylation states of lysine 4 on histone H3. Through ChIP experiments, H3K4 methylation has been strongly linked to transcriptional control..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems host an array of macrofauna, including many invertebrates. These animals adapt to the extreme conditions by forging endosymbiotic relationships with chemoautotrophic bacteria. Phages, viruses that infect prokaryotes, can fundamentally affect endosymbiotic bacteria, but their specific roles in deep-sea vent endosymbionts are not yet known. A recent study utilized metagenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics to examine the endosymbiotic phages associated with the deep-sea vent snail Gigantopelta aegis. These phages infected methane- and sulfur-oxidizing bacteria, and there was evidence of both lysogenic and lytic lifecycles. The genomes also showed evidence of an arms race between bacteria and phages, with the bacteria encoding defense systems like CRISPR–Cas to break down phage DNA and the phages encoding their own anti-defense mechanisms. The phages also had horizontally acquired auxiliary metabolic genes, which could benefit replication..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Ernst Haeckel is a medical doctor, artist, philosopher, and naturalist of the late 1800s/early 1900s who beautifully and accurately depicted sea animal and plant life using color illustrations; you can find many examples of his sketches online through websites such as this one (Kuriositas, January 2012)and in his published works like Art Forms of Nature (1899). He promoted Darwin's theory of natural selection and created many words in the study of biology such as phylogeny and protist. I can see his work being used to inspire student observations, which are the basis of scientific discovery and study and as a supplement within specific units of biology including classification and evolution studies. I can also envision them being used during curriculum development within a professional development setting for teachers or a collaborative project integrating art and science instruction.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The tick-borne parasite Theileria annulata can cause life-threatening illness in cows. Buparvaquone is the only available drug treatment, but the incidence of buparvaquone (BPQ) resistance is increasing so alternative therapies are needed. To help, researchers recently tested the efficacy of the anti-malaria drug artemisinin and its derivatives against T. annulata infection. Artemisinin itself wasn’t effective, but all of its derivatives were able to selectively kill parasite-infected cells. Artesunate (ARS) and dihydroartemisinin (DHART) were especially potent and either drug could act synergistically with BPQ, enhancing the parasite-killing effects of the individual compounds. Investigation of the mechanism revealed that ARS and DHART caused oxidative stress and DNA damage in the infected cells which activated the protein p53 and the caspase-dependent cell death pathway..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This course introduces representations, techniques, and architectures used to build applied systems and to account for intelligence from a computational point of view. This course also explores applications of rule chaining, heuristic search, logic, constraint propagation, constrained search, and other problem-solving paradigms. In addition, it covers applications of decision trees, neural nets, SVMs and other learning paradigms.

This video segment explores the benefits and pitfalls of cloning as a means of reproduction. From Evolution: "Why Sex?"

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Microbial metagenomes are like a blueprint of all the functions performed by a microbial community. Some microbes can't be grown in the lab, so metagenomics is important for investigating otherwise-unknown microbial "dark matter". Short-read sequencing provides large amounts of data, but it's hard to assemble into complete genomes. A recent study combined short-read data with nanopore long-read data using Iterative Hybrid Assembly (IHA). The researchers reconstructed 49 metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs), including some with very low coverage. In total, 34 MAGs did not belong to any known genus, representing unknown microbe groups. The IHA method revealed more of the genes present than a short-read-only approach and showed that the anammox genome of genus Ca. Brocadia contains two identical hydrazine synthase genes. The current method is best for enriched microbial communities and will be extended to high-complexity samples in the future..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Astronomy Notes is a website with a brief overview of astronomy's place in the scientific endeavor, the philosophy of science and the scientific method, astronomy that can be done without a telescope, a history of astronomy and science, Newton's law of gravity and applications to orbits, Einstein's Relativity theories, electromagnetic radiation, telescopes, all the objects of the solar system, solar system formation, determining properties of the stars, the Sun, fusion reactions, stellar structure, stellar evolution, the interstellar medium, the structure of the Milky Way galaxy, extra-galactic astronomy including active galaxies and quasars, cosmology, and extra-terrestrial life. This site also has pages giving angular momentum examples, a quick mathematics review, improving study skills, astronomy tables, and astronomy terms

This course provides a graduate-level introduction to stellar astrophysics. It covers a variety of topics, ranging from stellar structure and evolution to galactic dynamics and dark matter.

More attractive people elicit more positive first impressions. This effect is called the attractiveness halo, and it is shown when judging those with more attractive faces, bodies, or voices. Moreover, it yields significant social outcomes, including advantages to attractive people in domains as far-reaching as romance, friendships, family relations, education, work, and criminal justice. Physical qualities that increase attractiveness include youthfulness, symmetry, averageness, masculinity in men, and femininity in women. Positive expressions and behaviors also raise evaluations of a person’s attractiveness. Cultural, cognitive, evolutionary, and overgeneralization explanations have been offered to explain why we find certain people attractive. Whereas the evolutionary explanation predicts that the impressions associated with the halo effect will be accurate, the other explanations do not. Although the research evidence does show some accuracy, it is too weak to satisfactorily account for the positive responses shown to more attractive people.

Next generation sensors and a potential new ecosystem for marketing and advertising in augmented and virtual reality

Short Description:
Marketing is a competitive field that demands continuous improvement in the delivery of persuasive messaging to target audiences. The most recent successes in finding competitive advantage is achieved by professional marketers through technology. In this report, we will consider how Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (AR/VR) will impact the marketing profession. We will review our research into the background of AR/VR, the sensor technologies that enable these advances, a review of the available hardware types, their positioning in the marketplace, and their use cases. We will then review current best practices in digital marketing as shared by key presenters at the 2017 University of New Hampshire Digital Marketing Conference. This will be the basis of a discussion about how AR/VR might embrace these current practices, cannibalize them, or depart from them to establish completely new methods. The new ecosystem driven by advances in VR and AR technology make a powerful new tool available to engage with their audiences at a new intense emotional and psychological level. We will discuss AR/VR’s evolving uses in entertainment, therapy, training and pornography. A review of risks is included. We conclude with analysis and projections for future use cases in social media, business practices, education, and for opportunities that may accrue to marketers because of AR/VR.

Long Description:
It’s 2017 and we stand upon the brink of another evolution in digital media. Since the first Turing architecture machine was invented to break codes in WWII, the ongoing technology evolution has led to a state of nearly ubiquitous computing, most recognizable in the form of modern smart phones. Stemming from the concurrent development in computing hardware and information processing, governments, businesses, and individuals created new marketplaces. These technologies established the ecosystem for the Internet and World Wide Web. Marketers and traditional marketing models adapted quickly to this ecosystem to the extent that digital marketing now dominates a typical marketing mix.

New technology innovations, known as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), are developing at a rapid pace. The unique properties of fully immersive VR and situationally aware AR have great potential value to marketers seeking to engage and persuade consumers with impactful messaging. Marketers are starting to work with VR and AR as part of their toolbox for messaging. Its potential impact on existing marketing practices may turn out to be similar to what we have seen in the transition to digital marketing. In this report, we will describe AR/VR hardware technology and how it may enable new ecosystems to develop for marketing and advertising.

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UniProt is a high quality, comprehensive protein resource in which the core activity is the expert review and annotation of proteins where the function has been experimentally investigated. At the same time the UniProt database contains large numbers of proteins which are predicted to exist from gene models, but which do not have associated experimental evidence indicating their function. UniProt commits significant resources to developing computational methods for functional annotation of these predicted proteins based on the data in entries that have gone through the expert review process.

We will describe the two main automated annotation systems currently in use. First, UniRule, which is an established UniProt system in which curators manually develop rules for annotation. Second ARBA (Association-Rule-Based Annotator), which has recently been introduced as a significant improvement in fully automated functional annotation. ARBA is a multiclass learning system which uses rule mining techniques to generate concise annotation models. ARBA employs a data exclusion set that censors data not suitable for computational annotation, and generates human-readable rules for each UniProt release.

We will also briefly touch on the mechanism UniProt has set up to enable researchers to run these automated annotation systems on their own protein datasets.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is for scientists and bioinformaticians with an interest in functional annotation of protein sequences.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

Recall the role of UniProt's two main automated annotation systems
Describe how UniRule and ARBA work
Get started using these automated annotation systems

Ayurveda is the mother of all forms of modern medicine, from body work to surgery. Ayurveda is an ancient time tested method of holistic medicine that supports the individual in finding balance throughout their physiology leading to great levels of health s and happiness. It is well known that the oldest of all the sciences in the world is the science of life, Ayurveda. It is based entirely on herbs and herbal compounds. The scientific method of Modern Science is based on the principle of Observation, Hypothesis / anti-thesis, Experimentation and Proof. Present form of Ayurveda is the outcome of continued scientific inputs that has gone in to the evolution of its principles, theories and protocol of healthy living and disease management. In this paper an attempt has been done to highlight various plants of Ayurveda and their exploration in the scientific research. The evidences of effect of different Ayurvedic plant extracts, formulations (herbal product, bhasmas etc) by in vitro, in vivo studies and clinical trials is extremely helpful in enhancing the wisdom of Ayurveda as evidence-based Indian system of medicine.