This diploma thesis focuses on polar pesticides and their analysis in agricultural commodities. One of the aims was establishing of the method for quantitative determination of diquat and paraquat using liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry. Optimization parameters based on the European reference laboratories recommendations, availability of laboratory equipment and method suitability for routine analyses were taken into account. Extraction of analytes was based on shaking with acidified methanol with formic or hydrochloric acid. Considering the matrix complexity, purification with sorbents and/or acetonitrile precipitation were applied. Method validation was carried out on several levels for selected representative agricultural commodities. Part of the thesis is a field experiment where potatoes plants were sprayed with the diquat active substance. Samples of treated plants and tubers were analyzed for diquat residues. The validated method was also used for screening of diquat and paraquat residues in feed samples collected within official controls of the Central Institute for Supervising and Testing in Agriculture in 2020. The final method enables to analyze diquat and paraquat with sensitivity suitable for the maximal residue limit controls.

This master thesis shows, how can be the modified lifting line theory used for preliminary glider design an for wing loads determination. It is shown, that relatively accurate results can be obtained at less computational cost in comparison with CFD methods

The aim of this diploma thesis is to analyse flight performance of airplane VUT-081 Kondor. The first part focuses on determination and estimation of aerodynamic characteristics of the airplane. Based on this data flight performance was calculated and evaluated according to CS-ELSA. The last part is dedicated to comparison of flight performance of VUT-081 Kondor with other similar airplanes.

Des mouvements collectifs dirigés émergent dans des systèmes très variés, depuis les assemblées synthétiques de grains vibrés jusqu'aux nuées d'oiseaux dans la nature. En essayant de comprendre le caractère générique de ces comportements dynamiques collectifs, les physiciens ont décrit les populations d'individus motiles comme des matériaux ordonnés.Dans cette thèse, nous réalisons expérimentalement des troupeaux synthétiques en laboratoire et nous explorons leurs propriétés hydrodynamiques.Nous tirons avantage du mécanisme d’électro rotation de Quincke pour motoriser des millions de colloïdes. Ces rouleurs de Quincke sont capables de s'auto-organiser pour former un troupeau appelé liquide polaire où toutes les particules se déplacent en moyenne dans la même direction.Nous montrons que la dynamique de ce liquide polaire est très bien décrite par des prédictions théoriques laissées sans preuves expérimentales depuis vingt-cinq ans. En particulier,nous démontrons que deux modes sonores s'y propagent et nous montrons que l’étude de leur spectre fournit une méthode non invasive pour mesurer ses constantes hydrodynamiques.Finalement, nous montrons que le mouvement dirigé peut être supprimé collectivement dans un troupeau dense. Un solide actif peut nucléer et se propager à contre-courant dans le liquide polaire. Nous établissons que cette solidification est une transition du premier ordre et qu'il s'agit de la première démonstration expérimentale complète d'une séparation de phase induite par la motilité des particules actives (aussi appelée MIPS). / Spontaneous collective motion arises in many different systems, from assembly of synthetic shaken grains to living bird flocks. In order to understand the generic features of those collective behaviours, physisicts describe the flocks of motile units as ordered materials. In this thesis we study experimentally the dynamics of synthetic flocks and explore their hydrodynamic properties. We take advantage of the Quincke mechanism to motorize millions of colloids. Those Quincke rollers self-organize into a polar liquid, where all the particles, on average flow in the same direction. We provide the first experimental proof that the dynamics of polar liquids is well described by a theoretical prediction established more than twenty-five years ago. In particular, we demonstrate that two sound modes propagate along all directions of the fluid and we design a non invasive spectroscopic method to measure its hydrodynamics constants.Finally, we show that collective motion can be arrested in a dense flock. An active solid can nucleate, grow and propagate in a polar liquid. We establish that this solidification is a first order phase transition and demonstrate that the formation of this active solid is the first experimental proof of a complete motility induced phase separation of active particles (also known as MIPS).

The non-uniform distribution of the plant growth regulator (phytohormone) auxin is known to mediate many fundamental processes in plant development. Auxin is transported through the plant body either via vascular pathways or from cell to cell by specialized polar auxin transport machinery. This machinery consists of a balanced system of passive diffusion combined with the activities of auxin influx and efflux carriers. This work is focused on the processes that are involved in the uptake of auxin into plant cells. On the basis of molecular-biological and biochemical characterization, the function as an auxin influx carrier was confirmed for PaLAX1 protein from wild cherry (Prunus avium). The sequences of isolated cDNA of the PaLAX1 gene and of its protein product are highly similar to both the cDNAs and the corresponding protein products of the AUX1/LAX-type genes, coding for putative auxin influx carriers in model plant A. thaliana. On the level of organs and single cells, we have shown that the overproduction of PaLAX1 in transgenic lines resulted in an increase of the content of native auxin indole-3-acetic acid as well as of the uptake of synthetic auxin, 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Further, the mechanism of action of putative auxin influx inhibitors 1-naphthoxyacetic acid (1-NOA),...

Phytohormone auxin plays an important role in various aspects of plant growth and development. The necessary concentration maxima at the region of its action are achieved by auxin metabolism, passive diffusion of auxin molecules across plasma membrane and by the carrier-mediated auxin transport, as well as by modulation of these processes. In our study we used a group of compounds structurally related to major endogenous auxin indole-3-acetic acid, as well as synthetic auxins 2,4-dichlorophenoxy acetic acid (2,4- D) and naphthalene-1-acetic acid (NAA). We aimed to characterize the auxin specificity of developmentally important processes such as carrier-mediated auxin transport, and 'genomic' (transcriptional) and 'non-genomic' (transcriptional) auxin signaling. In addition to the characterization of these compounds we also hoped to get an insight into the complex regulatory mechanism of auxin-related processes and to possibly find a particular compound with distinct behavior towards particular processes. By making use of such compounds and other molecular tools we aimed to analyze the mechanism of 'non-genomic' auxin signaling, to understand the mode of action of FM (Fei Mao) styryl dyes on the dynamics of membrane- localized auxin transporters, and to study the involvement of other phytohormones...

The Polar Decomposition (PD) of a dense matrix is an important operation in linear algebra, while being a building block for solving the Symmetric Eigenvalue Problem (SEP) and computing the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). It can be directly calculated through the SVD itself, or iteratively using the QR Dynamically-Weighted Halley (QDWH) algorithm. The former is difficult to parallelize due to the preponderant number of memory-bound operations during the bidiagonal reduction. The latter is an iterative method, which performs more floating-point operations than the SVD approach, but exposes at the same time more parallelism. Looking at the roadmap of the hardware technology scaling, algorithms perform- ing floating-point operations on locally cached data should be favored over those requiring expensive horizontal data movement. In this context, this thesis investigates new high-performance algorithmic designs of QDWH algorithm to compute the PD. Originally introduced by Nakatsukasa et al. [1, 2], our algorithmic contributions include mixed precision techniques, task-based formulations, and parallel asynchronous executions. Moreover, by making the PD competitive, its application to the SEP and the SVD becomes practical. In particular, we introduce for the first time new algorithms for partial SVD decomposition using QDWH. By the same token, we extend the QDWH to support partial eigen decomposition for SEP. We present new high-performance implementations of the QDWH-based algorithms relying on fine-grained computations, which allows exploiting the sparsity of the underlying data structure. To demonstrate performance efficiency, portability and scalability, we conduct benchmarking campaigns on some of the latest shared/distributed-memory systems. Our QDWH-based algorithm implementations outperform the state-of-the-art numerical libraries by up to 2.8x and 12x on shared and distributed-memory, respectively. The task-based QDWH has been integrated into the Chameleon library (https://gitlab.inria.fr/solverstack/chameleon) for support on shared-memory systems with hardware accelerators. It is also currently being used by astronomers from the Subaru telescope located at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA. The distributed-memory software library of QDWH and its SVD extension are freely available under modified-BSD license at https: //github.com/ecrc/qdwh.git and https://github.com/ecrc/ksvd.git, respectively. Both software libraries have been integrated into the Cray Scientific numerical library LibSci v17.11.1 and v19.02.1.

There are several members of the subfamily of plant AGC kinases (AGCVIII) suggested to play a role in the regulation of auxin transport, protein kinases PID, WAG1, WAG2 and D6. They all have been shown to perform regulatory phosphorylation of PIN auxin efflux carriers. It is the asymmetrical subcellular localization of PIN proteins that enables the auxin molecules to be transported through a tissue in a polar manner. Regulation of their expression, localization or activity can therefore affect the quantity and directionality of auxin transport. This thesis is focused on better understanding of the PID-mediated regulation of auxin transport. The auxin accumulation as well as the localization of PIN and PID proteins has been studied using stable and transient expression of Arabidopsis thaliana PID in tobacco cell line BY-2. As shown here, the activity of PID does not enhance the activity of PINs, but still it has a positive effect on auxin efflux by increasing the amount of PIN proteins on the plasma membrane. Results presented here suggest that PID-mediated phosphorylation of PIN proteins most likely promotes their exocytosis from endosomal compartments towards the plasma membrane. Using transient co-expression of PID kinase mutated in its ATP-binding site and PIN1-RFP it was shown that functional...

No description available.

In the thesis the structure-property relations of newly synthesised liquid crystalline compounds have been investigated with respect to the length of the non-chiral chain, number of lactate units or the lateral substitutions in the molecular core. Such promising for applications phenomena as orthoconic properties and de Vries behaviour have been found and studied for certain compounds. Besides, the antiferroelectric, TGB, hexatic phases have been observed for some compounds of the studied series. Such unique phenomenon as re-entrancy has been observed for a few compounds of the series under investigation and binary mixtures of one compound with neighbouring homologues have been prepared and studied.