Salt stress severely constrains plant performance and global agricultural productivity. 5% of arable land, 20% of irrigated areas and 98% of water reserves worldwide are saline. Improving the salt tolerance of major crop species could help attenuate yield losses and expand irrigation opportunities and provide in situ relief in areas where poverty, food and water scarcity are prevalent. Increasing the salt tolerance of crops with high commercial and nutritional value, such as tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.), would provide particularly significant economic and health benefits. However, salt tolerance is a complex trait with a limited genetic repertoire in domesticated crop varieties, including tomato, frustrating attempts to breed and engineer tolerant crop varieties. Here, a genome-wide association study (GWAS) was undertaken, leveraging the rich genetic diversity of the wild, salt tolerant tomato Solanum pimpinellifolium and the latest phenotyping technologies to identify traits that contribute to salt tolerance and the genetic basis for variation in those traits. A panel of 220 S. pimpinellifolium accessions was phenotyped, focusing on image-based high-throughput phenotyping over time in controlled and field conditions in young and mature plants. Results reveal substantial natural variation in salt tolerance over time across many traits. In particular, the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing in the field allowed high-resolution RGB, thermal and hyperspectral mapping that offers new insights into plant performance in the field, over time. To empower our GWAS and facilitate the identification of candidate genes, a new S. pimpinellifolium reference genome was generated, 811Mb in size, N50 of ~76kb, containing 25,970 annotated genes. Analysis of this reference genome highlighted potential contributors to salt tolerance, including enrichments in genes with stress response functions and a high copy number of the salt tolerance-associated gene inositol- 3-phosphate synthase (I3PS). A recently completed full genome re-sequencing of the panel, along with a newly available pseudomolecule-level assembly of the S. pimpinellifolium genome with N50 of ~11Mb, will serve to drive a GWAS to identify loci associated with traits that contribute to salt tolerance. Further research including gene validation, breeding, genetic modification and gene editing experiments will drive the development of new salt tolerant tomato cultivars.

This thesis comparing broadband systems HomePlug and DS2 PLC technology (Power Line Communications). PLC is a technology for transmitting data over electrical power distribution network. The theoretical part consists of describing a system for broadband data communication over high-tension lines, the selection criteria, a description of DS2 and HomePlug (variants of chips, version, network architecture, elements). There are also described modulation techniques, interference, standards, standard ISO 50065 and access methods. The practical part consists of laboratory measurements with both systems. For the testing were used DS2 modems from the company Defidev and HomePlug modems from AirLive. These are then compared according to selected criteria.

No abstract available. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Education Management and Policy Studies / unrestricted

No description available.

Containerization and virtualization are two of the keystones of cloud computing. Neither technologies are a new invention but did not become widely used until it regained popularity through new implementations. Virtualization regained popularity with the founding of VMWare, and containerization has become vastly popular in the last decade with Docker. When using a service from a Cloud Service Provider today, that service will more than likely be utilizing one of these technologies. This study aims to compare the performance of these two technologies when being used to host an API and how they utilize their provided hardware resources to handle HTTP requests.A series of load tests were conducted on an API developed and hosted on the two technologies to measure the hardware performance, response time and throughput of each technology.Hyper-V was used for virtualization, and Docker was used for containerization. Data was collected on resource utilization, response time, and throughput. The data was also compared to related research to validate it.The results of the experiment showed that, in our implementation, virtualization was superior to containerization in every measured aspect.We conclude that containerization has a bottleneck in the implementation we chose that impedes the container's network performance, which results in the container not being able to process as many HTTP requests as the virtualized environment.The number of processed HTTP requests for the container in relation to CPU usage is superior to that of the virtualized environment, which leads us to believe that it could be possible that the container would be superior if not for the network performance.

QUIC is a relatively new transport layer network protocol that has gained popularity over the last few years. The protocol was initially developed by Google and standardization work has been continued by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with the goal of it becoming the next generation transport protocol. While the standardization work is not yet finished, the protocol has seen a large adoption, already covering a large portion of the internet traffic. As a new protocol, many researchers have studied QUIC and compared it to TCP in typical scenarios. However, few studies have been performed on QUIC in specific scenarios. In this thesis, we present the first performance study of QUIC over Dual Connectivity (DC). DC is a multi-connectivity technique that allows users to connect to multiple cell towers with one user equipment. It is an important lower-layer feature accelerating the transition from 4G to 5G, which is also expected to play an important role in standalone 5G networks. With DC, higher throughput and reliability can be achieved by using multiple paths simultaneously. However, the drawback of DC is that it introduces packet reordering and jitter, which can significantly impact the performance of upper-layer protocols such as TCP and QUIC. To study the extent of this effect, a testbed is set up to evaluate QUIC over DC. Our performance evaluation compares the throughput of QUIC over DC with that of TCP over DC, and evaluates the fairness of QUIC over DC. Using a series of throughput and fairness experiments, we show how QUIC is affected by different DC parameters, network conditions, and whether the DC implementation aims to improve throughput or reliability. Our findings provide network operators with insights into understanding the impacts of splitting QUIC traffic in a DC environment. We show the value of increasing the UDP receive buffers when running QUIC over DC and that QUIC can utilize the increased bandwidth and reliability in DC, provided that the links' characteristics are similar. We also show that with reasonably selected DC parameters and increased UDP receive buffers, QUIC over DC performs similarly to TCP over DC and achieves optimal systemwide fairness under symmetric link conditions when DC is not used for packet duplication.

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Mutagenesis following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at:http://mutage.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/08/03/mutage.gev055.full. / 京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(医学) / 甲第19588号 / 医博第4095号 / 新制||医||1014(附属図書館) / 32624 / 京都大学大学院医学研究科医学専攻 / (主査)教授 小泉 昭夫, 教授 渡邊 直樹, 教授 高田 穣 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Medical Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(農学) / 甲第19769号 / 農博第2165号 / 新制||農||1040(附属図書館) / 学位論文||H28||N4985(農学部図書室) / 32805 / 京都大学大学院農学研究科森林科学専攻 / (主査)教授 井鷺 裕司, 教授 北山 兼弘, 教授 神﨑 護 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Agricultural Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

No description available.

Forensic scientists and ancient DNA researchers face similar challenges with respect to genetic information acquisition and analysis. However, these communities differ in one critical aspect: while forensic science is regulated by the strict guidelines of the judicial community, ancient DNA is a research-based academic field free to explore emerging technologies as they arise. This thesis investigates the application of two methodologies, developed in ancient DNA research, to challenging extracts, in hopes of modernizing forensic models while maintaining compatibility with current standards. The first chapter focuses on blunt-end sequencing library preparation protocols previously optimized for ancient DNA specimens. Forensically-relevant extracts were converted into libraries and typed by short tandem repeats (STR) amplification. When compared to STR profiles from pre-library extracts, a significant decrease in the quality was observed, in the form of allelic drop-out, heterozygous peak imbalance and increased stutter ratios. The second chapter discusses the efficacy of two enzymatic DNA repair methods, “PreCR® Repair” and “Nelson”, on typical ancient DNA specimens. Based on endogenous sample content, fragment length variation and base misincorporation rates, some DNA repair was reported when using PreCR®. However, the use of the Nelson protocol is not recommended for use in its current state. Both sequencing library preparation and enzymatic DNA repair show potential application to forensic evidential material, but require further analyses to confirm hypotheses and observations outlined in this thesis. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)