Suchergebnisse

Funding Information: Funding: This study was financially supported by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tec-nologia (FCT), grants PTDC/BIA-BQM/27959/2017 and PTDC/BIA-BQM/0562/2020, and Project MOSTMICRO-ITQB with references UIDB/04612/2020 and UIDP/04612/2020. This project has also received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement 810856. MCM is the recipient of FCT grant SFRH/BD/143651/2019. BAS is the recipient of FCT grant DFA/BD/8066/2020. Funding Information: This study was financially supported by the Portuguese Funda??o para a Ci?ncia e Tecnologia (FCT), grants PTDC/BIA-BQM/27959/2017 and PTDC/BIA-BQM/0562/2020, and Project MOSTMICRO-ITQB with references UIDB/04612/2020 and UIDP/04612/2020. This project has also received funding from the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement 810856. MCM is the recipient of FCT grant SFRH/BD/143651/2019. BAS is the recipient of FCT grant DFA/BD/8066/2020. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. ; Flavodiiron proteins (FDPs) are a family of modular and soluble enzymes endowed with nitric oxide and/or oxygen reductase activities, producing N2O or H2O, respectively. The FDP from Escherichia coli, which, apart from the two core domains, possesses a rubredoxin-like domain at the C-terminus (therefore named flavorubredoxin (FlRd)), is a bona fide NO reductase, exhibiting O2 reducing activity that is approximately ten times lower than that for NO. Among the flavorubredoxins, there is a strictly conserved amino acids motif,-G[S,T]SYN-, close to the catalytic diiron center. To assess its role in FlRd's activity, we designed several site-directed mutants, replacing the conserved residues with hydrophobic or anionic ones. The mutants, which maintained the general characteristics of the wild type enzyme, including cofactor content and integrity of the diiron center, revealed a decrease of their oxygen reductase activity, while the NO reductase activity—specifically, its physiological function—was almost completely abolished in some of the mutants. Molecular modeling of the mutant proteins pointed to subtle changes in the predicted structures that resulted in the reduction of the hydration of the regions around the conserved residues, as well as in the elimination of hydrogen bonds, which may affect proton transfer and/or product release. ; published

The authors would like to thank Manuela M. Pereira for helpful discussions on liposome experiments and for provision of the ActC structure prior to publication, and Miguel Teixeira for use of the dual-wavelength OLIS spectrophotometer. This work was financially supported by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (Portugal) through fellowships SFRH/BPD/84607/2012 (to A.G.D.) and SFRH/BPD/92537/2013 (to D.L.), grants PTDC/BIA-MIC/6512/2014 and PTDC/BIA-MIC/2723/2014 (to I.A.C.P.) and R&D units UID/Multi/04551/2013 (Green-IT) and LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-007660 (MostMicro) cofunded by FCT/MCTES and FEDER funds through COMPETE2020/POCI. Funding by the WWTF (VRG15-007 to F.L.S.), BBSRC UK (Grant K00929X to T.A.C.), and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement no. 810856) is also acknowledged. ; The bioenergetics of anaerobic metabolism frequently relies on redox loops performed by membrane complexes with substrate- and quinone-binding sites on opposite sides of the membrane. However, in sulfate respiration (a key process in the biogeochemical sulfur cycle), the substrate- and quinone-binding sites of the QrcABCD complex are periplasmic, and their role in energy conservation has not been elucidated. Here we show that the QrcABCD complex of Desulfovibrio vulgaris is electrogenic, as protons and electrons required for quinone reduction are extracted from opposite sides of the membrane, with a H+/e− ratio of 1. Although the complex does not act as a H+-pump, QrcD may include a conserved proton channel leading from the N-side to the P-side menaquinone pocket. Our work provides evidence of how energy is conserved during dissimilatory sulfate reduction, and suggests mechanisms behind the functions of related bacterial respiratory complexes in other bioenergetic contexts. ; publishersversion ; published

Plastics have been on top of the political agenda in Europe and across the world to reduce plastic leakage and pollution. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted plastic reduction policies at the regional and national levels and induced significant changes in plastic waste management with potential for negative impacts in the environment and human health. This paper provides an overview of plastic policies and discusses the readjustments of these policies during the COVID-19 pandemic along with their potential environmental implications. The sudden increase in plastic waste and composition due to the COVID-19 pandemic underlines the crucial need to reinforce plastic reduction policies (and to implement them into action without delays), to scale up in innovation for sustainable and green plastics solutions, and to develop dynamic and responsive waste management systems immediately. Policy recommendations and future research directions are discussed. ; Thanks are due to CESAM (UIDP/50017/2020+UIDB/50017/2020), with the financial support from FCT/MCTES through national funds; and to the research project comPET (PTDC/CTA-AMB/30361/2017) funded by FEDER, through COMPETE 2020 - Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI), and by national funds (OE), through FCT/MCTES, and also to the Integrated Program of SR&T D' Smart Valorisation of Endogenous Marine Biological Resources Under a Changing Climate' (reference Centro-01-0145-FEDER-000018), co-funded by Centro (2020) program, Portugal 2020, European Union, through the European Regional Development Fund. J.C.P. and A.L.P.S. were funded by Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) through scholarship PD/BD/135581/2018 and PD/BPD/114870/2016 + CEECIND/01366/2018, respectively; under POCH funds, co-financed by the European Social Fund and Portuguese National Funds from MEC. T.R.W. was funded by a NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2018-04119, and D.C. was funded by a research contract within the project comPET (nr. Contract: 5662). ; Peer reviewed

Traffic accidents in Brazil kill more than 40,000 people a year and injure another 400,000, with largely permanent health impacts. This paper proposes the use of Forensic Intelligence, a field of Forensic Science that is able to convert forensic data into useful information, as a means to support policy measures and strategies, in order to prevent accidents. The selected study site was a small stretch on a Federal Highway (BR-040), where four fatal crashes occurred at the beginning of 2012. This highway had good mobility conditions and had no problems that could be correlated with these four fatal events, although speeding, alcohol abuse, and/or driver inattention were present in the crashes. We propose some possible interventions here, such as the use of advertising campaigns, strengthening traffic law enforcement, reduction of the speed limit, and the installation of electronic speed control devices in order to avoid future traffic accidents.

Ponencia presentada en: XXXV Jornadas Científicas de la AME y el XIX Encuentro Hispano Luso de Meteorología celebrado en León, del 5 al 7 de marzo de 2018. ; Most heavy precipitation events occurring in the world are associated with convective processes. As these phenomena produce severe economic and societal impacts, it is crucial to get to know their behaviour and their evolution in a future climate. For this reason, the international project CORDEX (Coordinated Regional climate Downscaling Experiment) proposed the Flagship Pilot Study on Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean, focused on the study of convection in Europe. In this initiative, multi-model and multi-physics results and uncertainties of regional climate models (RCMs) are explored by means of ensembles of simulations. In this work, we additionally explore the role of internal variability to explain the differences found in the results by different model configurations. ; This work is funded by the Spanish government through grant BES-2016-078158 and MINECO/FEDER co-funded projects INSIGNIA (CGL2016-79210-R) and MULTI-SDM (CGL2015-66583-R).

This work is funded by the Spanish government through grant BES-2016-078158 and MINECO/FEDER co-funded projects INSIGNIA (CGL2016-79210-R) and MULTI-SDM (CGL2015-66583-R). UCAN simulations have been carried out on the Altamira Supercomputer at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA, CSIC-UC), member of the Spanish Supercomputing Network.

In a recent study, Coppola et al. assessed the ability of an ensemble of convection-permitting models (CPM) to simulate deep convection using three case studies. The ensemble exhibited strong discrepancies between models, which were attributed to various factors. In order to shed some light on the issue, we quantify in this article the uncertainty associated to different physical parameterizations from that of using different initial conditions, often referred to as the internal variability. For this purpose, we establish a framework to quantify both signals and we compare them for upper atmospheric circulation and near-surface variables. The analysis is carried out in the context of the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study on Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean, in which the intermediate RCM WRF simulations that serve to drive the CPM are run several times with different parameterizations. For atmospheric circulation (geopotential height), the sensitivity induced by multi?physics and the internal variability show comparable magnitudes and a similar spatial distribution pattern. For 2-m temperature and 10-m wind, the simulations with different parameterizations show larger differences than those launched with different initial conditions. The systematic effect over one year shows distinct patterns for the multi-physics and the internal variability. Therefore, the general lesson of this study is that internal variability should be analysed in order to properly distinguish the impact of other sources of uncertainty, especially for short-term sensitivity simulations. ; This work is partially funded by the Spanish government through grant BES-2016-078158 and MINECO/ FEDER co-funded projects INSIGNIA (CGL2016-79210-R) and MULTI-SDM (CGL2015-66583-R). Universidad de Cantabria simulations have been carried out on the Altamira Supercomputer at the Instituto de F´ısica de Cantabria (IFCA-CSIC), member of the Spanish Supercomputing Network. EK and SK acknowledge the support of the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure for providing the computational resources of AUTH-simulations (under project ID pr003005) and the AUTH Scientific Computing Center for technical support. IPSL acknowledges the support from the EUCP project, funded by the European Union under H2020 Grant Agreement 776613, and from the IPSL mesocenter ESPRI facility which is supported by CNRS, UPMC, Labex L-IPSL, CNES and Ecole Polytechnique. IPSL simulations were granted access to the HPC resources of TGCC 19 under the allocation A0050106877 made by GENCI. The computational resources for NORCE/BCCR were provided by UNINETT Sigma2 (NN9280K, NS9001K), with funding from the Research Council of Norway's support for the strategic project on climate services. FZJ gratefully acknowledges the computing time granted by the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) and JARA-HPC provided on the supercomputer JURECA at J¨ulich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). We acknowledge the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project UERRA (https://www.uerra.eu) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service, and the data providers in the ECA&D project (https://eca.knmi.nl).