Anchoring is a well-known, robust effect causing estimates tobe biased towards previously seen values – regardless of theirrelevance. Reducing anchoring bias is important for optimizingestimation. Herein, we tested the MOLE (More-Or-LessElicitation) tool’s ability to limit the impact of anchors onestimates. In a direct elicitation task, 62 participants’ bestestimates correlated with anchor values at 0.27 whereas, whenusing the MOLE, this relationship disappeared (r = .02).Results also showed, however, that expertise reduces theimpact of anchoring (r = -0.46). We conclude that use of theMOLE assists in avoiding anchoring and that this will be mosthelpful in areas of high uncertainty.

Background

Identification and characterization of key enzymes associated with cell wall biosynthesis and modification is fundamental to gain insights into cell wall dynamics. However, it is a challenge that activity assays of glycosyltransferases are very low throughput and acceptor substrates are generally not available.

Results

We optimized and validated microscale thermophoresis (MST) to achieve high throughput screening for glycosyltransferase substrates. MST is a powerful method for the quantitative analysis of protein-ligand interactions with low sample consumption. The technique is based on the motion of molecules along local temperature gradients, measured by fluorescence changes. We expressed glycosyltransferases as YFP-fusion proteins in tobacco and optimized the MST method to allow the determination of substrate binding affinity without purification of the target protein from the cell lysate. The application of this MST method to the β-1,4-galactosyltransferase AtGALS1 validated the capability to screen both nucleotide-sugar donor substrates and acceptor substrates. We also expanded the application to members of glycosyltransferase family GT61 in sorghum for substrate screening and function prediction.

Conclusions

This method is rapid and sensitive to allow determination of both donor and acceptor substrates of glycosyltransferases. MST enables high throughput screening of glycosyltransferases for likely substrates, which will narrow down their in vivo function and help to select candidates for further studies. Additionally, this method gives insight into biochemical mechanism of glycosyltransferase function.

This article describes a Lagrangian finite element method that simulates the behavior of liquids and solids in a unified framework. Local mesh improvement operations maintain a high-quality tetrahedral discretization even as the mesh is advected by fluid flow. We conserve volume and momentum, locally and globally, by assigning to each element an independent rest volume and adjusting it to correct for deviations during remeshing and collisions. Incompressibility is enforced with per-node pressure values, and extra degrees of freedom are selectively inserted to prevent pressure locking. Topological changes in the domain are explicitly treated with local mesh splitting and merging. Our method models surface tension with an implicit formulation based on surface energies computed on the boundary of the volume mesh. With this method we can model elastic, plastic, and liquid materials in a single mesh, with no need for explicit coupling. We also model heat diffusion and thermoelastic effects, which allow us to simulate phase changes. We demonstrate these capabilities in several fluid simulations at scales from millimeters to meters, including simulations of melting caused by external or thermoelastic heating. Copyright © 2013 ACM.

In this study, we present an inverse calculation model based on the Levenberg-Marquardt optimization method to reconstruct temperature and species concentration from measured line-of-sight spectral transmissivity data for homogeneous gaseous media. The high temperature gas property database HITEMP 2010 (Rothman et al. (2010) [1]), which contains line-by-line (LBL) information for several combustion gas species, such as CO2 and H2O, was used to predict gas spectral transmissivities. The model was validated by retrieving temperatures and species concentrations from experimental CO2 and H2O transmissivity measurements. Optimal wavenumber ranges for CO2 and H2O transmissivity measured across a wide range of temperatures and concentrations were determined according to the performance of inverse calculations. Results indicate that the inverse radiation model shows good feasibility for measurements of temperature and gas concentration.

This paper describes measurements of residual stress in thin slices removed from the wall of a pressurizer safety/relief nozzle, which is a cylindrical welded component found in a nuclear power pressurized water reactor. Because the slices comprise a cross-section through a dissimilar metal weld that joins the low-alloy steel pressurizer to a stainless steel safe-end, the residual stress measurements are difficult. Typical welds have large grains and preferred orientations, along with chemical and phase gradients, that challenge diffraction techniques using neutron or x-ray beams. Welds also contain spatial gradients of residual stress that challenge mechanical release techniques like contour, slitting, and hole drilling. Therefore, the paper describes the application of, and compares the results from, three applicable residual stress measurement techniques: slitting, electronic speckle pattern interferometry hole drilling, and neutron diffraction. The results of slitting and neutron diffraction are in rough agreement, while the results from hole drilling are significantly different. An uncertainty analysis shows that slitting results had the smallest uncertainty, followed by hole drilling, and that neutron diffraction results had large uncertainty, particularly in the weld.