A fluctuation theory for electrolyte solutions is developed based on the coupling be-tween the equations of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and the Poisson equation. The resulting fluctuation theory is applied to the analysis of electrophoretic light scattering. It is shown that in a binary electrolyte solution (two ionic species), the Doppler shift is not determined by the electrical mobility of either ion, but depends instead on the rate of change of transference number with salt concentration. In addition the ionic relaxation time is shown to be proportional to the conductivity of the solution.

BioPolis- Inventory and analysis of national public policies that stimulate research in biotechnology, its exploitation and commercialisation by industry in Europe in the period 2002–2005

BioPolis- Inventory and analysis of national public policies that stimulate research in biotechnology, its exploitation and commercialisation by industry

BioPolis- Inventory and analysis of national public policies that stimulate research in biotechnology, its exploitation and commercialisation by industry in

BioPolis- Inventory and analysis of national public policies that stimulate research in biotechnology, its exploitation and commercialisation by industry in Europe in the period 2002–2005

An algorithm is presented for generating rigorously all suboptimal secondary structures between the minimum free energy and an arbitrary upper limit. The algorithm is particularly fast in the vicinity of the minimum free energy. This enables the efficient approximation of statistical quantities, such as the partition function or measures for structural diversity. The density of states at low energies and its associated structures are crucial in assessing from a thermodynamic point of view how well-defined the ground state is. We demonstrate this by exploring the role of base modification in tRNA secondary structures, both at the level of individual sequences from Escherichia coli and by comparing artificially generated ensembles of modified and unmodified sequences with the same tRNA structure. The two major conclusions are that (1) base modification considerably sharpens the definition of the ground state structure by constraining energetically adjacent structures to be similar to the ground state, and (2) sequences whose ground state structure is thermodynamically well defined show a significant tendency to buffer single point mutations. This can have evolutionary implications, since selection pressure to improve the definition of ground states with biological function may result in increased neutrality.

These authors contributed equally to this work.

With globalisation and knowledge-based production, firms may cooperate on a global scale, outsource parts of their administrative or productive units and negate location altogether. The extremely low transaction costs of data, information and knowledge seem to invalidate the theory of agglomeration and the spatial clustering of firms, going back to the classical work by Alfred Weber (1868-1958) and Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), who emphasized the microeconomic benefits of industrial collocation. This paper will argue against this view and show why the growth of knowledge societies will rather increase than decrease the relevance of location by creating knowledge clusters and knowledge hubs. A knowledge cluster is a local innovation system organized around universities, research institutions and firms which intend to drive innovations and create new industries. Knowledge hubs are localities with a knowledge architecture of high internal and external networking and knowledge sharing capabilities. Countries or regions form an epistemic landscape of knowledge assets, structured by knowledge hubs, knowledge gaps and areas of high or low knowledge intensity. The paper will focus on the internal dynamics of knowledge clusters and knowledge hubs and

Culture-dependent and-independent studies have found that prokaryotic assemblages are quite diverse in aquatic habitats and contain representatives of virtually all of the roughly 40 divisions of bacteria and the major archaeal

At its 1993 annual meeting, the American Society for Microbiology deemed the biofilm mode of growth to be a concept worthy of an extraordinary 4-day colloquium consist-ing of 52 lectures from invited speakers. Perhaps, immediatelyfollowing this herculean exercise, it is germane to consider the available evidence for the importance and uniqueness of this