Breakdown of hardly degradable carbohydrates (lignocellulose) in a two-stage anaerobic digestion plant is favored in the main fermenter.

The yield and productivity of biogas plants depend on the degradation performance of their microbiomes. The spatial separation of the anaerobic digestion (AD) process into a separate hydrolysis and a main fermenter should improve cultivation conditions of the microorganisms involved in the degradation of complex substrates like lignocellulosic biomass (LCB) and, thus, the performance of anaerobic digesters. However, relatively little is known about such two-stage processes.

The importance of graph databases and graph learning for clinical applications.

The increasing amount and complexity of clinical data require an appropriate way of storing and analyzing those data. Traditional approaches use a tabular structure (relational databases) for storing data and thereby complicate storing and retrieving interlinked data from the clinical domain. Graph databases provide a great solution for this by storing data in a graph as nodes (vertices) that are connected by edges (links).

Decision tree learning in Neo4j on homogeneous and unconnected graph nodes from biological and clinical datasets.

Background: Graph databases enable efficient storage of heterogeneous, highly-interlinked data, such as clinical data. Subsequently, researchers can extract relevant features from these datasets and apply machine learning for diagnosis, biomarker discovery, or understanding pathogenesis.

Methods: To facilitate machine learning and save time for extracting data from the graph database, we developed and optimized Decision Tree Plug-in (DTP) containing 24 procedures to generate and evaluate decision trees directly in the graph database Neo4j on homogeneous and unconnected nodes.

Sub-10-fs observation of bound exciton formation in organic optoelectronic devices.

Fundamental mechanisms underlying exciton formation in organic semiconductors are complex and elusive as it occurs on ultrashort sub-100-fs timescales. Some fundamental aspects of this process, such as the evolution of exciton binding energy, have not been resolved in time experimentally. Here, we apply a combination of sub-10-fs Pump-Push-Photocurrent, Pump-Push-Photoluminescence, and Pump-Probe spectroscopies to polyfluorene devices to track the ultrafast formation of excitons.

MPA_Pathway_Tool: User-Friendly, Automatic Assignment of Microbial Community Data on Metabolic Pathways.

Taxonomic and functional characterization of microbial communities from diverse environments such as the human gut or biogas plants by multi-omics methods plays an ever more important role. Researchers assign all identified genes, transcripts, or proteins to biological pathways to better understand the function of single species and microbial communities. However, due to the versality of microbial metabolism and a still-increasing number of newly biological pathways, linkage to standard pathway maps such as the KEGG central carbon metabolism is often problematic.

Ultrafast isomerization initiated by X-ray core ionization.

Rapid proton migration is a key process in hydrocarbon photochemistry. Charge migration and subsequent proton motion can mitigate radiation damage when heavier atoms absorb X-rays. If rapid enough, this can improve the fidelity of diffract-before-destroy measurements of biomolecular structure at X-ray-free electron lasers.

Carrier-envelope phase stability of hollow fibers used for high-energy few-cycle pulse generation.

We investigated the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) stability of hollow-fiber compression for high-energy few-cycle pulse generation. Saturation of the output pulse energy is observed at 0.6 mJ for a 260 μm inner-diameter, 1 m long fiber, statically filled with neon.