These films show very good sensitivity to

parts-per-million (ppm) level concentrations of ammonia, which is further enhanced by platinum functionalization, resulting in a relative resistance response of similar to 70% when exposed to 50 ppm ammonia. In addition, the sensing response exhibits excellent repeatability and full recovery in air. We also study in detail the dependence of the sensing response PRN1371 on ammonia concentration and temperature. We find that the relative resistance response of the graphitic nanoribbon films shows a power-law dependence on the ammonia concentration, which can be explained based on the Freundlich isotherm. The activation energy obtained from an Arrhenius plot of the temperature-dependent measurements is similar to 50 meV, which is consistent with the theoretical calculations of the adsorption energies of ammonia on large graphene sheets and nanoribbons. Their simple and low-cost fabrication process and good sensing response open up the possibility

of using graphitic nanoribbon films for large-scale sensing applications. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3597635]“
“Diploid Thinopyrum elongatum, a wild relative of wheat, contains many agronomically desirable traits and has potential for increasing genetic variability and introducing desirable characters in this crop. Few molecular markers are available for LY2157299 price rapid screening of T. elongatum genome segments in the wheat genetic background. We used 36 RAPD primers and 33 ISSR primers to screen for polymorphisms in the common Tideglusib mouse wheat variety Chinese Spring and in T. elongatum. Two RAPD markers and one ISSR marker, designated OPF03(1407), LW10(1487) and UBC841(701), were identified and were specific for the T. elongatum E genome. Three pairs of primers flanking these specific sequences were designed to produce SCAR markers. All three

SCAR markers were T. elongatum E genome-specific. Two of these SCAR markers, SCAR(807) and SCAR(577), were present in all seven T. elongatum chromosomes, while SCAR(839) was specific for T. elongatum chromosomes 2E and 3E. These newly developed SCAR markers should be useful for detecting alien genome chromatin or chromosome segments in the genetic background of common wheat.”
“Channel noise is the dominant intrinsic noise source of neurons causing variability in the timing of action potentials and interspike intervals (ISI). Slow adaptation currents are observed in many cells and strongly shape response properties of neurons. These currents are mediated by finite populations of ionic channels and may thus carry a substantial noise component. Here we study the effect of such adaptation noise on the ISI statistics of an integrate-and-fire model neuron by means of analytical techniques and extensive numerical simulations.