National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

About: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology is a government organization based out in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Catalysis & Thin film. The organization has 22114 authors who have published 65856 publications receiving 1669827 citations. The organization is also known as: Sangyō Gijutsu Sōgō Kenkyū-sho.

Curated genome annotation of Oryza sativa ssp. japonica and comparative genome analysis with Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract: We present here the annotation of the complete genome of rice Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica cultivar Nipponbare. All functional annotations for proteins and non-protein-coding RNA (npRNA) candidates were manually curated. Functions were identified or inferred in 19,969 (70%) of the proteins, and 131 possible npRNAs (including 58 antisense transcripts) were found. Almost 5000 annotated protein-coding genes were found to be disrupted in insertional mutant lines, which will accelerate future experimental validation of the annotations. The rice loci were determined by using cDNA sequences obtained from rice and other representative cereals. Our conservative estimate based on these loci and an extrapolation suggested that the gene number of rice is ∼32,000, which is smaller than previous estimates. We conducted comparative analyses between rice and Arabidopsis thaliana and found that both genomes possessed several lineage-specific genes, which might account for the observed differences between these species, while they had similar sets of predicted functional domains among the protein sequences. A system to control translational efficiency seems to be conserved across large evolutionary distances. Moreover, the evolutionary process of protein-coding genes was examined. Our results suggest that natural selection may have played a role for duplicated genes in both species, so that duplication was suppressed or favored in a manner that depended on the function of a gene.

Ultrafast optical switching to a metallic state by photoinduced mott transition in a halogen-bridged nickel-chain compound.

Abstract: We demonstrate the ultrafast photoinduced Mott transition from a charge transfer insulator to a metal in a halogen-bridged Ni-chain compound by pump-probe reflection spectroscopy. Upon the irradiation of a 130-femtosecond laser pulse, the spectral weight of the gap transition is transferred to the inner-gap region. When the photoexcitation density exceeds $0.1/\mathrm{N}\mathrm{i}$ site, the Drude-like high-reflection band appears in the infrared region, signaling the formation of a metallic state. The photogeneration of the metallic state and the subsequent recovery to the original gapped state occur within a few picoseconds.

Tsunami Source of the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman Earthquake Inferred from Tide Gauge and Satellite Data

Abstract: Tsunami source of the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake was esti- mated from a joint inversion of tsunami waveforms recorded on tide gauges and sea surface heights captured by satellite altimetry measurements. The earthquake, the largest in the past 40 years, caused devastating tsunami damage to countries around the Indian Ocean, but the tsunami source, in particular, its northern end, was not well resolved. Although aftershocks and crustal deformation extended from off north- western Sumatra Island through the Nicobar Islands to the Andaman Islands, some seismic-wave analyses indicated a shorter source length, several hundred kilometers. We used tsunami waveforms recorded at 12 tide gauge stations around the source and the sea surface heights measured by three satellites: Jason1, TOPEX/Poseidon, and Envisat. We numerically computed tsunami propagation using realistic bathym- etry; more than 66,000 depth points were digitized from nautical charts and combined with the ETOPO2 data. Inversion of satellite data indicates that the tsunami source extended to the Andaman Islands with a total length of 1,400 km, but such a model produces much larger tsunami waveforms than observed at Indian tide gauge stations. Inversion of tide gauge records and the joint inversion indicate that the tsunami source was about 900 km long. The largest slip, about 13 to 25 m, was located off Sumatra Island and the second largest slip, up to 7 m, near the Nicobar Islands. The slip distribution is similar for different rupture velocities and rise times, with a slow velocity of 1 km/sec and a rise time of 3 min yielding the largest variance reduction.

Triaxial compressive properties of artificial methane-hydrate-bearing sediment

Abstract: [1] Knowledge of the mechanical properties of gas-hydrate-bearing sediments is essential for simulating the geomechanical response to gas extraction from a gas-hydrate reservoir. In this study, drained triaxial compression tests were conducted on artificial methane-hydrate-bearing sediment samples under hydrate-stable temperature-pressure conditions. Toyoura sand (average particle size: D50 = 0.230 mm), number 7 silica sand (D50 = 0.205 mm), and number 8 silica sand (D50 = 0.130 mm) were used as the skeleton of each specimen. Axial loading was conducted at an axial strain rate of 0.1% min−1 at a constant temperature of 278 K. The cell and pore pressures were kept constant during axial loading. We found that the strength and stiffness of the hydrate-sand specimens increased with methane hydrate saturation and with the effective confining pressure, and the secant Poisson's ratio decreased with the effective confining pressure. The stiffness depends on the type of sand forming the skeleton of the specimens, although the strength has little dependence on the type of sand. According to an earlier work, hydrate-sand specimens are thought to contract in the early stage of axial loading before starting to expand owing to the dilatancy effect, as is the case for many other geological materials. The test results in this study are discussed in relation to the deformation mechanism proposed in an earlier work.