Sofia University

About: Sofia University is a education organization based out in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Large Hadron Collider & Laser. The organization has 8533 authors who have published 15730 publications receiving 306320 citations. The organization is also known as: University of Sofia & BFUS.

Comparing pollen spectra from modified Tauber traps and moss samples: examples from a selection of woodlands across Europe

Abstract: This paper compares pollen spectra derived from modified Tauber traps and moss samples from a selection of woodland types from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Greece, Poland, Switzerland and Wales. The study examines the representation of individual taxa in the two sampling media and aims to ascertain the duration of pollen deposition captured by a moss. The latter aim was pursued through the calculation of dissimilarity indexes to assess how many years of pollen deposited in a pollen trap yield percentage values that are most similar to those obtained from the moss. The results are broadly scattered; the majority of moss samples being most similar to several years of pollen deposition in the adjacent trap. For a selection of samples, a comparison of the pollen accumulation rate in pollen traps with the pollen concentration in the moss per unit surface indicates that the entrapment and/or preservation of individual pollen types in the moss differ from that in the pollen trap. A comparison of the proportion of different taxa in the moss with the pollen spectrum of 2 years of pollen deposition in the trap also revealed large differences. There is a tendency for bisaccate grains such as Pinus and Picea to have a higher representation in moss than in traps but there is considerable regional variation. The results indicate that pollen proportions from moss samples often represent the pollen deposition of one area over several years. However, bisaccate pollen grains tend to be over-represented in moss samples compared to both pollen traps and, potentially, lake sediments.

Chromatin immunoprecipitation from fixed clinical tissues reveals tumor-specific enhancer profiles

Abstract: Extensive cross-linking introduced during routine tissue fixation of clinical pathology specimens severely hampers chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by next-generation sequencing (ChIP-seq) analysis from archived tissue samples. This limits the ability to study the epigenomes of valuable, clinically annotated tissue resources. Here we describe fixed-tissue chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (FiT-seq), a method that enables reliable extraction of soluble chromatin from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples for accurate detection of histone marks. We demonstrate that FiT-seq data from FFPE specimens are concordant with ChIP-seq data from fresh-frozen samples of the same tumors. By using multiple histone marks, we generate chromatin-state maps and identify cis-regulatory elements in clinical samples from various tumor types that can readily allow us to distinguish between cancers by the tissue of origin. Tumor-specific enhancers and superenhancers that are elucidated by FiT-seq analysis correlate with known oncogenic drivers in different tissues and can assist in the understanding of how chromatin states affect gene regulation.

Measurement of dijet angular distributions and search for quark compositeness in pp collisions at √s=7TeV

Abstract: Dijet angular distributions are measured over a wide range of dijet invariant masses in pp collisions at root s = 7 TeV, at the CERN LHC. The event sample, recorded with the CMS detector, corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 36 pb(-1). The data are found to be in good agreement with the predictions of perturbative QCD, and yield no evidence of quark compositeness. With a modified frequentist approach, a lower limit on the contact interaction scale for left-handed quarks of Lambda(+) = 5.6 TeV (Lambda(-) = 6.7 TeV) for destructive (constructive) interference is obtained at the 95% confidence level.