@phdthesis{14622, abstract = {This Ph.D. thesis presents a detailed investigation into Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs), a promising class of quantum algorithms that are well suited for near-term quantum computation due to their moderate hardware requirements and resilience to noise. Our primary focus lies on two particular types of VQAs: the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), used for solving binary optimization problems, and the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), utilized for finding ground states of quantum many-body systems. In the first part of the thesis, we examine the issue of effective parameter initialization for the QAOA. The work demonstrates that random initialization of the QAOA often leads to convergence in local minima with sub-optimal performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose an initialization of QAOA parameters based on the Trotterized Quantum Annealing (TQA). We show that TQA initialization leads to the same performance as the best of an exponentially scaling number of random initializations. The second study introduces Transition States (TS), stationary points with a single direction of descent, as a tool for systematically exploring the QAOA optimization landscape. This leads us to propose a novel greedy parameter initialization strategy that guarantees for the energy to decrease with increasing number of circuit layers. In the third section, we extend the QAOA to qudit systems, which are higher-dimensional generalizations of qubits. This chapter provides theoretical insights and practical strategies for leveraging the increased computational power of qudits in the context of quantum optimization algorithms and suggests a quantum circuit for implementing the algorithm on an ion trap quantum computer. Finally, we propose an algorithm to avoid “barren plateaus”, regions in parameter space with vanishing gradients that obstruct efficient parameter optimization. This novel approach relies on defining a notion of weak barren plateaus based on the entropies of local reduced density matrices and showcases how these can be efficiently quantified using shadow tomography. To illustrate the approach we employ the strategy in the VQE and show that it allows to successfully avoid barren plateaus in the initialization and throughout the optimization. Taken together, this thesis greatly enhances our understanding of parameter initialization and optimization in VQAs, expands the scope of QAOA to higher-dimensional quantum systems, and presents a method to address the challenge of barren plateaus using the VQE. These insights are instrumental in advancing the field of near-term quantum computation.}, author = {Sack, Stefan}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {142}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Improving variational quantum algorithms: Innovative initialization techniques and extensions to qudit systems}}, doi = {10.15479/at:ista:14622}, year = {2023}, } @article{10842, abstract = {We determine the unique factorization of some polynomials over a finite local commutative ring with identity explicitly. This solves and generalizes the main conjecture of Qian, Shi and Solé in [13]. We also give some applications to enumeration of certain generalized double circulant self-dual and linear complementary dual (LCD) codes over some finite rings together with an application in asymptotic coding theory.}, author = {Köse, Seyda and Özbudak, Ferruh}, issn = {1936-2455}, journal = {Cryptography and Communications}, keywords = {Applied Mathematics, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Computer Networks and Communications}, number = {4}, pages = {933--948}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Factorization of some polynomials over finite local commutative rings and applications to certain self-dual and LCD codes}}, doi = {10.1007/s12095-022-00557-8}, volume = {14}, year = {2022}, } @article{10850, abstract = {We study two interacting quantum particles forming a bound state in d-dimensional free space, and constrain the particles in k directions to (0, ∞)k ×Rd−k, with Neumann boundary conditions. First, we prove that the ground state energy strictly decreases upon going from k to k+1. This shows that the particles stick to the corner where all boundary planes intersect. Second, we show that for all k the resulting Hamiltonian, after removing the free part of the kinetic energy, has only finitely many eigenvalues below the essential spectrum. This paper generalizes the work of Egger, Kerner and Pankrashkin (J. Spectr. Theory 10(4):1413–1444, 2020) to dimensions d > 1.}, author = {Roos, Barbara and Seiringer, Robert}, issn = {0022-1236}, journal = {Journal of Functional Analysis}, keywords = {Analysis}, number = {12}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Two-particle bound states at interfaces and corners}}, doi = {10.1016/j.jfa.2022.109455}, volume = {282}, year = {2022}, } @article{10920, abstract = {The spin-orbit interaction permits to control the state of a spin qubit via electric fields. For holes it is particularly strong, allowing for fast all electrical qubit manipulation, and yet an in-depth understanding of this interaction in hole systems is missing. Here we investigate, experimentally and theoretically, the effect of the cubic Rashba spin-orbit interaction on the mixing of the spin states by studying singlet-triplet oscillations in a planar Ge hole double quantum dot. Landau-Zener sweeps at different magnetic field directions allow us to disentangle the effects of the spin-orbit induced spin-flip term from those caused by strongly site-dependent and anisotropic quantum dot g tensors. Our work, therefore, provides new insights into the hole spin-orbit interaction, necessary for optimizing future qubit experiments.}, author = {Jirovec, Daniel and Mutter, Philipp M. and Hofmann, Andrea C and Crippa, Alessandro and Rychetsky, Marek and Craig, David L. and Kukucka, Josip and Martins, Frederico and Ballabio, Andrea and Ares, Natalia and Chrastina, Daniel and Isella, Giovanni and Burkard, Guido and Katsaros, Georgios}, issn = {1079-7114}, journal = {Physical Review Letters}, number = {12}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, title = {{Dynamics of hole singlet-triplet qubits with large g-factor differences}}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.126803}, volume = {128}, year = {2022}, } @article{10925, abstract = {Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulent channel flows up to Reτ≈1000 are conducted to investigate the three-dimensional (consisting of streamwise wavenumber, spanwise wavenumber and frequency) spectrum of wall pressure fluctuations. To develop a predictive model of the wavenumber–frequency spectrum from the wavenumber spectrum, the time decorrelation mechanisms of wall pressure fluctuations are investigated. It is discovered that the energy-containing part of the wavenumber–frequency spectrum of wall pressure fluctuations can be well predicted using a similar random sweeping model for streamwise velocity fluctuations. To refine the investigation, we further decompose the spectrum of the total wall pressure fluctuations into the autospectra of rapid and slow pressure fluctuations, and the cross-spectrum between them. We focus on evaluating the assumption applied in many predictive models, that is, the magnitude of the cross-spectrum is negligibly small. The present DNS shows that neglecting the cross-spectrum causes a maximum error up to 4.7 dB in the subconvective region for all Reynolds numbers under test. Our analyses indicate that the approximation of neglecting the cross-spectrum needs to be applied carefully in the investigations of acoustics at low Mach numbers, in which the subconvective components of wall pressure fluctuations make important contributions to the radiated acoustic power.}, author = {Yang, Bowen and Yang, Zixuan}, issn = {1469-7645}, journal = {Journal of Fluid Mechanics}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, title = {{On the wavenumber-frequency spectrum of the wall pressure fluctuations in turbulent channel flow}}, doi = {10.1017/jfm.2022.137}, volume = {937}, year = {2022}, } @phdthesis{11128, abstract = {Although we often see studies focusing on simple or even discrete traits in studies of colouration, the variation of “appearance” phenotypes found in nature is often more complex, continuous and high-dimensional. Therefore, we developed automated methods suitable for large datasets of genomes and images, striving to account for their complex nature, while minimising human bias. We used these methods on a dataset of more than 20, 000 plant SNP genomes and corresponding fower images from a hybrid zone of two subspecies of Antirrhinum majus with distinctly coloured fowers to improve our understanding of the genetic nature of the fower colour in our study system. Firstly, we use the advantage of large numbers of genotyped plants to estimate the haplotypes in the main fower colour regulating region. We study colour- and geography-related characteristics of the estimated haplotypes and how they connect to their relatedness. We show discrepancies from the expected fower colour distributions given the genotype and identify particular haplotypes leading to unexpected phenotypes. We also confrm a signifcant defcit of the double recessive recombinant and quite surprisingly, we show that haplotypes of the most frequent parental type are much less variable than others. Secondly, we introduce our pipeline capable of processing tens of thousands of full fower images without human interaction and summarising each image into a set of informative scores. We show the compatibility of these machine-measured fower colour scores with the previously used manual scores and study impact of external efect on the resulting scores. Finally, we use the machine-measured fower colour scores to ft and examine a phenotype cline across the hybrid zone in Planoles using full fower images as opposed to discrete, manual scores and compare it with the genotypic cline.}, author = {Matejovicova, Lenka}, isbn = {978-3-99078-016-9}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {112}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Genetic basis of flower colour as a model for adaptive evolution}}, doi = {10.15479/at:ista:11128}, year = {2022}, } @article{11135, abstract = {We consider a correlated NxN Hermitian random matrix with a polynomially decaying metric correlation structure. By calculating the trace of the moments of the matrix and using the summable decay of the cumulants, we show that its operator norm is stochastically dominated by one.}, author = {Reker, Jana}, issn = {2010-3271}, journal = {Random Matrices: Theory and Applications}, keywords = {Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics, Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty, Statistics and Probability, Algebra and Number Theory}, number = {4}, publisher = {World Scientific Publishing}, title = {{On the operator norm of a Hermitian random matrix with correlated entries}}, doi = {10.1142/s2010326322500368}, volume = {11}, year = {2022}, } @misc{11321, abstract = {Here are the research data underlying the publication "Effects of fine-scale population structure on the distribution of heterozygosity in a long-term study of Antirrhinum majus" Further information are summed up in the README document. }, author = {Surendranadh, Parvathy and Arathoon, Louise S and Baskett, Carina and Field, David and Pickup, Melinda and Barton, Nicholas H}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Effects of fine-scale population structure on the distribution of heterozygosity in a long-term study of Antirrhinum majus}}, doi = {10.15479/at:ista:11321}, year = {2022}, } @article{11403, author = {Stöllner, Andrea}, issn = {2662-138X}, journal = {Nature Reviews Earth and Environment}, number = {6}, pages = {360}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Measuring airborne nanoplastics using aerosol physics}}, doi = {10.1038/s43017-022-00302-y}, volume = {3}, year = {2022}, } @article{11411, abstract = {Many studies have quantified the distribution of heterozygosity and relatedness in natural populations, but few have examined the demographic processes driving these patterns. In this study, we take a novel approach by studying how population structure affects both pairwise identity and the distribution of heterozygosity in a natural population of the self-incompatible plant Antirrhinum majus. Excess variance in heterozygosity between individuals is due to identity disequilibrium, which reflects the variance in inbreeding between individuals; it is measured by the statistic g2. We calculated g2 together with FST and pairwise relatedness (Fij) using 91 SNPs in 22,353 individuals collected over 11 years. We find that pairwise Fij declines rapidly over short spatial scales, and the excess variance in heterozygosity between individuals reflects significant variation in inbreeding. Additionally, we detect an excess of individuals with around half the average heterozygosity, indicating either selfing or matings between close relatives. We use 2 types of simulation to ask whether variation in heterozygosity is consistent with fine-scale spatial population structure. First, by simulating offspring using parents drawn from a range of spatial scales, we show that the known pollen dispersal kernel explains g2. Second, we simulate a 1,000-generation pedigree using the known dispersal and spatial distribution and find that the resulting g2 is consistent with that observed from the field data. In contrast, a simulated population with uniform density underestimates g2, indicating that heterogeneous density promotes identity disequilibrium. Our study shows that heterogeneous density and leptokurtic dispersal can together explain the distribution of heterozygosity.}, author = {Surendranadh, Parvathy and Arathoon, Louise S and Baskett, Carina and Field, David and Pickup, Melinda and Barton, Nicholas H}, issn = {1943-2631}, journal = {Genetics}, number = {3}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, title = {{Effects of fine-scale population structure on the distribution of heterozygosity in a long-term study of Antirrhinum majus}}, doi = {10.1093/genetics/iyac083}, volume = {221}, year = {2022}, } @article{11447, abstract = {Empirical essays of fitness landscapes suggest that they may be rugged, that is having multiple fitness peaks. Such fitness landscapes, those that have multiple peaks, necessarily have special local structures, called reciprocal sign epistasis (Poelwijk et al. in J Theor Biol 272:141–144, 2011). Here, we investigate the quantitative relationship between the number of fitness peaks and the number of reciprocal sign epistatic interactions. Previously, it has been shown (Poelwijk et al. in J Theor Biol 272:141–144, 2011) that pairwise reciprocal sign epistasis is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of multiple peaks. Applying discrete Morse theory, which to our knowledge has never been used in this context, we extend this result by giving the minimal number of reciprocal sign epistatic interactions required to create a given number of peaks.}, author = {Saona Urmeneta, Raimundo J and Kondrashov, Fyodor and Khudiakova, Kseniia}, issn = {1522-9602}, journal = {Bulletin of Mathematical Biology}, keywords = {Computational Theory and Mathematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Pharmacology, General Environmental Science, General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, General Mathematics, Immunology, General Neuroscience}, number = {8}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Relation between the number of peaks and the number of reciprocal sign epistatic interactions}}, doi = {10.1007/s11538-022-01029-z}, volume = {84}, year = {2022}, } @article{11448, abstract = {Studies of protein fitness landscapes reveal biophysical constraints guiding protein evolution and empower prediction of functional proteins. However, generalisation of these findings is limited due to scarceness of systematic data on fitness landscapes of proteins with a defined evolutionary relationship. We characterized the fitness peaks of four orthologous fluorescent proteins with a broad range of sequence divergence. While two of the four studied fitness peaks were sharp, the other two were considerably flatter, being almost entirely free of epistatic interactions. Mutationally robust proteins, characterized by a flat fitness peak, were not optimal templates for machine-learning-driven protein design – instead, predictions were more accurate for fragile proteins with epistatic landscapes. Our work paves insights for practical application of fitness landscape heterogeneity in protein engineering.}, author = {Gonzalez Somermeyer, Louisa and Fleiss, Aubin and Mishin, Alexander S and Bozhanova, Nina G and Igolkina, Anna A and Meiler, Jens and Alaball Pujol, Maria-Elisenda and Putintseva, Ekaterina V and Sarkisyan, Karen S and Kondrashov, Fyodor}, issn = {2050-084X}, journal = {eLife}, keywords = {General Immunology and Microbiology, General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, General Medicine, General Neuroscience}, publisher = {eLife Sciences Publications}, title = {{Heterogeneity of the GFP fitness landscape and data-driven protein design}}, doi = {10.7554/elife.75842}, volume = {11}, year = {2022}, } @inproceedings{11459, abstract = {We present a novel approach to differential cost analysis that, given a program revision, attempts to statically bound the difference in resource usage, or cost, between the two program versions. Differential cost analysis is particularly interesting because of the many compelling applications for it, such as detecting resource-use regressions at code-review time or proving the absence of certain side-channel vulnerabilities. One prior approach to differential cost analysis is to apply relational reasoning that conceptually constructs a product program on which one can over-approximate the difference in costs between the two program versions. However, a significant challenge in any relational approach is effectively aligning the program versions to get precise results. In this paper, our key insight is that we can avoid the need for and the limitations of program alignment if, instead, we bound the difference of two cost-bound summaries rather than directly bounding the concrete cost difference. In particular, our method computes a threshold value for the maximal difference in cost between two program versions simultaneously using two kinds of cost-bound summaries---a potential function that evaluates to an upper bound for the cost incurred in the first program and an anti-potential function that evaluates to a lower bound for the cost incurred in the second. Our method has a number of desirable properties: it can be fully automated, it allows optimizing the threshold value on relative cost, it is suitable for programs that are not syntactically similar, and it supports non-determinism. We have evaluated an implementation of our approach on a number of program pairs collected from the literature, and we find that our method computes tight threshold values on relative cost in most examples.}, author = {Zikelic, Dorde and Chang, Bor-Yuh Evan and Bolignano, Pauline and Raimondi, Franco}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation}, isbn = {9781450392655}, location = {San Diego, CA, United States}, pages = {442--457}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, title = {{Differential cost analysis with simultaneous potentials and anti-potentials}}, doi = {10.1145/3519939.3523435}, year = {2022}, } @article{11462, abstract = {Nanobodies (VHH) from camelid antibody libraries hold great promise as therapeutic agents and components of immunoassay systems. Synthetic antibody libraries that could be designed and generated once and for various applications could yield binders to virtually any targets, even for non-immunogenic or toxic ones, in a short term. One of the most difficult tasks is to obtain antibodies with a high affinity and specificity to polyglycosylated proteins. It requires antibody libraries with extremely high functional diversity and the use of sophisticated selection techniques. Here we report a development of a novel sandwich immunoassay involving a combination of the synthetic library-derived VHH-Fc fusion protein as a capture antibody and the immune single-chain fragment variable (scFv) as a tracer for the detection of pregnancy-associated glycoprotein (PAG) of cattle (Bos taurus). We succeeded in the generation of a number of specific scFv antibodies against PAG from the mouse immune library. Subsequent selection using the immobilized scFv-Fc capture antibody allowed to isolate 1.9 nM VHH binder from the diverse synthetic library without any overlapping with the capture antibody binding site. The prototype sandwich ELISA based on the synthetic VHH and the immune scFv was established. This is the first successful example of the combination of synthetic and immune antibody libraries in a single sandwich immunoassay. Thus, our approach could be used for the express isolation of antibody pairs and the development of sandwich immunoassays for challenging antigens.}, author = {Dormeshkin, Dmitri and Shapira, Michail and Karputs, Alena and Kavaleuski, Anton and Kuzminski, Ivan and Stepanova, Elena and Gilep, Andrei}, issn = {1432-0614}, journal = {Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology}, pages = {5093--5103}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Combining of synthetic VHH and immune scFv libraries for pregnancy-associated glycoproteins ELISA development}}, doi = {10.1007/s00253-022-12022-w}, volume = {106}, year = {2022}, } @phdthesis{11473, abstract = {The polaron model is a basic model of quantum field theory describing a single particle interacting with a bosonic field. It arises in many physical contexts. We are mostly concerned with models applicable in the context of an impurity atom in a Bose-Einstein condensate as well as the problem of electrons moving in polar crystals. The model has a simple structure in which the interaction of the particle with the field is given by a term linear in the field’s creation and annihilation operators. In this work, we investigate the properties of this model by providing rigorous estimates on various energies relevant to the problem. The estimates are obtained, for the most part, by suitable operator techniques which constitute the principal mathematical substance of the thesis. The first application of these techniques is to derive the polaron model rigorously from first principles, i.e., from a full microscopic quantum-mechanical many-body problem involving an impurity in an otherwise homogeneous system. We accomplish this for the N + 1 Bose gas in the mean-field regime by showing that a suitable polaron-type Hamiltonian arises at weak interactions as a low-energy effective theory for this problem. In the second part, we investigate rigorously the ground state of the model at fixed momentum and for large values of the coupling constant. Qualitatively, the system is expected to display a transition from the quasi-particle behavior at small momenta, where the dispersion relation is parabolic and the particle moves through the medium dragging along a cloud of phonons, to the radiative behavior at larger momenta where the polaron decelerates and emits free phonons. At the same time, in the strong coupling regime, the bosonic field is expected to behave purely classically. Accordingly, the effective mass of the polaron at strong coupling is conjectured to be asymptotically equal to the one obtained from the semiclassical counterpart of the problem, first studied by Landau and Pekar in the 1940s. For polaron models with regularized form factors and phonon dispersion relations of superfluid type, i.e., bounded below by a linear function of the wavenumbers for all phonon momenta as in the interacting Bose gas, we prove that for a large window of momenta below the radiation threshold, the energy-momentum relation at strong coupling is indeed essentially a parabola with semi-latus rectum equal to the Landau–Pekar effective mass, as expected. For the Fröhlich polaron describing electrons in polar crystals where the dispersion relation is of the optical type and the form factor is formally UV–singular due to the nature of the point charge-dipole interaction, we are able to give the corresponding upper bound. In contrast to the regular case, this requires the inclusion of the quantum fluctuations of the phonon field, which makes the problem considerably more difficult. The results are supplemented by studies on the absolute ground-state energy at strong coupling, a proof of the divergence of the effective mass with the coupling constant for a wide class of polaron models, as well as the discussion of the apparent UV singularity of the Fröhlich model and the application of the techniques used for its removal for the energy estimates. }, author = {Mysliwy, Krzysztof}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {138}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Polarons in Bose gases and polar crystals: Some rigorous energy estimates}}, doi = {10.15479/at:ista:11473}, year = {2022}, } @inproceedings{11476, abstract = {Messaging platforms like Signal are widely deployed and provide strong security in an asynchronous setting. It is a challenging problem to construct a protocol with similar security guarantees that can efficiently scale to large groups. A major bottleneck are the frequent key rotations users need to perform to achieve post compromise forward security. In current proposals – most notably in TreeKEM (which is part of the IETF’s Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol draft) – for users in a group of size n to rotate their keys, they must each craft a message of size log(n) to be broadcast to the group using an (untrusted) delivery server. In larger groups, having users sequentially rotate their keys requires too much bandwidth (or takes too long), so variants allowing any T≤n users to simultaneously rotate their keys in just 2 communication rounds have been suggested (e.g. “Propose and Commit” by MLS). Unfortunately, 2-round concurrent updates are either damaging or expensive (or both); i.e. they either result in future operations being more costly (e.g. via “blanking” or “tainting”) or are costly themselves requiring Ω(T) communication for each user [Bienstock et al., TCC’20]. In this paper we propose CoCoA; a new scheme that allows for T concurrent updates that are neither damaging nor costly. That is, they add no cost to future operations yet they only require Ω(log2(n)) communication per user. To circumvent the [Bienstock et al.] lower bound, CoCoA increases the number of rounds needed to complete all updates from 2 up to (at most) log(n); though typically fewer rounds are needed. The key insight of our protocol is the following: in the (non-concurrent version of) TreeKEM, a delivery server which gets T concurrent update requests will approve one and reject the remaining T−1. In contrast, our server attempts to apply all of them. If more than one user requests to rotate the same key during a round, the server arbitrarily picks a winner. Surprisingly, we prove that regardless of how the server chooses the winners, all previously compromised users will recover after at most log(n) such update rounds. To keep the communication complexity low, CoCoA is a server-aided CGKA. That is, the delivery server no longer blindly forwards packets, but instead actively computes individualized packets tailored to each user. As the server is untrusted, this change requires us to develop new mechanisms ensuring robustness of the protocol.}, author = {Alwen, Joël and Auerbach, Benedikt and Cueto Noval, Miguel and Klein, Karen and Pascual Perez, Guillermo and Pietrzak, Krzysztof Z and Walter, Michael}, booktitle = {Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2022}, isbn = {9783031070846}, issn = {1611-3349}, location = {Trondheim, Norway}, pages = {815–844}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{CoCoA: Concurrent continuous group key agreement}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-07085-3_28}, volume = {13276}, year = {2022}, } @misc{11542, author = {Schulz, Rouven}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Source Data (Chimeric GPCRs mimic distinct signaling pathways and modulate microglia responses)}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:ISTA:11542}, year = {2022}, } @article{11556, abstract = {We revisit two basic Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Methods to model aggregation kinetics and extend them for aggregation processes with collisional fragmentation (shattering). We test the performance and accuracy of the extended methods and compare their performance with efficient deterministic finite-difference method applied to the same model. We validate the stochastic methods on the test problems and apply them to verify the existence of oscillating regimes in the aggregation-fragmentation kinetics recently detected in deterministic simulations. We confirm the emergence of steady oscillations of densities in such systems and prove the stability of the oscillations with respect to fluctuations and noise.}, author = {Kalinov, Aleksei and Osinskiy, A.I. and Matveev, S.A. and Otieno, W. and Brilliantov, N.V.}, issn = {0021-9991}, journal = {Journal of Computational Physics}, keywords = {Computer Science Applications, Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous), Applied Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, Modeling and Simulation, Numerical Analysis}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Direct simulation Monte Carlo for new regimes in aggregation-fragmentation kinetics}}, doi = {10.1016/j.jcp.2022.111439}, volume = {467}, year = {2022}, } @phdthesis{11626, abstract = {Plant growth and development is well known to be both, flexible and dynamic. The high capacity for post-embryonic organ formation and tissue regeneration requires tightly regulated intercellular communication and coordinated tissue polarization. One of the most important drivers for patterning and polarity in plant development is the phytohormone auxin. Auxin has the unique characteristic to establish polarized channels for its own active directional cell to cell transport. This fascinating phenomenon is called auxin canalization. Those auxin transport channels are characterized by the expression and polar, subcellular localization of PIN auxin efflux carriers. PIN proteins have the ability to dynamically change their localization and auxin itself can affect this by interfering with trafficking. Most of the underlying molecular mechanisms of canalization still remain enigmatic. What is known so far is that canonical auxin signaling is indispensable but also other non-canonical signaling components are thought to play a role. In order to shed light into the mysteries auf auxin canalization this study revisits the branches of auxin signaling in detail. Further a new auxin analogue, PISA, is developed which triggers auxin-like responses but does not directly activate canonical transcriptional auxin signaling. We revisit the direct auxin effect on PIN trafficking where we found that, contradictory to previous observations, auxin is very specifically promoting endocytosis of PIN2 but has no overall effect on endocytosis. Further, we evaluate which cellular processes related to PIN subcellular dynamics are involved in the establishment of auxin conducting channels and the formation of vascular tissue. We are re-evaluating the function of AUXIN BINDING PROTEIN 1 (ABP1) and provide a comprehensive picture about its developmental phneotypes and involvement in auxin signaling and canalization. Lastly, we are focusing on the crosstalk between the hormone strigolactone (SL) and auxin and found that SL is interfering with essentially all processes involved in auxin canalization in a non-transcriptional manner. Lastly we identify a new way of SL perception and signaling which is emanating from mitochondria, is independent of canonical SL signaling and is modulating primary root growth.}, author = {Gallei, Michelle C}, isbn = {978-3-99078-019-0}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {248}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Auxin and strigolactone non-canonical signaling regulating development in Arabidopsis thaliana}}, doi = {10.15479/at:ista:11626}, year = {2022}, } @article{11658, abstract = {The depth of a cell in an arrangement of n (non-vertical) great-spheres in Sd is the number of great-spheres that pass above the cell. We prove Euler-type relations, which imply extensions of the classic Dehn–Sommerville relations for convex polytopes to sublevel sets of the depth function, and we use the relations to extend the expressions for the number of faces of neighborly polytopes to the number of cells of levels in neighborly arrangements.}, author = {Biswas, Ranita and Cultrera di Montesano, Sebastiano and Edelsbrunner, Herbert and Saghafian, Morteza}, journal = {Leibniz International Proceedings on Mathematics}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Depth in arrangements: Dehn–Sommerville–Euler relations with applications}}, year = {2022}, }