Development of a Spatial Decision Support System for Real-Time Flood Early Warning in the Vu Gia-Thu Bon River Basin, Quang Nam Province, Vietnam.

Vu Gia-Thu Bon (VGTB) river basin is an area where flash flood and heavy flood events occur frequently, negatively impacting the local community and socio-economic development of Quang Nam Province. In recent years, structural and non-structural solutions have been implemented to mitigate damages due to floods. However, under the impact of climate change, natural disasters continue to happen unpredictably day by day. It is, therefore, necessary to develop a spatial decision support system for real-time flood warnings in the VGTB river basin, which will support in ensuring the area's socio-economic development. The main purpose of this study is to develop an online flood warning system in real-time based on Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, GIS, telecommunications, and modeling (Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and Hydrologic Engineering Center's River Analysis System (HEC-RAS)) in order to support the local community in the vulnerable downstream areas in the event of heavy rainfall upstream. The structure of the designed system consists of these following components: (1) real-time hydro-meteorological monitoring network, (2) IoT communication infrastructure (Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), wireless networks), (3) database management system (bio-physical, socio-economic, hydro-meteorological, and inundation), (4) simulating and predicting model (SWAT, HEC-RAS), (5) automated simulating and predicting module, (6) flood warning module via short message service (SMS), (7) WebGIS, application for providing and managing hydro-meteorological and inundation data, and (8) users (citizens and government officers). The entire operating processes of the flood warning system (i.e., hydro-meteorological data collecting, transferring, updating, processing, running SWAT and HEC-RAS, visualizing) are automated. A complete flood warning system for the VGTB river basin has been developed as an outcome of this study, which enables the prediction of flood events 5 h in advance and with high accuracy of 80%.

Cultivation system using glass beads immersed in liquid medium facilitates studies of Streptomyces differentiation.

A two-phase cultivation system was developed which will enable studies of streptomycete differentiation by molecular biological and global techniques such as transcriptomics and proteomics. The system is based on a solid phase formed by glass beads corresponding to particles in soil, clay, or sand natural habitats of streptomycetes. The beads are immersed in a liquid medium that allows easy modification or replacement of nutrients and growth factors as well as radioactive labeling of proteins. Scanning electron microscopy was used to analyze morphological differentiation of streptomycetes on glass beads and two-dimensional protein electrophoresis to demonstrate the potential of the system for analyses of protein synthesis profiles during the developmental program. This system facilitates studies of differentiation including expression and post-translation modifications of streptomycetes proteins, secondary metabolite biosynthesis, and morphological development.

Principles of microbial alchemy: insights from the Streptomyces coelicolor genome sequence.

The world's most creative producers of natural pharmaceutical compounds are soil-dwelling bacteria classified as Streptomyces. The availability of the recently completed Streptomyces coelicolor genome sequence provides a link between the folklore of antibiotics and other bioactive compounds to underlying biochemical, molecular genetic and evolutionary principles.

A central regulator of morphological differentiation in the multicellular bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor.

In the multicellular bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, functions of developmental (bald) genes are required for the biosynthesis of SapB, a hydrophobic peptidic morphogen that facilitates aerial hyphae formation. Here, we show that aerial hyphal growth and SapB biosynthesis could be activated independently from the normal developmental cascade by providing unprogrammed expression of functionally interactive genes within the ram cluster. ramC, ramS and ramR were essential for normal growth of aerial hyphae, and ramR, a response regulator gene, was a key activator of development. The ramR gene restored growth of aerial hyphae and SapB formation in all bald strains tested (albeit only weakly in the bldC mutant), many of which are characterized by physiological defects. Disruption of the ramR gene abolished SapB biosynthesis and severely delayed growth of aerial hyphae. Transcription of ramR was developmentally controlled, and RamR function in vivo depended on its putative phosphorylation site (D53). We identified and mapped RamR targets immediately upstream of the region encoding ramC and ramS, a putative operon. Overexpression of ramR in the wild-type strain increased SapB levels and caused a distinctive wrinkled surface topology. Based on these results, we propose that phenotypes of bald mutations reflect an early stage in the Streptomyces developmental programme similar to the spo0 mutations in the unicellular bacterium Bacillus subtilis, and that RamR has analogies to Spo0A, the Bacillus response regulator that integrates physiological signals before triggering endospore formation.

Colonial differentiation in Streptomyces coelicolor depends on translation of a specific codon within the adpA gene.

We identified adpA as an araC-like regulatory gene needed for colonial morphogenesis in Streptomyces coelicolor and showed that its activity depended on a unique TTA triplet corresponding to the leucyl-tRNA gene (bldA). These findings partially explained the dependence of aerial mycelium formation on a rare tRNA that is postulated to have developmental control functions.