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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2022

Effects of exogenous GnRH administration on lambing performance of oestrus‐synchronized Kazak ewes during the breeding season

Abstract The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of GnRH at insemination on lambing performance of Kazak ewes. Oestrus was synchronized in 774 adult Kazak ewes using an intravaginal sponge impregnated with flurogestone acetate. The sponge was left in the vagina for 12 days followed with an injection of 330 IU of eCG at sponge removal. Each ewe was inseminated twice at 48 h and 60 h after sponge removal. The treatment group ( n = 387) was intramuscularly injected at the first insemination with a dose of 25 μg GnRH and the control group ( n = 387) with saline solution. The results showed that GnRH administration significantly decreased the fertility rate. In addition, significant differences were observed between the two groups in terms of the twin birth rate, the abortion rate and the litter size. In conclusion, GnRH administration at insemination was not recommended in Kazak ewes undergoing the fixed time artificial insemination during the breeding season. The breed may be a critical determinant of the potential for the exploitation of GnRH application in sheep breeding programmes.

Zhang, Jing↗
DOE OSTI2022

Safeguarding Commercial Breed and Burn Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactors

A new class of reactors is under development in the United States. These new reactor designs use fast neutron spectra and rely on fuel technology advancements to reach fleet-wide operating conditions where neither enrichment nor reprocessing fuel are required to sustain or grow the fleet. Achieving this level of operation requires nuclear fuel that can remain in the reactor environment for much longer than current limits. The transfer of irradiated fuel is also required as the initial fissile source for new and replacement reactors. This class of reactors is known as breed and burn reactors and can be deployed as a fleet whereby the transfer of fuel is used to power subsequent generations of reactors. The use of breed and burn reactors reduces, and potentially eliminates, the need for enrichment and reprocessing to sustain a reactor fleet. Currently, enrichment and reprocessing plants require extremely complicated safeguards implementation and offer States diversion pathways for indirect use material. By eliminating the need for these facilities, a nuclear power fleet based on the BREED AND BURN reactor concept has the potential to indirectly reduce the burden on IAEA safeguards. However, this complex dynamic system does pose new safeguards challenges that are explored further in this report.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Development of Production Strains of Chlamydomonas Using Breeding Technologies

Chlamydomonas is a well-studied strain with excellent breeding capability. It can produce recombinant proteins in the raceway in the greenhouse. Increasing the pH of the culture resulted in a very stable cultivation process and cultures did not crash. This strain was not tolerant of high UV levels at KAF. This is can be probably easily overcome by breeding with a light tolerant strain. Overall Chlamydomonas is a very promising strain for production of recombinant proteins not only in the lab but also outdoors. It has excellent breeding capability and its progeny expressed the introduced protein for a long tiem. Chlamydomonas sp. produced lipids but overall lipid yield was low with highest lipid content of 15%. Chlamydomonas is a genus with a great potential for production of various specific proteins. It can be potentially cultivated outdoors and should be further investigated for production of specific molecules.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Neutronic impact of Autonomous Reactivity Control system inclusion in a breed-and-burn core

This work examines the impacts induced in a large breed-and-burn core through the inclusion of Autonomous Reactivity Control (ARC) systems from the neutronics perspective. A combination of numerical and analytical techniques are used to conservatively quantify the reactivity penalty, amount of additional tritium production, and depletion of the system absorber fluid. The reactivity penalty is found to be negligibly small, with the largest impact resulting from the removal of fuel material to make room for the ARC system tubes. Similarly, the depletion of the absorber fluid is found to be negligible compared to the amount of fluid present. It is found that the production of tritium within the active core is also small in comparison to that which is nominally produced, while tritium production within the lower ARC system reservoir may be of concern if not adequately considered during the assembly design phase. This issue is explored and a mitigation technique is proposed. Ultimately this study concludes that there are no issues from the steady-state neutronics perspective preventing incorporation of ARC systems into typical breed-and-burn cores.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Genome resources for three modern cotton lines guide future breeding efforts

Cotton ( Gossypium hirsutum L.) is the key renewable fibre crop worldwide, yet its yield and fibre quality show high variability due to genotype-specific traits and complex interactions among cultivars, management practices and environmental factors. Modern breeding practices may limit future yield gains due to a narrow founding gene pool. Precision breeding and biotechnological approaches offer potential solutions, contingent on accurate cultivar-specific data. Here we address this need by generating high-quality reference genomes for three modern cotton cultivars (‘UGA230’, ‘UA48’ and ‘CSX8308’) and updating the ‘TM-1’ cotton genetic standard reference. Despite hypothesized genetic uniformity, considerable sequence and structural variation was observed among the four genomes, which overlap with ancient and ongoing genomic introgressions from ‘Pima’ cotton, gene regulatory mechanisms and phenotypic trait divergence. Differentially expressed genes across fibre development correlate with fibre production, potentially contributing to the distinctive fibre quality traits observed in modern cotton cultivars. These genomes and comparative analyses provide a valuable foundation for future genetic endeavours to enhance global cotton yield and sustainability.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Breeding of microbiomes conferring salt tolerance to plants

Microbiome breeding through host-mediated selection is a technique to artificially select for microbiomes conferring beneficial properties to plants. Using a systematic selection protocol that maximises the heritability of microbiome effects, transmission fidelity, and microbiome stability through multiple selection cycles, we previously developed root-associated microbial communities conferring sodium and aluminium tolerance to Brachypodium distachyon, a model for cereal crops. Here, we explore the physiological mechanisms underlying our selected microbiomes’ effect on plant fitness and analyse how our selection protocol shaped the composition and structure of these microbiomes. We analysed the effects of our selected microbiomes on plant fitness and tissue-nutrient concentration, then used 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to examine microbial community composition and co-occurrence network patterns. Our sodium-selected microbiomes reduced leaf sodium concentration by ~ 50%, whereas the aluminium-selected microbiomes had no effect on leaf-tissue nutrient concentration, suggesting different mechanisms underlying the microbiome-mediated stress tolerance. By testing the selected microbiomes in a cross-fostering experiment, we show that our artificially selected microbiomes attained (a) ecological robustness contributing to transplantability (i.e. inheritance) of microbiome-encoded effects between plants; and (b) network features identifying key bacteria promoting salt-stress tolerance. Combined, these findings elucidate critical mechanisms underlying host-mediated artificial selection as a framework to breed microbiomes with targeted benefits for plants under salt stresses, with significant implications for sustainable agriculture.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Populus_trichocarpa_Breeding_Population_SNPs

These data are from the manuscript “Application of Genomic Prediction in a Populus trichocarpa Breeding Program”, by Brian J. Stanton, David Macaya-Sanz, Chanaka Roshan Abeyratne, David Kainer, Kathy Haiby, Austin Himes, Carlos Gantz, Gerald A. Tuskan, and Stephen P. DiFazio. The data are based on genome resequencing to approximately 10X depth on two collections of Populus trichocarpa trees from Oregon, Washington, California, and British Columbia. The first collection consists of 293 genets collected by Poplar Innovations LLC for a breeding program. The second collection consists of 961 trees collected for the purpose of genome-wide association studies. These genets were sequenced using short, paired-end Illumina sequence reads (Chhetri et al. 2019). Reads were aligned to the P. trichocarpa ′Stettler-14′ reference (Hofmeister et al. 2020), with minor modifications to correct mis-assemblies (Zhou et al. 2020), and variants were called as per methods described in (Abeyratne et al. 2023). Identified variants were filtered using GATK’s VariantFiltration tool (DePristo et al. 2011), with filter expression flag set to “AF < 0.01 || AF > 0.99 || QD < 10.0 || ExcessHet > 20.0 || FS > 10.0 || MQ < 58.0”. SNPs with severe departures from Hardy−Weinberg expectations (exact-test p< 0.01) were also removed using vcftools --hwe flag (Danecek et al. 2011), resulting in 15,627,211 bi-allelic SNPs. The data included here consist of 141,903 high quality bi-allelic genome-wide SNPs obtained by further filtering the original SNP dataset using vcftools with flags --maf 0.05, --max-maf 0.95, --max-missing 0.95, --min-meanDP 10.75, --max-meanDP 43.00, --thin 2000. Collectively, these filtering parameters removed SNPs with 1) a minor allele frequency ≤ 0.05; 2) proportion of missing data for individual loci exceeding 5%; 3) sequencing depth more than 2X mean-depth or less than 0.5X mean-depth; or 4) a distance of

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Data‐driven identification of environmental variables influencing phenotypic plasticity to facilitate breeding for future climates

Summary Phenotypic plasticity describes a genotype's ability to produce different phenotypes in response to different environments. Breeding crops that exhibit appropriate levels of plasticity for future climates will be crucial to meeting global demand, but knowledge of the critical environmental factors is limited to a handful of well‐studied major crops. Using 727 maize ( Zea mays L.) hybrids phenotyped for grain yield in 45 environments, we investigated the ability of a genetic algorithm and two other methods to identify environmental determinants of grain yield from a large set of candidate environmental variables constructed using minimal assumptions. The genetic algorithm identified pre‐ and postanthesis maximum temperature, mid‐season solar radiation, and whole season net evapotranspiration as the four most important variables from a candidate set of 9150. Importantly, these four variables are supported by previous literature. After calculating reaction norms for each environmental variable, candidate genes were identified and gene annotations investigated to demonstrate how this method can generate insights into phenotypic plasticity. The genetic algorithm successfully identified known environmental determinants of hybrid maize grain yield. This demonstrates that the methodology could be applied to other less well‐studied phenotypes and crops to improve understanding of phenotypic plasticity and facilitate breeding crops for future climates.

Kusmec, Aaron↗
DOE OSTI2024

Integrating multi-modal remote sensing, deep learning, and attention mechanisms for yield prediction in plant breeding experiments

In both plant breeding and crop management, interpretability plays a crucial role in instilling trust in AI-driven approaches and enabling the provision of actionable insights. The primary objective of this research is to explore and evaluate the potential contributions of deep learning network architectures that employ stacked LSTM for end-of-season maize grain yield prediction. A secondary aim is to expand the capabilities of these networks by adapting them to better accommodate and leverage the multi-modality properties of remote sensing data. In this study, a multi-modal deep learning architecture that assimilates inputs from heterogeneous data streams, including high-resolution hyperspectral imagery, LiDAR point clouds, and environmental data, is proposed to forecast maize crop yields. The architecture includes attention mechanisms that assign varying levels of importance to different modalities and temporal features that, reflect the dynamics of plant growth and environmental interactions. The interpretability of the attention weights is investigated in multi-modal networks that seek to both improve predictions and attribute crop yield outcomes to genetic and environmental variables. This approach also contributes to increased interpretability of the model's predictions. The temporal attention weight distributions highlighted relevant factors and critical growth stages that contribute to the predictions. The results of this study affirm that the attention weights are consistent with recognized biological growth stages, thereby substantiating the network's capability to learn biologically interpretable features. Accuracies of the model's predictions of yield ranged from 0.82-0.93 R 2 ref in this genetics-focused study, further highlighting the potential of attention-based models. Further, this research facilitates understanding of how multi-modality remote sensing aligns with the physiological stages of maize. The proposed architecture shows promise in improving predictions and offering interpretable insights into the factors affecting maize crop yields, while demonstrating the impact of data collection by different modalities through the growing season. By identifying relevant factors and critical growth stages, the model's attention weights provide valuable information that can be used in both plant breeding and crop management. The consistency of attention weights with biological growth stages reinforces the potential of deep learning networks in agricultural applications, particularly in leveraging remote sensing data for yield prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the use of hyperspectral and LiDAR UAV time series data for explaining/interpreting plant growth stages within deep learning networks and forecasting plot-level maize grain yield using late fusion modalities with attention mechanisms.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Bird Species Use of Bioenergy Croplands in Illinois, USA—Can Advanced Switchgrass Cultivars Provide Suitable Habitats for Breeding Grassland Birds?

Grassland birds have sustained significant population declines in the United States through habitat loss, and replacing lost grasslands with bioenergy production areas could benefit these species and the ecological services they provide. Point count surveys and autonomous acoustic monitoring were used at two field sites in Illinois, USA, to determine if an advanced switchgrass cultivar that is being used for bioenergy feedstock production could provide suitable habitats for grassland and other bird species. At the Brighton site, the bird use of switchgrass plots was compared to that of corn plots during the breeding seasons of 2020–2022. At the Urbana site, the bird use of restored prairie, switchgrass, and Miscanthus × giganteus was studied in the 2022 breeding season. At Brighton, Common Yellowthroat, Dickcissel, Grasshopper Sparrow, and Sedge Wren occurred on switchgrass plots more often than on corn; Common Yellowthroat and Dickcissel increased on experimental plots as the perennial switchgrass increased in height and density over the study period; and the other two species declined over the same period. At Urbana, Dickcissel was most frequent in prairie and switchgrass; Common Yellowthroat was most frequent in miscanthus and switchgrass. These findings suggest that advanced switchgrass cultivars could provide suitable habitats for grassland birds, replace lost habitats, and contribute to the recovery of these vulnerable species.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1973

Breeding monkeys for biomedical research

Captive bred rhesus monkeys show much less pathology than wild born animals. The monkeys may be bred in cages or in an outdoor compound. Cage bred animals are not psychologically normal which makes then unsuited for some types of space related research. Compound breeding provides contact between mother and infant and an opportunity for the infants to play with their peers which are important requirements to help maintain their behavioral integrity. Offspring harvested after a year in the compound appear behaviorally normal and show little histopathology. Compound breeding is also an economical method for the rapid production of young animals. The colony can double its size about every two and a half years.

Bourne, G. H.↗
NASA NTRS1974

Utility of ERTS for monitoring the breeding habit of migratory waterfowl

Waterfowl breeding-ground surveys conducted each year by the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife extend over a vast region of the United States and Canada. Data from these surveys are used to estimate waterfowl production by means of a mathematical model. Counts of May and July ponds are some the variables used in this model. Annual production estimates are used to predict fall flights of ducks. This information is then used for establishing waterfowl hunting regulations. Work to date indicates that satellite remote sensing techniques hold considerable promise for the accurate and rapid assessment of waterfowl breeding habitat, especially changes in pond numbers and distribution. Development of an operational system utilizing satellite sensors as a primary source of data appears to be a realistic goal for the future.

Work, E. W., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS1975

The rationale for attempting to define salt marsh mosquito-breeding areas in Galveston County by remote sensing the associated vegetation

The rationale for attempting to define salt marsh mosquito breeding areas in Galveston County was discussed, including a botanical survey of the marsh plant communities, their relationship to flooding, and their exposure to salt water. Particular emphasis is given to Distichlis spicata, a widespread marsh grass. Evidence suggests that breeding areas of Aedes sollicitans are associated with Distichlis and that both species respond to similar ecological conditions in the salt marsh. Aspects of the remote sensing of the Distichlis are considered.

Arp, G. K.↗
NASA NTRS1988

Helium-3 blankets for tritium breeding in fusion reactors

It is concluded that He-3 blankets offers considerable promise for tritium breeding in fusion reactors: good breeding potential, low operational risk, and attractive safety features. The availability of He-3 resources is the key issue for this concept. There is sufficient He-3 from decay of military stockpiles to meet the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor needs. Extraterrestrial sources of He-3 would be required for a fusion power economy.

Steiner, Don↗
DOE OSTI2021

Tripal, a community update after 10 years of supporting open source, standards-based genetic, genomic and breeding databases

Abstract Online, open access databases for biological knowledge serve as central repositories for research communities to store, find and analyze integrated, multi-disciplinary datasets. With increasing volumes, complexity and the need to integrate genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic, phenomic and environmental data, community databases face tremendous challenges in ongoing maintenance, expansion and upgrades. A common infrastructure framework using community standards shared by many databases can reduce development burden, provide interoperability, ensure use of common standards and support long-term sustainability. Tripal is a mature, open source platform built to meet this need. With ongoing improvement since its first release in 2009, Tripal provides full functionality for searching, browsing, loading and curating numerous types of data and is a primary technology powering at least 31 publicly available databases spanning plants, animals and human data, primarily storing genomics, genetics and breeding data. Tripal software development is managed by a shared, inclusive governance structure including both project management and advisory teams. Here, we report on the most important and innovative aspects of Tripal after 11 years development, including integration of diverse types of biological data, successful collaborative projects across member databases, and support for implementing FAIR principles.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

The genomic footprints of wild Saccharum species trace domestication, diversification, and modern breeding of sugarcane

Sugarcane is a major crop of unclear origins due to its complex polyploid interspecific genome. We analyzed genome ancestries using whole-genome sequence data from 390 representative accessions based on repeated k-mers and chloroplast phylogeny. The results provided evidence that Saccharum officinarum was domesticated in the New Guinea region from the S. robustum wild species and revealed that its genome is a mosaic involving different S. robustum subgroups. We discovered a wild Saccharum contributor to most modern cultivars, likely originating from East Melanesia. We highlighted two early centers of sugarcane diversification associated with human transport, one in continental Asia through hybridization with different S. spontaneum subgroups and one in the Melanesian and Polynesian islands via hybridization with the discovered ancestor and Miscanthus. Finally, we revealed the genome ancestry of modern cultivars, highlighting untapped wild Saccharum diversity as a source of alleles for breeding programs.

Garsmeur, Olivier [CIRAD, Montpellier (France). Ag↗
DOE OSTI2026

Evaluating Lithium-Lead Mixtures for Increased Tritium Breeding in Fusion Energy Blanket Systems: Exploring the Impact of Composition and Temperature

This project investigates hypo- and hyper-eutectic liquid lithium-lead (PbLi) mixtures as a coolant in fusion blanket systems, with a focus on testing the compatibility of compositions with better tritium breeding ratios (TBR). The 12-month study concentrates on static corrosion experiments, comparing silicon carbide (SiC) corrosion rates in Li-rich and eutectic Li-Pb mixtures, and examining interactions between Mo and PbLi. The research seeks to determine the maximum operating temperatures for this material combination, acknowledging the balance between Li-Pb melting temperature and achievable TBR to unlock new opportunities for blanket design. This work lays the groundwork for future collaboration between Kyoto Fusioneering and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Findings could enhance the TBR of fusion blanket designs, and impact fusion energy development by confirming material compatibility between different Li-Pb mixtures with SiC and Mo at higher temperatures, including at temperatures relevant for very high-temperature blankets (1,000 °C), which could enable higher electricity conversion efficiencies and commercial applications using process heat.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗