Textile-reinforced mortars (TRM) have recently received significant attention for the externally bonded reinforcement (EBR) of masonry and reinforced concrete structures. The fiber-to-mortar bond, the TRM-to-substrate bond, and the mechanical properties of the TRM constituents have a fundamental role in the performance of this strengthening technique and therefore require special attention. Despite this importance, only few investigations are devoted to characterization of the single fiber-to-mortar bond response in these systems. This paper, as an step towards addressing the fiber-to-mortar bond, presents a combined experimental and analytical investigation on the effect of test setup on the pull-out response and bond-slip laws in TRM composites. Three different pull-out test setups, consisting of one pull-pull and two pull-push configurations, are developed and investigated for characterization of the single fiber-to-mortar bond behavior. The experimental and analytical results are critically discussed and presented and bond-slip laws are extracted for each test setup.

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The YEASTRACT (http://www.yeastract.com) information system is a tool for the analysis and prediction of transcription regulatory associations in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Last updated in June 2013, this database contains over 200 000 regulatory associations between transcription factors (TFs) and target genes, including 326 DNA binding sites for 113 TFs. All regulatory associations stored in YEASTRACT were revisited and new information was added on the experimental conditions in which those associations take place and on whether the TF is acting on its target genes as activator or repressor. Based on this information, new queries were developed allowing the selection of specific environmental conditions, experimental evidence or positive/negative regulatory effect. This release further offers tools to rank the TFs controlling a gene or genome-wide response by their relative importance, based on (i) the percentage of target genes in the data set; (ii) the enrichment of the TF regulon in the data set when compared with the genome; or (iii) the score computed using the TFRank system, which selects and prioritizes the relevant TFs by walking through the yeast regulatory network. We expect that with the new data and services made available, the system will continue to be instrumental for yeast biologists and systems biology researchers.@en