Local Increase of Arginase Activity in Lesions of Patients with Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Ethiopia

The leishmaniases are a complex of diseases caused by Leishmania parasites. Currently, the diseases affect an estimated 12 million people in 88 countries, and approximately 350 million more people are at risk. The leishmaniases belong to the most neglected tropical diseases, affecting the poorest populations, for whom access to diagnosis and effective treatment are often not available. Leishmania parasites infect cells of the immune system called macrophages, which have the capacity to eliminate the intracellular parasites when they receive the appropriate signals from other cells of the immune system. In nonhealing persistent leishmaniasis, lymphocytes are unable to transmit the signals to macrophages required to kill the intracellular parasites. The local upregulation of the enzyme arginase has been shown to impair lymphocyte effector functions at the site of pathology. In this study, we tested the activity of this enzyme in skin lesions of patients presenting with localized cutaneous leishmaniasis. Our results show that arginase is highly upregulated in these lesions. This increase in arginase activity coincides with lower expression of a signalling molecule in lymphocytes, which is essential for efficient activation of these cells. These results suggest that increased arginase expression in the localized cutaneous lesions might contribute to persistent disease in patients presenting with cutaneous leishmaniasis

The AgMIP Coordinated Climate-Crop Modeling Project (C3MP): Methods and Protocols

Climate change is expected to alter a multitude of factors important to agricultural systems, including pests, diseases, weeds, extreme climate events, water resources, soil degradation, and socio-economic pressures. Changes to carbon dioxide concentration ([CO2]), temperature, andwater (CTW) will be the primary drivers of change in crop growth and agricultural systems. Therefore, establishing the CTW-change sensitivity of crop yields is an urgent research need and warrants diverse methods of investigation. Crop models provide a biophysical, process-based tool to investigate crop responses across varying environmental conditions and farm management techniques, and have been applied in climate impact assessment by using a variety of methods (White et al., 2011, and references therein). However, there is a significant amount of divergence between various crop models’ responses to CTW changes (R¨otter et al., 2011). While the application of a site-based crop model is relatively simple, the coordination of such agricultural impact assessments on larger scales requires consistent and timely contributions from a large number of crop modelers, each time a new global climate model (GCM) scenario or downscaling technique is created. A coordinated, global effort to rapidly examine CTW sensitivity across multiple crops, crop models, and sites is needed to aid model development and enhance the assessment of climate impacts (Deser et al., 2012)..

It's Not Just What You Have, but Who You Know: Networks, Social Proximity to Elites, and Voting in State and Local Elections

These files were used for the analysis in Pietryka and DeBats' "It's Not Just What You Have, but Who You Know: Networks, Social Proximity to Elites, and Voting in State and Local Elections." The .tsv files represent the data from Alexandria and Newport. The .R file provides the code to run the models reported in the main text using the R statistical computing software

Table ronde " L'auteur de science-fiction est-il un historien du futur ? "

As an explorer of what we do not yet know, is the science fiction author a historian of the future ?En tant qu'explorateur de ce que nous ne savons pas encore, l'auteur de science-fiction est-il un historien du futur

Biases in rhythmic sensorimotor coordination: Effects of modality and intentionality

Sensorimotor biases were examined for intentional (tracking task) and unintentional (distractor task) rhythmic coordination. The tracking task involved unimanual tracking of either an oscillating visual signal or the passive movements of the contralateral hand (proprioceptive signal). In both conditions the required coordination patterns (isodirectional and mirror-symmetric) were defined relative to the body midline and the hands were not visible. For proprioceptive tracking the two patterns did not differ in stability, whereas for visual tracking the isodirectional pattern was performed more stably than the mirror-symmetric pattern. However, when visual feedback about the unimanual hand movements was provided during visual tracking, the isodirectional pattern ceased to be dominant. Together these results indicated that the stability of the coordination patterns did not depend on the modality of the target signal per se, but on the combination of sensory signals that needed to be processed (unimodal vs. cross-modal). The distractor task entailed rhythmic unimanual movements during which a rhythmic visual or proprioceptive distractor signal had to be ignored. The observed biases were similar as for intentional coordination, suggesting that intentionality did not affect the underlying sensorimotor processes qualitatively. Intentional tracking was characterized by active sensory pursuit, through muscle activity in the passively moved arm (proprioceptive tracking task) and rhythmic eye movements (visual tracking task). Presumably this pursuit afforded predictive information serving the coordination process. © 2013 Elsevier B.V