Persistencia del herbicida Imazapir en el suelo y efectos fitotóxicos sobre cultivos de invierno y de verano

Imazapir es un herbicida de amplio espectro de control, perteneciente al grupo químico de las imidazolinonas. En Argentina es aplicado a gran escala en los cultivos de girasol y maíz Clearfield. Debido a su acción residual en el suelo, resulta de gran importancia determinar su persistencia fitotóxica. El objetivo de este trabajo fue determinar la persistencia fitotóxica sobre cultivos de invierno y de verano, de dos dosis de imazapir aplicado en un cultivo de girasol Clearfield. El ensayo se realizó en un suelo franco-arcilloso de Balcarce (Pcia. de Buenos Aires), siguiendo un diseño experimental en bloques completos aleatorizados con cuatro repeticiones. Los tratamientos consistieron en la aplicación de imazapir en dosis de 80 y 160 g de ingrediente activo (i.a)/ha, incluyéndose un testigo sin tratar. Luego de la cosecha del girasol (marzo de 2003), se obtuvieron muestras de suelo mensualmente. Posteriormente, se efectúo un bioensayo en cámara de crecimiento con trigo, colza, girasol y maíz no tolerantes. Paralelamente, se sembró a campo maíz y girasol no tolerantes a imidazolinonas y papa, determinándose el rendimiento. Los resultados fueron analizados mediante un análisis de la varianza (p = 0.05). La persistencia fitotóxica en el bioensayo siguió el orden trigo > colza > girasol = maíz. A campo, ninguno de los cultivos evaluados mostró efectos negativos, indicando que no existió efecto residual sobre ellos

Introducing medical parasitology at the University of Makeni, Sierra Leone

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.Capacity building in Sierra Leone (West Africa) is critical to prevent potential future outbreaks similar to the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak that had devastating effects for the country and its poorly developed healthcare system. De Montfort University (DMU) in the United Kingdom (UK), in collaboration with parasitologists from the Spanish Universities of San Pablo CEU and Miguel Hernández de Elche, is leading a project to build the teaching and research capabilities of medical parasitology at the University of Makeni (UniMak, Sierra Leone). This project has two objectives: a) to introduce and enhance the teaching of medical parasitology, both theoretical and practical; and b) to implement and develop parasitology research related to important emerging human parasites such as Cryptosporidium spp. due to their public health significance. Two UniMak academics, hired to help initiate and implement the research part of the project, shared their culturally sensitive public health expertise to broker parasitology research in communities and perform a comprehensive environmental monitoring study for the detection of different emerging human parasites. The presence of targeted parasites are being studied microscopically using different staining techniques, which in turn have allowed UniMak’s academics to learn these techniques to develop new practicals in parasitology. To train UniMak’s academics and develop both parts of our project, a DMU researcher visited UniMak for two weeks in April 2019 and provided a voluntary short training course in basic parasitology, which is currently not taught in any of their programmes, and was attended by 31 students. These sessions covered basic introduction to medical parasitology and life-cycle, pathogenesis, detection, treatment and prevention of: a) coccidian parasites (Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora and Cystoisospora); b) Giardia intestinalis, Entamoeba and free-living amoebas; c) malaria and d) microsporidia. A theoretical session on common staining techniques was also provided. To facilitate the teaching and learning of these parasites, the novel resource DMU e-Parasitology was used, a package developed by the above participating universities and biomedical scientists from the UK National Health Service (NHS): http://parasitology.dmu.ac.uk/ index.htm. Following the two weeks of training, UniMak’s academics performed different curriculum modifications to the undergraduate programme ‘Public Health: Medical Laboratory Sciences’, which includes the introduction of new practicals in parasitology and changes to enhance the content of medical parasitology that will be subjected to examination. Thus, a new voluntary practical on Kinyoun stain for the detection of coccidian parasites was introduced in the final year module of ‘Medical Bacteriology and Parasitology’; eighteen students in pairs processed faecal samples from pigs provided by the Department of Agriculture and Food Security from a nearby farm. Academics at UniMak used the Kinyoun staining unit (available at http://parasitology.dmu.ac.uk/learn/lab/Kinyoun/story_html5.html; [1]) to deliver this practical. Although our project is at a preliminary stage, it has been shown to be effective in promoting the introduction and establishment of medical parasitology at UniMak and could be viewed as a case-study for other universities in low-income countries to promote the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and improve public health understanding of infectious diseases

Necesidades y motivaciones de los estudiantes de educación permanente en España. El caso del Centro de Educación Permanente Valle del Guadiato en Córdoba

El objetivo de la investigación en la que está basado el artículo fue identificar las necesidades y las motivaciones de los estudiantes del Centro de Educación Permanente (CEPER) Valle del Guadiato de Córdoba, España. Se parte de diferentes teorías para su fundamentación, como las aportadas por Maslow (2005), McClelland (1989), García Aretio (1988), Paz (1984), Palladino (1981), entre otros. Se utilizó la metodología comparada cuyas unidades de comparación se corresponden con las unidades espaciales, que en este estudio son los municipios: Belmez, Espiel, Fuente Obejuna, Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo, Villanueva del Rey y Villaviciosa de Córdoba. Para la recogida de datos se utiliza el estudio documental, el cuestionario escrito y la observación cualitativa. El universo poblacional del “CEPER Valle del Guadiato” lo conformaron 606 personas adultas del período escolar 2011-2012 (592 estudiantes, 14 maestros), siendo la muestra de 265 personas (251 estudiantes, 14 maestros). Entre las principales conclusiones destacan que las necesidades sociales, laborales y personales de los estudiantes del Centro objeto de estudio se derivan básicamente del deseo de aprender, del deseo de superación personal, y del interés por el tema. Las motivaciones giran en torno a la oportunidad de ocupar sus tiempos libres, a la posibilidad de tener mejores oportunidades de encontrar trabajo, y al apoyo de la familia

Comparación de dos métodos de obtención de índices para la estimación del riesgo de lixiviación de plaguicidas en dos perfiles de suelo

La determinación de los parámetros de adsorción y disipación de plaguicidas en el suelo permite un mejor pronóstico de los procesos y del potencial de contaminación del agua subterránea. El objetivo fue comparar dos métodos de cálculo de los índices factor de retardo y de atenuación log-transformado (AFT), a fin de estimar el riesgo de lixiviación potencial de los herbicidas atrazina, acetoclor y s-metolacloro en los horizontes A, B, C y en todo el perfil de dos suelos de la provincia de Buenos Aires (Argentina). Se elaboraron los índices a partir de los parámetros de adsorción y persistencia de los herbicidas obtenidos mediante experimentos con enfoque multicapa, respecto de cálculos mediante bases de datos con enfoque monocapa. Se determinó el índice de adsorción y el tiempo de vida media para los tres horizontes, a partir de experimentos bajo condiciones controladas. De acuerdo al AFT, calculado para diferentes recargas (0,3; 1,1 y 2,3 mm/día) mediante información de los experimentos multicapa, se estimó un potencial de lixiviación muy improbable de los tres herbicidas en todos los horizontes y perfiles. La utilización de índices tabulados determinó un mayor riesgo de lixiviación, que tendió a incrementarse a mayor profundidad según el orden C>B>A>perfil

Novel resources for learning the identification of human-related parasites.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Microscopic detection of human-related parasites in a range of clinical samples remains the cornerstone of parasitological diagnosis despite recent advances in technology and molecular sciences. However, the use of the light microscope for diagnostic purposes requires comprehensive training, skills and parasitology knowledge that it is difficult to appropriately provide to future health professionals due to different challenges including shortages of health science academics, resources, time and specimens for delivering appropriate training. An international teaching innovation team from different European universities, led by De Montfort University (UK), is building a novel resource for learning and teaching parasitology, which is equipped with a Virtual Laboratory and Microscope. In the Virtual Laboratory (http://parasitology.dmu.ac.uk/learn/laboratory.htm), we are building a complete subsection with a series of engaging units for learning different parasitological staining/fresh preparations techniques for detecting common and rare (emerging and re-emerging) human parasites from several taxa: protozoa (mostly cysts, oocysts) and helminths (eggs and organs for parasitological differentiation such as scolex or proglottids for Taenia spp.) and fungi (spores), which will be publicly available in 2019. Examples of staining techniques included are Kinyoun and Trichrome (normal and modified) stain and fresh preparations for investigating eggs as well as more recent techniques such as immunofluorescence. The Virtual Laboratory will also provide resources to undertake appropriate sample (faeces, blood, urine) collection, management and preparation for parasitological diagnosis and the use of different microscopes including the light microscope for parasite analysis. These units will be equipped with short videos of academics and technicians performing the different techniques, which will include audio and subtitles in English, and will be supported by photos, artworks, designs and self-assessment mini-quizzes and exercises, to provide students with the most practical experience possible. Finally, a complete library of digitised clinical slides of different specimens and parasites is provided here: http://parasitology.dmu.ac.uk/learn/microscope.htm. Each virtual slide is provided with the functionality of a microscope, so the user will be able to zoom in and out and explore all of the clinical sample to learn the morphological characteristics of cysts, oocysts, eggs and spores for parasitological diagnosis. When relevant, a variety of virtual slides for the different species for the same parasite will be provided to enhance the identification of parasites to species level in conjunction with a short description and tips for easy identification. The resources that are being created will cover the theoretical foundation and current scientific information so they will be suitable for undergraduate/postgraduate students as well as for more professional training. This paper will present a complete overview of these novel resources that are aimed to help train future professionals in parasitic disease diagnosis with microscopic identification of parasites; these web-based resources could help to overcome current limitations that are eroding the teaching status of parasitology. Finally, different strategies will be presented to facilitate the introduction and use of this novel resource in any human health programme

Applicability of monthly CDC case studies to improve reflection in biomedical science students.

Background Academics from De Montfort University (DMU, UK) in collaboration with other EU universities, virologists and first responders are developing training for health science students to deal with biological incidents. Initially the training is being tested with final year students enrolled on the BSc Biomedical Science (Hons) and in the BMedSci Medical Science (Hons) degree programmes in 2016/17 at DMU. To improve the limited clinical skills of these students, a series of parasitology case studies have been introduced, where students will need to reflect on their knowledge and search for information from different sources to propose possible diagnoses. Reflection is an essential learning tool for developing aspects such autonomous working, critical and analytical thinking and integration of theory with practice (Quintanilla et al., 2016). Methods A series of teaching sessions (theoretical and practical) has been created related to emergency preparedness and response (Peña-Fernández et al., 2016). Students are provided with different scenarios to develop an intervention programme to protect human health in the aftermath of a biological incident involving different biological agents including emerging parasites. During the theoretical component of the training students are provided with different slides collected from the Laboratory Identification of Parasitic Diseases of Public Health Concern (DPDx) (CDC, 2016). Students, by peer group interaction, provide a possible “diagnosis” for each clinical case based on the clinical features presented and microscopic slides provided. Critical thinking is encouraged. Results Although our results are preliminary and we need to evaluate the students’ feedback, the introduction of clinical case-studies has shown to facilitate the acquisition of some clinical skills, particularly in the biomedical science cohort. This is informed by the high level of students’ interaction during these sessions and the formulation of appropriate questions. Students have also shown some gradual improvement in the resolution of clinical case studies throughout the course. Conclusions Despite the fact that student feedback will not be collected until the end of the course, students have display strong engagement and interest in these workshops through interim module level feedback. A priori, these case-studies have been shown to be effective in facilitating the acquisition of different transversal competences including critical thinking, clinical skills, communication and team work

Extraction of pharmacokinetic evidence of drug-drug interactions from the literature

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and a subject of intense scientific interest. Biomedical literature mining can aid DDI research by extracting evidence for large numbers of potential interactions from published literature and clinical databases. Though DDI is investigated in domains ranging in scale from intracellular biochemistry to human populations, literature mining has not been used to extract specific types of experimental evidence, which are reported differently for distinct experimental goals. We focus on pharmacokinetic evidence for DDI, essential for identifying causal mechanisms of putative interactions and as input for further pharmacological and pharmacoepidemiology investigations. We used manually curated corpora of PubMed abstracts and annotated sentences to evaluate the efficacy of literature mining on two tasks: first, identifying PubMed abstracts containing pharmacokinetic evidence of DDIs; second, extracting sentences containing such evidence from abstracts. We implemented a text mining pipeline and evaluated it using several linear classifiers and a variety of feature transforms. The most important textual features in the abstract and sentence classification tasks were analyzed. We also investigated the performance benefits of using features derived from PubMed metadata fields, various publicly available named entity recognizers, and pharmacokinetic dictionaries. Several classifiers performed very well in distinguishing relevant and irrelevant abstracts (reaching F10.93, MCC0.74, iAUC0.99) and sentences (F10.76, MCC0.65, iAUC0.83). We found that word bigram features were important for achieving optimal classifier performance and that features derived from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms significantly improved abstract classification. We also found that some drug-related named entity recognition tools and dictionaries led to slight but significant improvements, especially in classification of evidence sentences. Based on our thorough analysis of classifiers and feature transforms and the high classification performance achieved, we demonstrate that literature mining can aid DDI discovery by supporting automatic extraction of specific types of experimental evidence.National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine Program, grant 01LM011945-01 "BLR: Evidence-based Drug-Interaction Discovery: In-Vivo, In-Vitro and Clinical," a grant from the Indiana University Collaborative Research Program 2013, "Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction from Large-scale Mining of Literature and Patient Records," as well as a grant from the joint program between the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Portugal) and National Science Foundation (USA), 2012-2014, "Network Mining For Gene Regulation And Biochemical Signaling.

A Dissymmetric [Gd2] Coordination Molecular Dimer Hosting six Addressable Spin Qubits

Artificial magnetic molecules can host several spin qubits, which could then implement small-scale algorithms. In order to become of practical use, such molecular spin processors need to increase the available computational space and warrant universal operations. Here, we design, synthesize and fully characterize dissymetric molecular dimers hosting either one or two Gadolinium(III) ions. The strong sensitivity of Gadolinium magnetic anisotropy to its local coordination gives rise to different zero-field splittings at each metal site. As a result, the [LaGd] and [GdLu] complexes provide realizations of distinct spin qudits with eight unequally spaced levels. In the [Gd2] dimer, these properties are combined with a Gd-Gd magnetic interaction, sufficiently strong to lift all level degeneracies, yet sufficiently weak to keep all levels within an experimentally accessible energy window. The spin Hamiltonian of this dimer allows a complete set of operations to act as a 64-dimensional all-electron spin qudit, or, equivalently, as six addressable qubits. Electron paramagnetic resonance experiments show that resonant transitions between different spin states can be coherently controlled, with coherence times TM of the order of 1 µs limited by hyperfine interactions. Coordination complexes with embedded quantum functionalities are promising building blocks for quantum computation and simulation hybrid platforms

Evaluation of nitrous oxide emission by soybean inoculated with Bradyrhizobium strains commonly used as inoculants in South America

Aims: The purpose of this work was to analyze the agronomic and environmental performance of soybean plants inoculated with the Bradyrhizobium strains widely used as soybean biofertilizers in South America and to determine if these strains possess any functional or taxonomic trait associated with the NO emission. Methods: Bradyrhizobium japonicum E109 and CPAC 15, B. diazoefficiens USDA 110 and CPAC 7, and B. elkanii SEMIA 5019 and SEMIA 587 were used to inoculate soybean seeds. The field experiment was carried out in a soil without history of soybean cultivation in the Argentinian Humid Pampa. The natural N abundance method was applied to estimate N-fixation, and NO production was evaluated using gas chromatography. Among other physiological parameters, shoot dry weight, shoot N content, and crop yield were estimated after harvest. Results: B. japonicum inoculation produced the greatest increases in soybean growth and crop yield but also led to higher NO emissions compared to all other inoculated treatments. Plants inoculated with B. diazoefficiens released the lowest amount of NO, and their growth and yield were the least affected. Inoculation with B. elkanii resulted in intermediate NO emission fluxes and crop yield compared with B. japonicum and B. diazoefficiens. Conclusions: We found that soybean inoculation with strains of B. japonicum and B. elkanii that lack the nosZ gene led to the highest NO emissions under field conditions, but also to the highest crop yield, while inoculation with strains that carry out complete denitrification, nosZ-containing B. diazoefficiens, showed lower NO emission and lower crop yield.To the Instituto de Investigaciones Agrobiotecnológicas (INIAB); Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto (UNRC); Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científcas y Tecnológicas (CONICET), Fondo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (FONCyT); Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). FC is Researcher of CONICET at the UNRC. DT and FD are Postdoc and PhD students at the UNRC granted by CONICET. MOC is a former PhD student at the UNRC granted by CONICET. To Mariano Cicchino from INTA Chascomús, who was in charge of sowing and yield estimation at R8. To Juan Pedro Ezquiaga from INTA Castelar, for their contribution to N2O measurements

Lower Aptian ammonite and carbon isotope stratigraphy in the eastern Prebetic Domain (Betic Cordillera, southeastern Spain)

Major global palaeobiologic and palaeoenvironmental changes occurred during the Early Aptian. Precise dating and timing of the different events is crucial to determine possible cause-effect relationships between them. In this regard, the combination of biostratigraphic and chemostratigraphic data can provide a very useful tool for time control. So far attempts to correlate the Lower Aptian carbon isotope record and the ammonite zonation yielded contradictory conclusions. In this paper, we present the results of an integrated analysis of the ammonite stratigraphic distribution and highresolution carbon isotope profiles from Lower Aptian sections of the eastern Prebetic Domain (Betic Cordillera, southeastern Spain). We recognized, in ascending order, the Deshayesites oglanlensis, Deshayesites forbesi, Deshayesites deshayesi, and Dufrenoyia furcata Zones. This succession is the same as that recently identified in the eastern Iberian Chain, and it closely correlates with both standard Mediterranean and Boreal zonations. The carbon isotope record displays the trends globally recognized for the Early Aptian, with two long positive shifts separated by a pronounced negative excursion. Calibration of this isotopic record with the ammonite zonation shows that the age of OAE 1a, which corresponds to the negative excursion and subsequent positive shift, is constrained to the middle/upper part of the Deshayesites forbesi Zone