Bioformulation of microbial biocontrol agents for a sustainable agriculture

The application of microbial based biopesticides has become a sustainable alternative to the use of chemicals to prevent yield losses due to plant pathogens. However, microbial based biopesticides are often unsuccessfully formulated and do not meet the demanding regulatory standards required by the agencies, which hinders their commercialization. Hence, an outline on the approaches to attain more effective formulations might be useful for the development of future more effective products. With this aim, this chapter reports the current state of biocontrol strategies and describes the principles of microbial biocontrol formulations. Emphasis is placed on techniques and tools available for the development and characterisation of microbial products. To provide glimpses on the possible formulations, the different existing additives, carriers, inoculation techniques and formulation types are exhaustively reviewed. Finally, requirements and principles for efficacy evaluation of plant protection products in the European Union are include

Interleukin-10 inhibits osteoclastogenesis by reducing NFATc1 expression and preventing its translocation to the nucleus

BACKGROUND: IL-10 has a potent inhibitory effect on osteoclastogenesis. In vitro and in vivo studies confirm the importance of this cytokine in bone metabolism, for instance IL-10-deficient mice develop the hallmarks of osteoporosis. Although it is known that IL-10 directly inhibits osteoclastogenesis at an early stage, preventing differentiation of osteoclast progenitors to preosteoclasts, the precise mechanism of its action is not yet clear. Several major pathways regulate osteoclastogenesis, with key signalling genes such as p38, TRAF6, NF-κB and NFATc1 well established as playing vital roles. We have looked at gene expression in eleven of these genes using real-time quantitative PCR on RNA extracted from RANKL-treated RAW264.7 monocytes. RESULTS: There was no downregulation by IL-10 of DAP12, FcγRIIB, c-jun, RANK, TRAF6, p38, NF-κB, Gab2, Pim-1, or c-Fos at the mRNA level. However, we found that IL-10 significantly reduces RANKL-induced NFATc1 expression. NFATc1 is transcribed from two alternative promoters in Mus musculus and, interestingly, only the variant transcribed from promoter P1 and beginning with exon 1 was downregulated by IL-10 (isoform 1). In addition, immunofluorescence studies showed that IL-10 reduces NFATc1 levels in RANKL-treated precursors and suppresses nuclear translocation. The inhibitory effect of IL-10 on tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase-positive cell number and NFATc1 mRNA expression was reversed by the protein kinase C agonist phorbol myristate acetate, providing evidence that interleukin-10 disrupts NFATc1 activity through its effect on Ca(2+ )mobilisation. CONCLUSION: IL-10 acts directly on mononuclear precursors to inhibit NFATc1 expression and nuclear translocation, and we provide evidence that the mechanism may involve disruption of Ca(2+ )mobilisation. We detected downregulation only of the NFATc1 isoform 1 transcribed from promoter P1. This is the first report indicating that one of the ways in which IL-10 directly inhibits osteoclastogenesis is by suppressing NFATc1 activity

On the price of morals in markets: an empirical study of the Swedish AP-Funds and the Norwegian Government Pension Fund

This study empirically analyses the exclusion of companies from investors’ investment universe due to a company’s business model (sector-based exclusion) or due to a company’s violations of international norms (normbased exclusion). We conduct a time-series analysis of the performance implications of the exclusion decisions of two leading Nordic investors, Norway’s Government Pension Fund-Global (GPFG) and Sweden’s AP-funds. We find that their portfolios of excluded companies do not generate an abnormal return relative to the funds’ benchmark index. While the exclusion portfolios show higher risk than the respective benchmark, this difference is only statistically significant for the case of GPFG. These findings suggest that the exclusion of the companies generally does not harm funds’ performance. We interpret these findings as indicative that with exclusionary screening, as practiced by the sample funds, asset owners can meet the ethical objectives of their beneficiaries without compromising financial returns

The Burkholderia pseudomallei Type III Secretion System and BopA Are Required for Evasion of LC3-Associated Phagocytosis

Burkholderia pseudomallei is the causative agent of melioidosis, a fatal infectious disease endemic in tropical regions worldwide, and especially prevalent in southeast Asia and northern Australia. This intracellular pathogen can escape from phagosomes into the host cytoplasm, where it replicates and infects adjacent cells. We previously demonstrated that, in response to B. pseudomallei infection of macrophage cell line RAW 264.7, a subset of bacteria co-localized with the autophagy marker protein, microtubule-associated protein light chain 3 (LC3), implicating autophagy in host cell defence against infection. Recent reports have suggested that LC3 can be recruited to both phagosomes and autophagosomes, thereby raising questions regarding the identity of the LC3-positive compartments in which invading bacteria reside and the mechanism of the autophagic response to B. pseudomallei infection. Electron microscopy analysis of infected cells demonstrated that the invading bacteria were either free in the cytosol, or sequestered in single-membrane phagosomes rather than double-membrane autophagosomes, suggesting that LC3 is recruited to B. pseudomallei-containing phagosomes. Partial or complete loss of function of type III secretion system cluster 3 (TTSS3) in mutants lacking the BopA (effector) or BipD (translocator) proteins respectively, resulted in delayed or no escape from phagosomes. Consistent with these observations, bopA and bipD mutants both showed a higher level of co-localization with LC3 and the lysosomal marker LAMP1, and impaired survival in RAW264.7 cells, suggesting enhanced killing in phagolysosomes. We conclude that LC3 recruitment to phagosomes stimulates killing of B. pseudomallei trapped in phagosomes. Furthermore, BopA plays an important role in efficient escape of B. pseudomallei from phagosomes

Characteristics of Different Systems for the Solar Drying of Crops

Solar dryers are used to enable the preservation of agricultural crops, food processing industries for dehydration of fruits and vegetables, fish and meat drying, dairy industries for production of milk powder, seasoning of wood and timber, textile industries for drying of textile materials. The fundamental concepts and contexts of their use to dry crops is discussed in the chapter. It is shown that solar drying is the outcome of complex interactions particular between the intensity and duration of solar energy, the prevailing ambient relative humidity and temperature, the characteristics of the particular crop and its pre-preparation and the design and operation of the solar dryer

Estimating global injuries morbidity and mortality: methods and data used in the Global Burden of Disease 2017 study

BACKGROUND: While there is a long history of measuring death and disability from injuries, modern research methods must account for the wide spectrum of disability that can occur in an injury, and must provide estimates with sufficient demographic, geographical and temporal detail to be useful for policy makers. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 study used methods to provide highly detailed estimates of global injury burden that meet these criteria. METHODS: In this study, we report and discuss the methods used in GBD 2017 for injury morbidity and mortality burden estimation. In summary, these methods included estimating cause-specific mortality for every cause of injury, and then estimating incidence for every cause of injury. Non-fatal disability for each cause is then calculated based on the probabilities of suffering from different types of bodily injury experienced. RESULTS: GBD 2017 produced morbidity and mortality estimates for 38 causes of injury. Estimates were produced in terms of incidence, prevalence, years lived with disability, cause-specific mortality, years of life lost and disability-adjusted life-years for a 28-year period for 22 age groups, 195 countries and both sexes. CONCLUSIONS: GBD 2017 demonstrated a complex and sophisticated series of analytical steps using the largest known database of morbidity and mortality data on injuries. GBD 2017 results should be used to help inform injury prevention policy making and resource allocation. We also identify important avenues for improving injury burden estimation in the future

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe