Sex Promotes Spatial and Dietary Segregation in a Migratory Shorebird during the Non-Breeding Season

Several expressions of sexual segregation have been described in animals, especially in those exhibiting conspicuous dimorphism. Outside the breeding season, segregation has been mostly attributed to size or age-mediated dominance or to trophic niche divergence. Regardless of the recognized implications for population dynamics, the ecological causes and consequences of sexual segregation are still poorly understood. We investigate the foraging habits of a shorebird showing reversed sexual dimorphism, the black-tailed godwit Limosa limosa, during the winter season, and found extensive segregation between sexes in spatial distribution, microhabitat use and dietary composition. Males and females exhibited high site-fidelity but differed in their distributions at estuary-scale. Male godwits (shorter-billed) foraged more frequently in exposed mudflats than in patches with higher water levels, and consumed more bivalves and gastropods and fewer polychaetes than females. Females tended to be more frequently involved and to win more aggressive interactions than males. However, the number of aggressions recorded was low, suggesting that sexual dominance plays a lesser role in segregation, although its importance cannot be ruled out. Dimorphism in the feeding apparatus has been used to explain sex differences in foraging ecology and behaviour of many avian species, but few studies confirmed that morphologic characteristics drive individual differences within each sex. We found a relationship between resource use and bill size when pooling data from males and females. However, this relationship did not hold for either sex separately, suggesting that differences in foraging habits of godwits are primarily a function of sex, rather than bill size. Hence, the exact mechanisms through which this segregation operates are still unknown. The recorded differences in spatial distribution and resource use might expose male and female to distinct threats, thus affecting population dynamics through differential mortality. Therefore, population models and effective conservation strategies should increasingly take sex-specific requirements into consideration

Guidelines for management of ischaemic stroke and transient ischaemic attack 2008

This article represents the update of the European Stroke Initiative Recommendations for Stroke Management. These guidelines cover both ischaemic stroke and transient ischaemic attacks, which are now considered to be a single entity. The article covers referral and emergency management, Stroke Unit service, diagnostics, primary and secondary prevention, general stroke treatment, specific treatment including acute management, management of complications, and rehabilitation

Evidence for macromolecular protein rings in the absence of bulk water.

We have examined the architecture of a protein complex in the absence of bulk water. By determining collision cross sections of assemblies of the trp RNA binding protein, TRAP, we established that the 11-membered ring topology of the complex can be maintained within a mass spectrometer. We also found that the binding of tryptophan enhances the stability of the ring structure and that addition of a specific RNA molecule increases the size of the complex and prevents structural collapse. These results provide definitive evidence that protein quaternary structure can be maintained in the absence of bulk water and highlight the potential of ion mobility separation for defining shapes of heterogeneous macromolecular assemblies

Ion mobility-mass spectrometry analysis of large protein complexes.

Here we describe a detailed protocol for both data collection and interpretation with respect to ion mobility-mass spectrometry analysis of large protein assemblies. Ion mobility is a technique that can separate gaseous ions based on their size and shape. Specifically, within this protocol, we cover general approaches to data interpretation, methods of predicting whether specific model structures for a given protein assembly can be separated by ion mobility, and generalized strategies for data normalization and modeling. The protocol also covers basic instrument settings and best practices for both observation and detection of large noncovalent protein complexes by ion mobility-mass spectrometry

Classification and analysis of a large collection of <i>in vivo</i> bioassay descriptions

<div><p>Testing potential drug treatments in animal disease models is a decisive step of all preclinical drug discovery programs. Yet, despite the importance of such experiments for translational medicine, there have been relatively few efforts to comprehensively and consistently analyze the data produced by <i>in vivo</i> bioassays. This is partly due to their complexity and lack of accepted reporting standards—publicly available animal screening data are only accessible in unstructured free-text format, which hinders computational analysis. In this study, we use text mining to extract information from the descriptions of over 100,000 drug screening-related assays in rats and mice. We retrieve our dataset from ChEMBL—an open-source literature-based database focused on preclinical drug discovery. We show that <i>in vivo</i> assay descriptions can be effectively mined for relevant information, including experimental factors that might influence the outcome and reproducibility of animal research: genetic strains, experimental treatments, and phenotypic readouts used in the experiments. We further systematize extracted information using unsupervised language model (Word2Vec), which learns semantic similarities between terms and phrases, allowing identification of related animal models and classification of entire assay descriptions. In addition, we show that random forest models trained on features generated by Word2Vec can predict the class of drugs tested in different <i>in vivo</i> assays with high accuracy. Finally, we combine information mined from text with curated annotations stored in ChEMBL to investigate the patterns of usage of different animal models across a range of experiments, drug classes, and disease areas.</p></div