Effects of two common fungicides on the reproduction of Aporrectodea caliginosa in natural soil

The use of pesticides in agroecosystems can have negative effects on earthworms, which play key roles in soil functioning such as organic matter decomposition. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of two fungicides (Cuprafor micro®, composed of copper oxychloride, and Swing Gold®, composed of epoxiconazole (EPX) and dimoxystrobin (DMX)) on earthworm reproduction by exposing adults and cocoons. First, adult Aporrectodea caliginosa individuals were exposed for 28 days to 3.33, 10 and 30 times the recommended dose (RD) of Cuprafor micro® corresponding to 25.8, 77.5 and 232.5 mg kg−1 dry soil of copper, respectively, and 0.33, 1 and 3 times the RD of Swing Gold® (corresponding to 5.2 × 10−2 mg DMX kg−1 + 1.94 × 10−2 mg EPX kg−1, 1.55 × 10−1 mg DMX kg−1 + 5.81 × 10−2 mg EPX kg−1 and 4.62 × 10−1 mg DMX kg−1 + 1.74 × 10−1 mg EPX kg−1 respectively), in addition to a control soil with no fungicide treatment. Cocoon variables (production, weight, hatching success, hatching time) were monitored. Second, “naïve” cocoons produced by uncontaminated earthworms were exposed to soils contaminated by the same concentrations of the two fungicides, and we assessed hatching success and hatching time. In the first experiment, cocoon production was halved at the highest copper concentration (232.5 mg Cu kg−1 of dry soil) as compared to the control. Cocoons took 5 more days to hatch, and the hatching success decreased by 35% as compared to the control. In the Swing Gold® treatments, cocoon production was reduced by 63% at 3 times the RD, and the hatching success significantly decreased by 16% at the RD. In the second experiment, only the hatching success of cocoons was impacted by Swing Gold® at 3 times the RD (30% less hatching). It is concluded that the cocoon stock in the soil is crucial for the renewal of populations in the field. The most sensitive endpoint was the hatching success of the cocoons produced by exposed adults. This endpoint and the effects observed on the “naïve” cocoons could be taken into account in pesticide risk assessment

Earthworms mitigate pesticide effects on soil microbial activities

Earthworms act synergistically with microorganisms in soils. They are ecosystem engineers involved in soil organic matter degradation and nutrient cycling, leading to the modulation of resource availability for all soil organisms. Using a soil microcosm approach, we aimed to assess the influence of the earthworm Aporrectodea caliginosa on the response of soil microbial activities against two fungicides, i.e. Cuprafor micro® (copper oxychloride, a metal) and Swing® Gold (epoxiconazole and dimoxystrobin, synthetic organic compounds). The potential nitrification activity (PNA) and soil enzyme activities (glucosidase, phosphatase, arylamidase, and urease) involved in biogeochemical cycling were measured at the end of the incubation period, together with earthworm biomass. Two common indices of the soil biochemistry were used to aggregate the response of the soil microbial functioning: the geometric mean (Gmean) and the Soil Quality Index (SQI). At the end of the experiment, the earthworm biomass was not impacted by the fungicide treatments. Overall, in the earthworm-free soil microcosms, the two fungicides significantly increased several soil enzyme and nitrification activities, leading to a higher GMean Index as compared to the non-treated control soils. The microbial activity responses depended on the type of activity (nitrification was the most sensitive one), on the fungicide (Swing® Gold or Cuprafor micro®), and on the doses. The SQI indices revealed higher effects of both fungicides on the soil microbial activity in the absence of earthworms. The presence of earthworms enhanced all soil microbial activities in both the control and fungicide-contaminated soils. Moreover, the magnitude of the fungicide impact, integrated through the SQI index, was mitigated by the presence of earthworms, conferring a higher stability of microbial functional diversity. Our results highlight the importance of biotic interactions in the response of indicators of soil functioning (i.e., microbial activity) to pesticides

Ensuring access to high-quality resources reduces the impacts of heat stress on bees

Pollinators are experiencing declines globally, negatively affecting the reproduction of wild plants and crop production. Well-known drivers of these declines include climatic and nutritional stresses, such as a change of dietary resources due to the degradation of habitat quality. Understanding potential synergies between these two important drivers is needed to improve predictive models of the future effects of climate change on pollinator declines. Here, bumblebee colony bioassays were used to evaluate the interactive effects of heat stress, a reduction of dietary resource quality, and colony size. Using a total of 117 colonies, we applied a fully crossed experiment to test the effect of three dietary quality levels under three levels of heat stress with two colony sizes. Both nutritional and heat stress reduced colony development resulting in a lower investment in offspring production. Small colonies were much more sensitive to heat and nutritional stresses than large ones, possibly because a higher percentage of workers helps maintain social homeostasis. Strikingly, the effects of heat stress were far less pronounced for small colonies fed with suitable diets. Overall, our study suggests that landscape management actions that ensure access to high-quality resources could reduce the impacts of heat stress on bee decline.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

La gestion alternative des eaux pluviales permet-elle une maîtrise efficace des flux de micropolluants? Retour d'expérience des projets Matriochkas, MicroMégas et Roulépur

Novatech 2019, LYON, FRANCE, 01-/07/2019 - 05/07/2019The pooling of results from three French projects (Matriochkas, MicroMégas and Roulépur), within the framework of a working group on methodological harmonisation, makes it possible to analyse the performance of a wide range of stormwater control measures (SCMs) in terms of micropollutant load reduction. Data covers 12 management systems, in 9 different urban contexts. The results highlight the diversity of runoff contamination levels and of their distribution between dissolved and particulate phases. They show significant reductions in particulate pollutants for all filtration-based systems, and less for those that only allow sedimentation. Performance is more limited for the dissolved phase, for which concentration reduction is limited and significant load reductions are only achieved due to a reduction in runoff volumes in structures promoting evapotranspiration.La mise en commun de résultats issus des projets français Matriochkas, MicroMégas et Roulépur, dans le cadre d'un groupe de travail d'échanges et d'harmonisation méthodologiques, permet d'analyser l'efficacité de la gestion alternative des eaux pluviales en termes de réduction des flux de micropolluants, pour 12 dispositifs de gestion et 9 contextes urbains différents. Les résultats soulignent la diversité des niveaux de contamination des eaux de ruissellement, et de leur distribution entre phases dissoutes et particulaires. Ils démontrent des abattements importants des polluants particulaires pour l'ensemble des systèmes basés sur la filtration, et moindre pour ceux ne permettant que la sédimentation. Les performances sont plus limitées pour les concentrations dissoutes, de sorte que seul un abattement des volumes de ruissellement, dans les ouvrages favorisant l'évapotranspiration, permet une réduction significative des flux de micropolluants dissou

Coupling metabolism and chemotaxis-dependent behaviours by energy taxis receptors

Bacteria have evolved the ability to monitor changes in various physico-chemical parameters and to adapt their physiology and metabolism by implementing appropriate cellular responses to these changes. Energy taxis is a metabolism-dependent form of taxis and is the directed movement of motile bacteria in gradients of physico-chemical parameters that affect metabolism. Energy taxis has been described in diverse bacterial species and several dedicated energy sensors have been identified. The molecular mechanism of energy taxis has not been studied in as much detail as chemotaxis, but experimental evidence indicates that this behaviour differs from metabolism-independent taxis only by the presence of dedicated energy taxis receptors. Energy taxis receptors perceive changes in energy-related parameters, including signals related to the redox and/or intracellular energy status of the cell. The best-characterized energy taxis receptors are those that sense the redox state of the electron transport chain via non-covalently bound FAD cofactors. Other receptors shown to mediate energy taxis lack any recognizable redox cofactor or conserved energy-sensing motif, and some have been suggested to monitor changes in the proton motive force. The exact energy-sensing mechanism(s) involved are yet to be elucidated for most of these energy sensors. By monitoring changes in energy-related parameters, energy taxis receptors allow cells to couple motility behaviour with metabolism under diverse environmental conditions. Energy taxis receptors thus provide fruitful models to decipher how cells integrate sensory behaviours with metabolic activities. doi: 10.1099/mic.0.039214-

Le développent d'un guide méthodologique pour l'évaluation des performances des ouvrages de maîtrise à la source des eaux pluviales

Novatech 2019, LYON, FRANCE, 01-/07/2019 - 05/07/2019Evaluating the performance of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) in a field context presents a number of methodological problems. For this reason, as a part of three French research projects focused on this type of evaluation, Matriochkas, Micromegas and Roulepur, a working group on methodological harmonisation was established in order to facilitate the inter-comparison of results between the projects and propose a methodological guideline for practitioners carrying out such evaluations. The guideline proposes an approach where performance is evaluated with respect to a service function that the SuDS aims to achieve, itself identified from local issues. Its first section presents the various service functions which may be assigned to these devices. Next, performance indicators are defined for a selection of the identified service functions, common within the French context and studied as a part of the three projects. Three categories of indicators are identified: hydrologic indicators (relative to water flows), pollutant indicators and socio-technical indicators. Examples of instrumentation and of the application of the proposed indicators drawn from the experience of the three projects are also presented.L'évaluation in situ des performances des ouvrages de maîtrise à la source des eaux pluviales pose un grand nombre de questions d'ordre méthodologique. Ainsi, dans le cadre de trois projets de recherche français dédiés à ce type d'évaluation, Matriochkas, Micromegas et Roulépur, un groupe de travail sur l'harmonisation des méthodes a été constitué afin de faciliter l'inter-comparaison des résultats issus des projets, mais aussi de rédiger un guide méthodologique à destination des acteurs opérationnels pouvant être amenés à faire ce type d'étude. Ce guide propose une démarche où la performance est évaluée pour chaque fonction de service visée pour l'ouvrage, en réponse à des enjeux locaux. La première partie du guide détaille les fonctions de service pouvant être attendues de ce type d'ouvrage. Ensuite, des indicateurs de performance sont déclinés pour une sélection de fonctions de service couramment rencontrées dans le contexte français et qui ont pu être abordées au cours des projets. Ces indicateurs se regroupent en trois catégories: les indicateurs hydrologiques (relatifs aux flux d'eau), les indicateurs pollutifs (relatifs aux polluants) et les indicateurs sociotechniques. Le guide s'appuie sur des exemples issus des trois projets pour présenter des cas pratiques de dispositifs métrologiques et d'application des indicateurs proposés

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

Time-resolved NMR monitoring of tRNA maturation

International audienc

Ensuring access to high-quality resources reduces the impacts of heat stress on bees

International audiencePollinators are experiencing declines globally, negatively affecting the reproduction of wild plants and crop production. Well-known drivers of these declines include climatic and nutritional stresses, such as a change of dietary resources due to the degradation of habitat quality. Understanding potential synergies between these two important drivers is needed to improve predictive models of the future effects of climate change on pollinator declines. Here, bumblebee colony bioassays were used to evaluate the interactive effects of heat stress, a reduction of dietary resource quality, and colony size. Using a total of 117 colonies, we applied a fully crossed experiment to test the effect of three dietary quality levels under three levels of heat stress with two colony sizes. Both nutritional and heat stress reduced colony development resulting in a lower investment in offspring production. Small colonies were much more sensitive to heat and nutritional stresses than large ones, possibly because a higher percentage of workers helps maintain social homeostasis. Strikingly, the effects of heat stress were far less pronounced for small colonies fed with suitable diets. Overall, our study suggests that landscape management actions that ensure access to high-quality resources could reduce the impacts of heat stress on bee decline