Belgian sea fisheries statistics: compiling historical data to recover a wider perspective

Belgian sea fisheries may be considered small or insignificant in the global context. Nevertheless, it does provide an interesting case study to look at trends in catch and landings statistics, and evolutions in the fleet size and capacity. With a tradition in beam trawl fishery (>90% of the actual fleet) and only three fishing ports where the main part of catches are landed, catch statistics are quite detailed and complete. The FAO statistics available for Belgian sea fisheries included per annum landings (tonnes) and values (EUR) per species, for larger fishing areas (e.g. ICES rectangles) from 1970 onwards. Recent FAO/ICES efforts have completed data from 1950 onwards. Nevertheless, ‘older’ data is available in fragmented publications and journals. Although source documents are often disperse, describing and storing has been made possible thanks to the support of the Sea Fisheries Service (DVZ), the Institute for Agriculture and Fisheries Research (ILVO), the Provincial Library West-Flanders and the Library of the City of Antwerp. After a thorough inventory of sea fisheries statistics from the late 19th century onwards, VLIZ is now collating data from these paper sources to compile historical time series. This requires previous storage, handling and quality control. A fair degree of continuity in the reporting is achieved starting 1929, although earlier data is available. Reporting focuses on 1) landings and value of landings per species by port, per annum, 2) landings and values of landings per species by fishing ground, per annum. Monthly data is reported from the early 1950’s onwards. Additional reporting is available on the size and capacity of the fleet, fishing effort, and socio-economic aspects of the sector. Resulting graphs and tables that depict trends in landings and values per species, from the early 20th century, are presented in fact sheets per species. Information on taxonomy, biology and ecology, distribution and conservation status (where available), provides the interested reader with further background and links to reliable sources. For more information on the project: http://www.vliz.be/NL/Zeecijfers/Zeecijfers_Intro (Dutch and English)

Automated Segmentation of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms in Multi-spectral MR Images

An automated method for segmenting the outer boundary of abdominal aortic aneurysms in MR images is presented. The method is based on the well known Active Shape Models (ASM), which fit a global landmark-based shape model on the basis of local boundary appearance models

Lentiviral transduction of mammalian cells for fast, scalable and high-level production of soluble and membrane proteins

Structural, biochemical and biophysical studies of eukaryotic soluble and membrane proteins require their production in milligram quantities. Although large-scale protein expression strategies based on transient or stable transfection of mammalian cells are well established, they are associated with high consumable costs, limited transfection efficiency or long and tedious selection of clonal cell lines. Lentiviral transduction is an efficient method for the delivery of transgenes to mammalian cells and unifies the ease of use and speed of transient transfection with the robust expression of stable cell lines. In this protocol, we describe the design and step-by-step application of a lentiviral plasmid suite, termed pHR-CMV-TetO2, for the constitutive or inducible large-scale production of soluble and membrane proteins in HEK293 cell lines. Optional features include bicistronic co-expression of fluorescent marker proteins for enrichment of co-transduced cells using cell sorting and of biotin ligase for in vivo biotinylation. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method for a set of soluble proteins and for the G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) Smoothened (SMO). We further compare this method with baculovirus transduction of mammalian cells (BacMam), using the type-A γ-aminobutyric acid receptor (GABAAR) β3 homopentamer as a test case. The protocols described here are optimized for simplicity, speed and affordability; lead to a stable polyclonal cell line and milligram-scale amounts of protein in 3–4 weeks; and routinely achieve an approximately three- to tenfold improvement in protein production yield per cell as compared to transient transduction or transfection

Lentiviral transduction of mammalian cells for fast, scalable and high-level production of soluble and membrane proteins

Structural, biochemical and biophysical studies of eukaryotic soluble and membrane proteins require their production in milligram quantities. Although large-scale protein expression strategies based on transient or stable transfection of mammalian cells are well established, they are associated with high consumable costs, limited transfection efficiency or long and tedious selection of clonal cell lines. Lentiviral transduction is an efficient method for the delivery of transgenes to mammalian cells and unifies the ease of use and speed of transient transfection with the robust expression of stable cell lines. In this protocol, we describe the design and step-by-step application of a lentiviral plasmid suite, termed pHR-CMV-TetO2, for the constitutive or inducible large-scale production of soluble and membrane proteins in HEK293 cell lines. Optional features include bicistronic co-expression of fluorescent marker proteins for enrichment of co-transduced cells using cell sorting and of biotin ligase for in vivo biotinylation. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method for a set of soluble proteins and for the G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) Smoothened (SMO). We further compare this method with baculovirus transduction of mammalian cells (BacMam), using the type-A γ-aminobutyric acid receptor (GABAAR) β3 homopentamer as a test case. The protocols described here are optimized for simplicity, speed and affordability; lead to a stable polyclonal cell line and milligram-scale amounts of protein in 3–4 weeks; and routinely achieve an approximately three- to tenfold improvement in protein production yield per cell as compared to transient transduction or transfection

Adapting Active Shape Models for 3D Segmentation of Tubular Structures in Medical Images

Active Shape Models (ASM) have proven to be an effective approach for image segmentation. In some applications, however, the linear model of gray level appearance around a contour that is used in ASM is not sufficient for accurate boundary localization. Furthermore, the statistical shape model may be too restricted if the training set is limited