Driving Discovery: Do You Have the Keys to Fair Linking? (It’s About Knowledge and Library Control)

Do concerns about “fair” linking make you wonder about discovery services? It’s time to understand HOW linking works. In the end, the power is in your hands. But do you know it? And maximize it? If search engines are optimized to provide the best results, regardless of the source of the content, or the resource from which a record originated, the focus is on the full-text linking. How and why did the link appear? What is the user experience? Do users want to see multiple links to full text or do they just want to see the article ? How effective (accurate, simple) is the link resolver experience for your users? How can it be optimized? How can usage via the link resolver be tracked back to the source? What are the emerging standards? This session explores fears of bias, the approaches to take control of your discovery service through customization, and ways to maximize the user experience. It covers all views from the discovery vendor perspective, participating content partner perspective, an over-arching look from the standards perspective, as well as from a university perspective associated consortium having needs to allow for customization at multiple universities with differing needs/opinions

Terpenoid-Induced Feeding Deterrence and Antennal Response of Honey Bees

Multiple interacting stressors negatively affect the survival and productivity of managed honey bee colonies. Pesticides remain a primary concern for beekeepers, as even sublethal exposures can reduce bee immunocompetence, impair navigation, and reduce social communication. Pollinator protection focuses on pesticide application guidelines; however, a more active protection strategy is needed. One possible approach is the use of feeding deterrents that can be delivered as an additive during pesticide application. The goal of this study was to validate a laboratory assay designed to rapidly screen compounds for behavioral changes related to feeding or feeding deterrence. The results of this investigation demonstrated that the synthetic Nasonov pheromone and its terpenoid constituents citral, nerol, and geraniol could alter feeding behavior in a laboratory assay. Additionally, electroantennogram assays revealed that these terpenoids elicited some response in the antennae; however, only a synthetic Nasonov pheromone, citral, and geraniol elicited responses that differed significantly from control and vehicle detections

Terpenoid-Induced Feeding Deterrence and Antennal Response of Honey Bees

Multiple interacting stressors negatively affect the survival and productivity of managed honey bee colonies. Pesticides remain a primary concern for beekeepers, as even sublethal exposures can reduce bee immunocompetence, impair navigation, and reduce social communication. Pollinator protection focuses on pesticide application guidelines; however, a more active protection strategy is needed. One possible approach is the use of feeding deterrents that can be delivered as an additive during pesticide application. The goal of this study was to validate a laboratory assay designed to rapidly screen compounds for behavioral changes related to feeding or feeding deterrence. The results of this investigation demonstrated that the synthetic Nasonov pheromone and its terpenoid constituents citral, nerol, and geraniol could alter feeding behavior in a laboratory assay. Additionally, electroantennogram assays revealed that these terpenoids elicited some response in the antennae; however, only a synthetic Nasonov pheromone, citral, and geraniol elicited responses that differed significantly from control and vehicle detections

Laboratory And Field Assessment Of Some Kairomone Blends For Host-Seeking \u3ci\u3eAedes Aegypti\u3c/i\u3e

Using laboratory Y-tube olfactometers, the attractiveness of lactic acid and 2 kairomone blends from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and BioGents GmbH (BG) was assessed for attractiveness to Aedes aegypti. Four geographically disparate populations were assessed: North Queensland Australia (NQA), Florida USA, Minas Gerais Brazil (MGB), and Singapore. In descending order, populations were attracted to USE)A, BG blends, and lactic acid. MGB was poorly attracted to lactic acid alone. The blends were less attractive than human odor. Proprietary blends were modified, and their attractiveness was assessed to find the optimum attractive mixture for NQA. Adding acetone to BG, and ammonia and caproic acid to USDA, improved attractiveness in the laboratory. Field attractiveness was assessed by coupling the blends with a newly developed BG-Sentinel Ae. aegypti trap. Trials were carried out using the BG blend, BG blend plus acetone, USDA blend, USDA blend plus ammonia and caproic acid, and a control trap with no kairomones. The traps were highly effective, with mean 24-h collections up to 11.15 Ae. aegypti per trap, and this species made up 91.7% of collections. However, the effectiveness of the unbaited control trap indicated that the BG-Sentinel has visual attractive properties for Ae. aegypti and that the kairomone lures added little to trap performance in NQA

A polymorphism associated with depressive disorders differentially regulates brain derived neurotrophic factor promoter IV activity

PMCID: PMC3712170Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Structure-activity relationship of the peptide binding-motif mediating the BRCA2:RAD51 protein-protein interaction

RAD51 is a recombinase involved in the homologous recombination of double-strand breaks in DNA. RAD51 forms oligomers by binding to another molecule of RAD51 via an 'FxxA' motif, and the same recognition sequence is similarly utilised to bind BRCA2. We have tabulated the effects of mutation of this sequence, across a variety of experimental methods and from relevant mutations observed in the clinic. We use mutants of a tetrapeptide sequence to probe the binding interaction, using both isothermal titration calorimetry and X-ray crystallography. Where possible, comparison between our tetrapeptide mutational study and the previously reported mutations is made, discrepancies are discussed and the importance of secondary structure in interpreting alanine scanning and mutational data of this nature is considered.We would like to thank Protein and Nucleic Acid Service at the Department of Biochemistry for peptide synthesis and the X-ray crystallographic and Biophysics facilities for access and support. We thank Diamond Light Source (beamline I02, I03 and I04 proposal MX315), Swiss Light Source (beamline pxIII) and European Synchrotron Radiation Source (beamline ID14.4) for access to and support at beamlines that contributed to the results presented here. This work was funded by a Translational Award from the Wellcome Trust (080083/Z/06/Z)

Autistic Traits Moderate the Impact of Reward Learning on Social Behaviour

A deficit in empathy has been suggested to underlie social behavioural atypicalities in autism. A parallel theoretical account proposes that reduced social motivation (i.e., low responsivity to social rewards) can account for the said atypicalities. Recent evidence suggests that autistic traits modulate the link between reward and proxy metrics related to empathy. Using an evaluative conditioning paradigm to associate high and low rewards with faces, a previous study has shown that individuals high in autistic traits show reduced spontaneous facial mimicry of faces associated with high vs. low reward. This observation raises the possibility that autistic traits modulate the magnitude of evaluative conditioning. To test this, we investigated (a) if autistic traits could modulate the ability to implicitly associate a reward value to a social stimulus (reward learning/conditioning, using the Implicit Association Task, IAT); (b) if the learned association could modulate participants' prosocial behaviour (i.e., social reciprocity, measured using the cyberball task); (c) if the strength of this modulation was influenced by autistic traits. In 43 neurotypical participants, we found that autistic traits moderated the relationship of social reward learning on prosocial behaviour but not reward learning itself. This evidence suggests that while autistic traits do not directly influence social reward learning, they modulate the relationship of social rewards with prosocial behaviour

Has education lost sight of children?

The reflections presented in this chapter are informed by clinical and personal experiences of school education in the UK. There are many challenges for children and young people in the modern education system and for the professionals who support them. In the UK, there are significant gaps between the highly selective education provided to those who pay privately for it and to the majority of those educated in the state-funded system. Though literacy rates have improved around the world, many children, particularly boys, do not finish their education for reasons such as boredom, behavioural difficulties or because education does not ‘pay’. Violence, bullying, and sexual harassment are issues faced by many children in schools and there are disturbing trends of excluding children who present with behavioural problems at school whose origins are not explored. Excluded children are then educated with other children who may also have multiple problems which often just make the situation worse. The experience of clinicians suggests that school-related mental health problems are increasing in severity. Are mental health services dealing with the consequences of an education system that is not meeting children’s needs? An education system that is testing- and performance-based may not be serving many children well if it is driving important decisions about them at increasingly younger ages. Labelling of children and setting them on educational career paths can occur well before they reach secondary schools, limiting potential very early on in their developmental trajectory. Furthermore, the emphasis at school on testing may come at the expense of creativity and other forms of intelligence, which are also valuable and important. Meanwhile the employment marketplace requires people with widely different skills, with an emphasis on innovation, creativity, and problem solving. Is education losing sight of the children it is educating

Consistent phenological shifts in the making of a biodiversity hotspot: the Cape flora

Background The best documented survival responses of organisms to past climate change on short (glacial-interglacial) timescales are distributional shifts. Despite ample evidence on such timescales for local adaptations of populations at specific sites, the long-term impacts of such changes on evolutionary significant units in response to past climatic change have been little documented. Here we use phylogenies to reconstruct changes in distribution and flowering ecology of the Cape flora - South Africa's biodiversity hotspot - through a period of past (Neogene and Quaternary) changes in the seasonality of rainfall over a timescale of several million years. Results Forty-three distributional and phenological shifts consistent with past climatic change occur across the flora, and a comparable number of clades underwent adaptive changes in their flowering phenology (9 clades; half of the clades investigated) as underwent distributional shifts (12 clades; two thirds of the clades investigated). Of extant Cape angiosperm species, 14-41% have been contributed by lineages that show distributional shifts consistent with past climate change, yet a similar proportion (14-55%) arose from lineages that shifted flowering phenology. Conclusions Adaptive changes in ecology at the scale we uncover in the Cape and consistent with past climatic change have not been documented for other floras. Shifts in climate tolerance appear to have been more important in this flora than is currently appreciated, and lineages that underwent such shifts went on to contribute a high proportion of the flora's extant species diversity. That shifts in phenology, on an evolutionary timescale and on such a scale, have not yet been detected for other floras is likely a result of the method used; shifts in flowering phenology cannot be detected in the fossil record