Finding Concealed Active Faults: Extending the Southern Whidbey Island Fault across the Puget Lowland, Washington

The southern Whidbey Island fault zone (SWIF), as previously mapped using borehole data, potential field anomalies, and marine seismic reflection surveys, consists of three subparallel, northwest trending strands extending ~100 km from near Vancouver Island to the northern Puget Lowland. East of Puget Sound, the SWIF makes landfall between the cities of Seattle and Everett but is concealed beneath a thick mantle of young glacial deposits and vegetation. A ~20-km-wide, northwest trending swath of subparallel, low-amplitude aeromagnetic anomalies crosses this region of the Puget Lowland and is on strike with the SWIF. The most prominent aeromagnetic anomaly, the Cottage Lake lineament, extends at least 18 km and lies approximately on strike with the SWIF on Whidbey Island. Subtle scarps and topographic lineaments on Pleistocene surfaces, visible on high-resolution lidar topography at a number of locations along the SWIF, lie on or near these magnetic anomalies. In the field, scarps exhibit northeast-side-up and vertical relief of 1 to 5 m. Excavations across several lidar scarps lying on or near magnetic anomalies show evidence for multiple folding and faulting events since deglaciation, most likely above buried reverse/oblique faults. Excavations in areas away from magnetic anomalies do not show evidence of tectonic deformation. In total, paleoseismological evidence suggests that the SWIF produced at least four earthquakes since deglaciation about 16,400 years ago, the most recent less than 2700 years ago

Crop Updates 2005 - Katanning

This session covers twenty five papers from different authors KEYNOTE How Farmers Can Work Together for a More Sustainable and Profitable Business, Brian McAlpine Farmer, Nuffield Scholar GENERAL 2005 Seasonal Outlook, David Stephens and Nicola Telcik, Department of Agriculture Essentials for cereal leaf disease management, K. Jayasena, R. Loughman, G. Thomas, C. Beard, and B. Paynter, Department of Agriculture Benefits to the grower of grain licensing, Colin Mann, Grain Licensing Authority SOIL & NUTRIENTS The effect of higher nitrogen fertiliser prices on rotation and fertiliser strategies in cropping systems, Ross Kingwell, Department of Agriculture Effect of stubble burning and seasonality on microbial processes and nutrient cycling, Francis Hoyle, University of Western Australia Soil Biology and Crop Production in Western Australian Farming Systems, D.V. Murphy, N. Milton, M. Osman, F.C. Hoyle, L.K Abbott, W.R. Cookson and S. Darmawanto, University of Western Australia Nutrient Management to get optimal production, Bill Bowden, Department of Agriculture OTHER CROPS Which malting barley variety and why? Blakely Paynter, Department of Agriculture KASPA AND OTHER NEW PULSE VARIETIES, 1. New Pulse varieties and where they fit in, K. Regan, P. White, Department of Agriculture & CLIMA, K. Siddique, CLIMA, K. Adhikari, Department of Agriculture & CLIMA, M. Harries, CLIMA Kaspa in the WA Grain Belt 2003-2004, Ian Pritchard, Department of Agriculture New annual pastures for Mediterranean farming systems, Angelo Loi, Phil Nichols, Clinton Revell & David Ferris, Department of Agriculture Challenging herbicide resistant ryegrass, Bill Roy, Agricultural Consulting & Research Services Pty.Ltd WEED MANAGEMENT Ingest, incinerate or invert? The pro’s and con’s of 3 weed seed removal tactics, Sally Peltzer1, Dave Minkey1 and Michael Walsh2 Department of Agriculture 1 and Western Australian Herbicide Resistance lnitiative2 A good use guide for pre-emergent herbicides, Alexandra Douglas, Department of Agriculture OTHER USEFUL INFORMATION 17.Growing season outlook, Meredith Fairbanks, Ian Foster, Geraldine Pasqual, David Stephens, Nicola Telcik, David Tennant, Department of Agriculture 18. Status Of Department Of Agriculture Western Australia Crop Varieties 19. Seed Licensee Details 20. Gene technology for growers. What is it? How does it Work? Belinda Barr, Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, Dr Heather Bray, Molecular Plant Breeding Cooperative Research Centre. 21. Agronomic package for EGA Eagle Rock, Steve Penny, Department of Agriculture 22. Nutrient timing and requirements for increased crop yields in the high rainfall cropping zone, Narelle Hill, Ron McTaggart, Dr. Wal Anderson and Ray Tugwell Department of Agriculture 23. Insect contamination of cereal grain at harvest, Svetlana Micic and Phil Michael, Department of Agriculture 24. Crop leftovers: what’s in stubble for sheep? Roy Butler and Keith Croker, Department of Agriculture 25. Mandelup – Narrow-leafed lupi

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

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Interrogating the Spatiotemporal Landscape of Neuromodulatory GPCR Signaling by Real-Time Imaging of cAMP in Intact Neurons and Circuits

Summary: Modulation of neuronal circuits is key to information processing in the brain. The majority of neuromodulators exert their effects by activating G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that control the production of second messengers directly impacting cellular physiology. How numerous GPCRs integrate neuromodulatory inputs while accommodating diversity of incoming signals is poorly understood. In this study, we develop an in vivo tool and analytical suite for analyzing GPCR responses by monitoring the dynamics of a key second messenger, cyclic AMP (cAMP), with excellent quantitative and spatiotemporal resolution in various neurons. Using this imaging approach in combination with CRISPR/Cas9 editing and optogenetics, we interrogate neuromodulatory mechanisms of defined populations of neurons in an intact mesolimbic reward circuit and describe how individual inputs generate discrete second-messenger signatures in a cell- and receptor-specific fashion. This offers a resource for studying native neuronal GPCR signaling in real time. : Muntean et al. develop an in vivo reagent to study processing of neurotransmitter GPCR signals by monitoring real-time dynamics of cAMP responses. They demonstrate application of this approach, in combination with CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and optogenetics, to interrogate the functional organization of a striatal circuit. Keywords: cAMP, GPCR, neuromodulation, dopamine, striatum, imaging, optogenetic

A multi-institution analysis of predictors of timing of inguinal hernia repair among premature infants

Purpose Inguinal hernias are common in premature infants, but there is substantial variation with regards to timing of repair. We sought to quantify and explain this variation. Methods Cohort study of infants < 34 weeks gestation diagnosed with an inguinal hernia and discharged from one of 329 neonatal intensive units between 1998 and 2012. Multivariable logistic regression clustered by site was used to evaluate demographic, clinical, maternal, and socioeconomic variables associated with pre-discharge repair. Results A total of 8037 infants met study criteria, and 3230 (40%) received a pre-discharge repair. The frequency of pre-discharge repair varied by site from 9% to 84%, and increased over the study period from 20% in 1998 to 45% in 2012. Concurrent gastrostomy or fundoplication and lower socioeconomic status were associated with an increased odds of receiving a pre-discharge repair. Conclusion There is substantial variation with regards to the timing of repair of inguinal hernias in premature infants, with an increasing number of infants receiving repair prior to hospital discharge over time. Concurrent gastrostomy or fundoplication and socioeconomic status are associated with timing of repair