Characterization of bovine respiratory syncytial virus isolated in Brazil

This paper presents the first isolation of bovine respiratory syncytial virus in Brazil and its physicochemical, morphological and molecular characterization. The virus was isolated from 33 samples of nasotracheal secretions, successively inoculated into a Madin-Darby bovine kidney cell culture, which was characterized by physicochemical tests and morphological observation by electron microscopy. The Brazilian sample is an RNA pleomorphic, enveloped, thermolabile and non-hemagglutinating spicular virus. Reverse transcription, followed by nested polymerase chain reaction (nRT-PCR) assay was carried out using oligonucleotides B1, B2A, B3 and B4 for the fusion proteins (F) and B5A, B6A, B7A and B8 for the attachment protein (G). The nRT-PCR-F amplified a fragment of 481 bp corresponding to part of the gene that codes for protein F, whereas nRT-PCR-G amplified a fragment of 371 bp, in agreement with part of the G gene. The virus isolated from Brazilian samples in this study corresponded to the bovine respiratory syncytial virus, and RT-PCR proved to be useful for the diagnosis of bovine clinical samples.21321

State of the climate in 2013

In 2013, the vast majority of the monitored climate variables reported here maintained trends established in recent decades. ENSO was in a neutral state during the entire year, remaining mostly on the cool side of neutral with modest impacts on regional weather patterns around the world. This follows several years dominated by the effects of either La Niña or El Niño events. According to several independent analyses, 2013 was again among the 10 warmest years on record at the global scale, both at the Earths surface and through the troposphere. Some regions in the Southern Hemisphere had record or near-record high temperatures for the year. Australia observed its hottest year on record, while Argentina and New Zealand reported their second and third hottest years, respectively. In Antarctica, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station reported its highest annual temperature since records began in 1957. At the opposite pole, the Arctic observed its seventh warmest year since records began in the early 20th century. At 20-m depth, record high temperatures were measured at some permafrost stations on the North Slope of Alaska and in the Brooks Range. In the Northern Hemisphere extratropics, anomalous meridional atmospheric circulation occurred throughout much of the year, leading to marked regional extremes of both temperature and precipitation. Cold temperature anomalies during winter across Eurasia were followed by warm spring temperature anomalies, which were linked to a new record low Eurasian snow cover extent in May. Minimum sea ice extent in the Arctic was the sixth lowest since satellite observations began in 1979. Including 2013, all seven lowest extents on record have occurred in the past seven years. Antarctica, on the other hand, had above-average sea ice extent throughout 2013, with 116 days of new daily high extent records, including a new daily maximum sea ice area of 19.57 million km2 reached on 1 October. ENSO-neutral conditions in the eastern central Pacific Ocean and a negative Pacific decadal oscillation pattern in the North Pacific had the largest impacts on the global sea surface temperature in 2013. The North Pacific reached a historic high temperature in 2013 and on balance the globally-averaged sea surface temperature was among the 10 highest on record. Overall, the salt content in nearsurface ocean waters increased while in intermediate waters it decreased. Global mean sea level continued to rise during 2013, on pace with a trend of 3.2 mm yr-1 over the past two decades. A portion of this trend (0.5 mm yr-1) has been attributed to natural variability associated with the Pacific decadal oscillation as well as to ongoing contributions from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets and ocean warming. Global tropical cyclone frequency during 2013 was slightly above average with a total of 94 storms, although the North Atlantic Basin had its quietest hurricane season since 1994. In the Western North Pacific Basin, Super Typhoon Haiyan, the deadliest tropical cyclone of 2013, had 1-minute sustained winds estimated to be 170 kt (87.5 m s-1) on 7 November, the highest wind speed ever assigned to a tropical cyclone. High storm surge was also associated with Haiyan as it made landfall over the central Philippines, an area where sea level is currently at historic highs, increasing by 200 mm since 1970. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide all continued to increase in 2013. As in previous years, each of these major greenhouse gases once again reached historic high concentrations. In the Arctic, carbon dioxide and methane increased at the same rate as the global increase. These increases are likely due to export from lower latitudes rather than a consequence of increases in Arctic sources, such as thawing permafrost. At Mauna Loa, Hawaii, for the first time since measurements began in 1958, the daily average mixing ratio of carbon dioxide exceeded 400 ppm on 9 May. The state of these variables, along with dozens of others, and the 2013 climate conditions of regions around the world are discussed in further detail in this 24th edition of the State of the Climate series. © 2014, American Meteorological Society. All rights reserved

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

Efeito de Florescimentos Sucessivos no Rendimento de Sementes de Trevo-Branco.

A producao de sementes e os componentes do rendimento de sementes da cultivar Jacui de trevo-branco (Trifolium repens L.), estabelecida em parcelas de campo na EEA-UFRGS, Guaíba, RS, foram determinados para diferentes datas de colheita, condicionadas a acumulos de florescimentos. Foram colhidos o primeiro florescimento (F1), o primeiro mais o segundo acumulados (F2), e o primeiro mais o segundo mais o terceiro acumulados (F3). Florescimentos subsequentes foram colhidos, de modo que mais tres colheitas em F1, mais duas em F2 e mais uma em F3 foram efetuadas, totalizando nove colheitas para comparacao. Os resultados mostraram que o florescimento acumulado nao e pratica eficiente para aumentar o rendimento de sementes. A realizacao de mais de uma colheita no mesmo cultivo so trouxe vantagens quando efetuada apos a colheita do primeiro florescimento (F1), o que mostra ser a desfolhacao, nesta epoca, importante pratica para elevar os rendimentos de sementes. Em meados de novembro, o corte ou a vedacao da area aos animais seria uma pratica vantajosa. O numero de inflorescencias maduras por unidade de area mostrou ser o principal fator a contribuir para o aumento no rendimento de sementes.Made available in DSpace on 2011-04-09T12:18:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 pab08fev91.pdf: 572965 bytes, checksum: a297448daf3a8ecd1cbf987026cb0c84 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2001-09-13199

Efeito de Florescimentos Sucessivos no Rendimento de Sementes de Trevo-Branco.

A producao de sementes e os componentes do rendimento de sementes da cultivar Jacui de trevo-branco (Trifolium repens L.), estabelecida em parcelas de campo na EEA-UFRGS, Guaíba, RS, foram determinados para diferentes datas de colheita, condicionadas a acumulos de florescimentos. Foram colhidos o primeiro florescimento (F1), o primeiro mais o segundo acumulados (F2), e o primeiro mais o segundo mais o terceiro acumulados (F3). Florescimentos subsequentes foram colhidos, de modo que mais tres colheitas em F1, mais duas em F2 e mais uma em F3 foram efetuadas, totalizando nove colheitas para comparacao. Os resultados mostraram que o florescimento acumulado nao e pratica eficiente para aumentar o rendimento de sementes. A realizacao de mais de uma colheita no mesmo cultivo so trouxe vantagens quando efetuada apos a colheita do primeiro florescimento (F1), o que mostra ser a desfolhacao, nesta epoca, importante pratica para elevar os rendimentos de sementes. Em meados de novembro, o corte ou a vedacao da area aos animais seria uma pratica vantajosa. O numero de inflorescencias maduras por unidade de area mostrou ser o principal fator a contribuir para o aumento no rendimento de sementes