The anadromous fish passage optimization tool: Using optimization to strategically manage fish barrier remediation in California

In the present work we have selected a collection of statistical and mathematical tools useful for the exploration of multivariate data and we present them in a form that is meant to be particularly accessible to a classically trained mathematician. We give self contained and streamlined introductions to principal component analysis, multidimensional scaling and statistical hypothesis testing. Within the presented mathematical framework we then propose a general exploratory methodology for the investigation of real world high dimensional datasets that builds on statistical and knowledge supported visualizations. We exemplify the proposed methodology by applying it to several different genomewide DNA-microarray datasets. The exploratory methodology should be seen as an embryo that can be expanded and developed in many directions. As an example we point out some recent promising advances in the theory for random matrices that, if further developed, potentially could provide practically useful and theoretically well founded estimations of information content in dimension reducing visualizations. We hope that the present work can serve as an introduction to, and help to stimulate more research within, the interesting and rapidly expanding field of data exploration

Diseases Caused by Pectobacterium and Dickeya Species Around the World

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Cell-based therapies for Parkinson disease-past insights and future potential.

Parkinson disease (PD) is characterized by loss of the A9 nigral neurons that provide dopaminergic innervation to the striatum. This discovery led to the successful instigation of dopaminergic drug treatments in the 1960s, although these drugs were soon recognized to lose some of their efficacy and generate their own adverse effects over time. Despite the fact that PD is now known to have extensive non-nigral pathology with a wide range of clinical features, dopaminergic drug therapies are still the mainstay of therapy, and work well for many years. Given the success of pharmacological dopamine replacement, pursuit of cell-based dopamine replacement strategies seemed to be the next logical step, and studies were initiated over 30 years ago to explore the possibility of dopaminergic cell transplantation. In this Review, we outline the history of this therapeutic approach to PD and highlight the lessons that we have learned en route. We discuss how the best clinical outcomes have been obtained with fetal ventral mesencephalic allografts, while acknowledging inconsistencies in the results owing to problems in trial design, patient selection, tissue preparation, and immunotherapy used post-grafting. We conclude by discussing the challenges of bringing the new generation of stem cell-derived dopamine cells to the clinic