There are many barriers to species’ migrations

Temperature-change trajectories are being used to identify the geographic barriers and thermal ‘cul-de-sacs’ that will limit the ability of many species to track climate change by migrating. We argue that there are many other potential barriers to species’ migrations. These include stable ecotones, discordant shifts in climatic variables, human land use, and species’ limited dispersal abilities. To illustrate our argument, for each 0.5° latitude/longitude grid cell of the Earth’s land surface, we mapped and tallied the number of cells for which future (2060–2080) climate represents an analog of the focal cell’s current climate. We compared results when only considering temperature with those for which both temperature and total annual precipitation were considered in concert. We also compared results when accounting for only geographic barriers (no cross-continental migration) with those involving both geographic and potential ecological barriers (no cross-biome migration). As expected, the number of future climate analogs available to each pixel decreased markedly with each added layer of complexity (e.g. the proportion of the Earth’s land surface without any available future climate analogs increased from 3% to more than 36% with the inclusion of precipitation and ecological boundaries). While including additional variables can increase model complexity and uncertainty, we must strive to incorporate the factors that we know will limit species’ ranges and migrations if we hope to predict the effects of climate change at a high-enough degree of accuracy to guide management decisions

Losing your edge: climate change and the conservation value of range-edge populations

Populations occurring at species\u27 range edges can be locally adapted to unique environmental conditions. From a species\u27 perspective, range-edge environments generally have higher severity and frequency of extreme climatic events relative to the range core. Under future climates, extreme climatic events are predicted to become increasingly important in defining species\u27 distributions. Therefore, range-edge genotypes that are better adapted to extreme climates relative to core populations may be essential to species\u27 persistence during periods of rapid climate change. We use relatively simple conceptual models to highlight the importance of locally adapted range-edge populations (leading and trailing edges) for determining the ability of species to persist under future climates. Using trees as an example, we show how locally adapted populations at species\u27 range edges may expand under future climate change and become more common relative to range-core populations. We also highlight how large-scale habitat destruction occurring in some geographic areas where many species range edge converge, such as biome boundaries and ecotones (e.g., the arc of deforestation along the rainforest-cerrado ecotone in the southern Amazonia), can have major implications for global biodiversity. As climate changes, range-edge populations will play key roles in helping species to maintain or expand their geographic distributions. The loss of these locally adapted range-edge populations through anthropogenic disturbance is therefore hypothesized to reduce the ability of species to persist in the face of rapid future climate change

Modulation of Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Immunogenicity through Forced Expression of Human Cytomegalovirus US Proteins

BACKGROUND: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) are promising candidates for cell therapy, as they migrate to areas of injury, differentiate into a broad range of specialized cells, and have immunomodulatory properties. However, MSC are not invisible to the recipient's immune system, and upon in vivo administration, allogeneic MSC are able to trigger immune responses, resulting in rejection of the transplanted cells, precluding their full therapeutic potential. Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) has developed several strategies to evade cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) and Natural Killer (NK) cell recognition. Our goal is to exploit HCMV immunological evasion strategies to reduce MSC immunogenicity. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We genetically engineered human MSC to express HCMV proteins known to downregulate HLA-I expression, and investigated whether modified MSC were protected from CTL and NK attack. Flow cytometric analysis showed that amongst the US proteins tested, US6 and US11 efficiently reduced MSC HLA-I expression, and mixed lymphocyte reaction demonstrated a corresponding decrease in human and sheep mononuclear cell proliferation. NK killing assays showed that the decrease in HLA-I expression did not result in increased NK cytotoxicity, and that at certain NK∶MSC ratios, US11 conferred protection from NK cytotoxic effects. Transplantation of MSC-US6 or MSC-US11 into pre-immune fetal sheep resulted in increased liver engraftment when compared to control MSC, as demonstrated by qPCR and immunofluorescence analyses. CONCLUSIONS AND SIGNIFICANCE: These data demonstrate that engineering MSC to express US6 and US11 can be used as a means of decreasing recognition of MSC by the immune system, allowing higher levels of engraftment in an allogeneic transplantation setting. Since one of the major factors responsible for the failure of allogeneic-donor MSC to engraft is the mismatch of HLA-I molecules between the donor and the recipient, MSC-US6 and MSC-US11 could constitute an off-the-shelf product to overcome donor-recipient HLA-I mismatch

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Freezing temperatures as a limit to forest recruitment above tropical Andean treelines

The elevation of altitudinal treelines is generally believed to occur where low mean temperatures during the growing season limit growth and prevent trees from establishing at higher elevations. Accordingly, treelines should move upslope with increasing global temperatures. Contrary to this prediction, tropical treelines have remained stable over the past several decades despite increasing mean temperatures. The observed stability of tropical treelines, coupled with the drastically different temperature profiles between temperate and tropical treelines, suggests that using mean measures of temperature to predict tropical treeline movements during climate change may be overly simplistic. We hypothesize that frost events at tropical treelines may slow climate driven treeline movement by preventing tree recruitment beyond the established forest canopy. To assess this hypothesis, we measured freezing resistance of four canopy-forming treeline species ( Weinmannia fagaroides , Polylepis pauta , Clethra cuneata , and Gynoxys nitida ) at two life stages (juvenile and adult) and during two seasons (warm-wet and cold-dry). Freezing resistances were then compared to microclimatic data to determine if freezing events in the grassland matrix above treeline are too harsh for these forest species. Freezing resistance varied among species and life stages from −5.7°C for juveniles of P. pauta to −11.1°C for juveniles of W. fagaroides . Over a four-year period, the lowest temperatures recorded at 10 cm above ground level in the grasslands above treeline and at treeline itself were −8.9°C and −6.8°C, respectively. Juveniles maintained freezing resistances similar to adults during the coldest parts of the year and ontogenetic differences in freezing resistance were only present during the warm season when temperatures did not represent a significant threat to active plant tissue. These findings support the hypothesis that rare extreme freezing events at and above tropical treelines can prevent recruitment outside of closed canopy forest for some tree species and may significantly slow treeline advancement despite warming mean temperatures. Predictions of treeline shifts under climate change should be reevaluated to include species-specific climatic tolerances and measures of climatic variability