Wealth and power: political and economic change in the United Arab Emirates

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Adam8 Limits the Development of Allergic Airway Inflammation in Mice

To determine whether a disintegrin and a metalloproteinase-8 (Adam8) regulates allergic airway inflammation (AAI) and airway hyper-responsiveness (AHR), we compared AAI and AHR in wild type (WT) versus Adam8−/− mice in different genetic backgrounds sensitized and challenged with ovalbumin (OVA) or house dust mite protein extract (HDM). OVA- and HDM-treated Adam8−/− mice had higher lung leukocyte counts, more airway mucus metaplasia, greater lung levels of some TH2 cytokines, and higher methacholine-induced increases in central airway resistance than allergen-treated WT mice. Studies of OVA-treated Adam8 bone marrow chimeric mice confirmed that leukocyte-derived Adam8 predominantly mediated Adam8’s anti-inflammatory activities in murine airways. Airway eosinophils and macrophages both expressed Adam8 in WT mice with AAI. Adam8 limited AAI and AHR in mice by reducing leukocyte survival because: 1) Adam8−/− mice with AAI had fewer apoptotic eosinophils and macrophages in their airways than WT mice with AAI; and 2) Adam8−/− macrophages and eosinophils had reduced rates of apoptosis compared with WT leukocytes when the intrinsic (but not the extrinsic) apoptosis pathway was triggered in the cells in vitro. ADAM8 was robustly expressed by airway granulocytes in lung sections from human asthma patients but, surprisingly, airway macrophages had less ADAM8 staining than airway eosinophils. Thus, ADAM8 has anti-inflammatory activities during AAI in mice by activating the intrinsic apoptosis pathway in myeloid leukocytes. Strategies that increase ADAM8 levels in myeloid leukocytes may have therapeutic efficacy in asthma

The UCSC SARS-CoV-2 Genome Browser.

BACKGROUND:: Researchers are generating molecular data pertaining to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA genome and its proteins at an unprecedented rate during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, there is a critical need for rapid and continuously updated access to the latest molecular data in a format in which all data can be quickly cross-referenced and compared. We adapted our genome browser visualization tool to the viral genome for this purpose. Molecular data, curated from published studies or from database submissions, are mapped to the viral genome and grouped together into “annotation tracks” where they can be visualized along the linear map of the viral genome sequence and programmatically downloaded in standard format for analysis. RESULTS:: The UCSC Genome Browser for SARS-CoV-2 (https://genome.ucsc.edu/covid19.html) provides continuously updated access to the mutations in the many thousands of SARS-CoV-2 genomes deposited in GISAID and the international nucleotide sequencing databases, displayed alongside phylogenetic trees. These data are augmented with alignments of bat, pangolin, and other animal and human coronavirus genomes, including per-base evolutionary rate analysis. All available annotations are cross-referenced on the virus genome, including those from major databases (PDB, RFAM, IEDB, UniProt) as well as up-to-date individual results from preprints. Annotated data include predicted and validated immune epitopes, promising antibodies, RT-PCR and sequencing primers, CRISPR guides (from research, diagnostics, vaccines, and therapies), and points of interaction between human and viral genes. As a community resource, any user can add manual annotations which are quality checked and shared publicly on the browser the next day. CONCLUSIONS:: We invite all investigators to contribute additional data and annotations to this resource to accelerate research and development activities globally. Contact us at [email protected] with data suggestions or requests for support for adding data. Rapid sharing of data will accelerate SARS-CoV-2 research, especially when researchers take time to integrate their data with those from other labs on a widely-used community browser platform with standardized machine-readable data formats, such as the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Browser

Substantial light woodland and open vegetation characterized the temperate forest biome before Homo sapiens

Acknowledgments We thank D. Karger for assisting with the bias correction and downscaling of the Last Interglacial climate data based on the CHELSA V2 dataset. We also thank P. Gibbard for help and support during data collection. We are thankful to A. Blach Overgaard for help in harmonizing the pollen taxa. We thank C. Tzedakis for thorough and helpful feedback regarding this manuscript. We thank A. Pearcy Buitenwerf for helpful comments on the manuscript. Last, we thank C. Davison for the valuable discussions and assistance throughout this project. Funding: This work was supported by the project TERRANOVA, the European Landscape Learning Initiative, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 813904. The output reflects only the views of the authors, and the European Union cannot be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein. J.-C.S. also considers this work to contribute to his VILLUM Investigator project “Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World” funded by VILLUM FONDEN (grant 16549), the Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere (ECONOVO) funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (grant DNRF173), and his Independent Research Fund Denmark: Natural Sciences project MegaComplexity (grant 0135-00225B). This work was also supported by SustainScapes - Center for Sustainable Landscapes under Global Change (NOVO grant NNF20OC0059595).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Substantial light woodland and open vegetation characterised the temperate forest biome before Homo sapiens

The extent of vegetation openness in past European landscapes is widely debated. In particular, the temperate forest biome has traditionally been defined as dense, closed-canopy forest; however, some argue that large herbivores maintained greater openness or even wood-pasture conditions. Here, we address this question for the Last Interglacial period (129,000–116,000 years ago), before Homo sapiens–linked megafauna declines and anthropogenic landscape transformation. We applied the vegetation reconstruction method REVEALS to 96 Last Interglacial pollen records. We found that light woodland and open vegetation represented, on average, more than 50% cover during this period. The degree of openness was highly variable and only partially linked to climatic factors, indicating the importance of natural disturbance regimes. Our results show that the temperate forest biome was historically heterogeneous rather than uniformly dense, which is consistent with the dependency of much of contemporary European biodiversity on open vegetation and light woodland.</p