The Effects of Biogeography on Ant Diversity and Activity on the Boston Harbor Islands, Massachusetts, U.S.A

Many studies have examined how island biogeography affects diversity on the scale of island systems. In this study, we address how diversity varies over very short periods of time on individual islands. To do this, we compile an inventory of the ants living in the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, Boston, Massachusetts, USA using data from a five-year All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory of the region's arthropods. Consistent with the classical theory of island biogeography, species richness increased with island size, decreased with island isolation, and remained relatively constant over time. Additionally, our inventory finds that almost half of the known Massachusetts ant fauna can be collected in the BHI, and identifies four new species records for Massachusetts, including one new to the United States, Myrmica scabrinodis. We find that the number of species actually active on islands depended greatly on the timescale under consideration. The species that could be detected during any given week of sampling could by no means account for total island species richness, even when correcting for sampling effort. Though we consistently collected the same number of species over any given week of sampling, the identities of those species varied greatly between weeks. This variation does not result from local immigration and extinction of species, nor from seasonally-driven changes in the abundance of individual species, but rather from weekly changes in the distribution and activity of foraging ants. This variation can be upwards of 50% of ant species per week. This suggests that numerous ant species on the BHI share the same physical space at different times. This temporal partitioning could well explain such unexpectedly high ant diversity in an isolated, urban site

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

In Search of a Theory of Public Memory: The State, the Individual, and Marcel Proust

This Article posits the existence and pervasiveness of an official public (or State) memory that is primarily constructed using public law devices and statements of official policy. While official public memory serves the purposes of social control and stability, it also seeks to mask contestation and is, accordingly, neither complete nor authentic. Using philosophical, scientific, and literary sources, this Article demonstrates how the affective (emotional) memory that is unique to individuals creates a permanent potential for contestation and authenticity and therefore sets a natural conceptual limit to the power of officially managed memory to contrive the past. To help establish this Article\u27s initial claim, Part I provides as an illustration of the phenomenon of official public memory the legal and policy means by which the Austrian government sustains an official public memory ofAustria as a victim State of Nazi aggression. Part H builds upon the Austrian illustration as well as examples from other States to expose the characteristic patterns-selectivity, constructivism, mythmaking (mythopoesis), incorporation, and presentism-by which government elites create and maintain a contrived ideological account of the past. It shows how States exploit law and the legal process in this task. In response to Parts l and I, the remainder of this Article (Parts IlI-V) is a search for a concept of public memory that provides a more contested (and authentic) account of the past, and thus a challenge to the law-sustained contrivance of official public memory. Others have sought to open up contestation by proposing actions that occur entirely within the construct of law and legal institutions. This Article broadens the inquiry by seeking to support contestation (and authenticity) using the work of other disciplines. Part III begins this quest for an alternative discourse by exploring the discipline of history, which is characterized by archivistic efforts to discover the true past. History\u27s unending revisionism, however, makes it unlikely to serve the purposes of social control and stability that give official memory its power. And history\u27s relativist biases makes it no more likely than official memory to create a broadly accurate portrait of the past. Part IV considers whether social philosophy offers a more accessible paradigm of public memory, one that is grounded in the lived experience of individuals. In particular, Part IV draws on the concept of non-official collective memory expounded by French social philosopher Maurice Halbwachs as an alternative account of public memory. But this, too, is deficient as an authentic counterpoint to official public memory, because Halbwachs fails to exclude the effects of that very contrivance from his theory. Nor, importantly, does he account in his social theory of memory for a unique feature of individual lived experience, the scientifically verified condition of emotional or affective memory. Part V seeks to use literature, and in particular the theory of transcendent memory offered by Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time, to meet the ontological challenge of demonstrating how affective memory is the feature of individual lived experience that is most likely to sustain a reconceptualized public memory. By representing affective memory as an autonomous condition, this Article sets a cognitive, definitional, and even scientific limit to the power of official memory. Rather than finding a discourse to displace official public memory, therefore, this Article reaches the reassuring conclusion that affective memory allows an understanding of official public memory as intrinsically confronting a potential for contestation, and therefore for authenticity

Beyond open skies: a new regime for international aviation

Divulgação dos SUMÁRIOS das obras recentemente incorporadas ao acervo da Biblioteca Ministro Oscar Saraiva do STJ. Em respeito à lei de Direitos Autorais, não disponibilizamos a obra na íntegra. STJ0008192

Metabolic characterisation of plasma in juveniles with glycogen storage disease type 1a (GSD1a) by high-resolution 1H NMR spectroscopy

This paper reports the first application of high-resolution 1H NMR spectroscopy to the plasma of five juveniles with glycogen storage disease type 1a (GSD1a), permitting the characterisation of the plasma metabolic profile and the identification of alterations relative to a set of control samples. The relaxation-weighted spectra allowed changes in low molecular weight compounds to be detected more clearly, whereas diffusion-edited spectra were used to characterise the plasma lipoprotein profile. Low molecular weight metabolites with altered levels in most patients were lactate, ketone bodies, acetate, creatine/creatinine and glucose. One of the patients showed distinctively lower glucose levels and higher lactate and ketone body contents, suggesting poorer metabolic control of the disease compared with other patients. In addition, a metabolite tentatively identified as alpha-hydroxyisobutyrate was only detected in the spectra of GSD1a plasmas, representing, therefore, a possible novel GSD1a biomarker. Total lipoprotein contents were higher in the plasma from GSD1a patients. Furthermore, lower HDL and higher VLDL + LDL levels also characterised the plasma of these patients. Preliminary results on principal component analysis of 1H NMR spectra allowed a clear separation between GSD1a and control plasmas. The specificity of the changes observed to GSD1a is discussed, together with the recognised potential of NMR and pattern recognition methods for aiding the diagnosis of GSD1a. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd