Process length variation in cysts of a dinoflagellate, Lingulodinium machaerophorum, in surface sediments: Investigating its potential as salinity proxy

“Many authors have contributed to writing this paper. Those listed in the metadata are: the main/contact author, the first listed author and Brunel University author(s). For a full list of the authors, please see the PDF version.”A biometrical analysis of the dinoflagellate cyst Lingulodinium machaerophorum (Deflandre and Cookson 1955) Wall, 1967 in 144 globally distributed surface sediment samples revealed that the average process length is related to summer salinity and temperature at a water depth of 30 m by the equation (salinity/temperature) = (0.078*average process length + 0.534) with R² = 0.69. This relationship can be used to reconstruct palaeosalinities, albeit with caution. The particular ecological window can be associated with known distributions of the corresponding motile stage Lingulodinium polyedrum (Stein) Dodge, 1989. Confocal laser microscopy showed that the average process length is positively related to the average distance between process bases (R²=0.78), and negatively related to the number of processes (R²=0.65). These results document the existence of two end members in cyst formation: one with many short, densely distributed processes and one with a few, long, widely spaced processes, which can be respectively related to low and high salinity/temperature ratios. Obstruction during formation of the cysts causes anomalous distributions of the processes. From a biological perspective, processes function to facilitate sinking of the cysts through clustering

An early Little Ice Age brackish water invasion along the south coast of the Caspian Sea (sediment of Langarud wetland) and its wider impacts on environment and people

Caspian Sea level has undergone significant changes through time with major impacts not only on the surrounding coasts, but also offshore. This study reports a brackish water invasion on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea constructed from a multi-proxy analysis of sediment retrieved from the Langarud wetland. The ground surface level of wetland is >6 m higher than the current Caspian Sea level (at -27.41 m in 2014) and located >11 km far from the coast. A sequence covering the last millennium was dated by three radiocarbon dates. The results from this new study suggest that Caspian Sea level rose up to at least -21.44 m (i.e. >6 m above the present water level) during the early Little Ice Age. Although previous studies in the southern coast of the Caspian Sea have detected a high-stand during the Little Ice Age period, this study presents the first evidence that this high-stand reached so far inland and at such a high altitude. Moreover, it confirms one of the very few earlier estimates of a high-stand at -21 m for the second half of the 14th century. The effects of this large-scale brackish water invasion on soil properties would have caused severe disruption to regional agriculture, thereby destabilizing local dynasties and facilitating a rapid Turko-Mongol expansion of Tamerlane’s armies from the east.N Ghasemi (INIOAS), V Jahani (Gilan Province Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organisation) and A Naqinezhad (University of Mazandaran), INQUA QuickLakeH project (no. 1227) and to the European project Marie Curie, CLIMSEAS-PIRSES-GA-2009-24751

A Lexical Database of Portuguese Multiword Expressions

This presentation focuses on an ongoing project which aims at the creation of a large lexical database of Portuguese multiword (MW) units, automatically extracted through the analysis of a balanced 50 million word corpus, statistically interpreted with lexical association measures and validated by hand. This database covers different types of MW units, like named entities, and lexical associations ranging from sets of favoured co-occurring forms with high corpus frequency and low cohesion to strongly lexicalized expressions with no, or minimum, variation. This new resource has a two-fold objective: to be an important research tool which supports the development of collocation typologies and their integration in a larger theory of MW units; to be of major help in developing and evaluating language processing tools able of dealing with MW expressions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Many pion decays of rho(770) and omega(782) mesons in chiral theory

The decays rho(770) to 4 pi and omega(782) to 5pi are considered in detail in the approach based on the Weinberg Lagrangian obtained upon the nonlinear realization of chiral symmetry, added with the term induced by the anomalous Lagrangian of Wess and Zumino. The partial widths and excitation curves of the decays rho^0 to 2 pi^+ 2 pi^-, pi^+ pi^- 2 pi^0, rho^{+-} to 2 pi^{+-} pi^{-+} pi^0, rho^(+-} to pi^(+-} 3 pi^0 are evaluated for e^+e^- annihilation, photoproduction and tau lepton decays. The results of calculations are compared with the recent CMD-2 data on the decay rho^0 to 2 pi^+ 2 pi^- observed in e^+e^- annihilation. The omega to 5 pi decay widths and excitation curves in e^+e^- annihilation are obtained. The angular distributions for various combinations of the final pions in the decays rho to 4 pi and omega to 5 pi are written. The perspectives of the experimental study of the above decays in e^+e^- annihilation, tau lepton decays and photoproduction are discussed.Comment: Revtex, 32 pages including 11 ps figures. Replaced to fit the version published in Phys. Rev. D. Material rearranged, clarifying remarks and references added, typos fixe

The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically “superior” wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g., What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g., Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure, while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty

Neuronal intranuclear inclusion disease is genetically heterogeneous

Neuronal intranuclear inclusion disease (NIID) is a clinically heterogeneous neurodegenerative condition characterized by pathological intranuclear eosinophilic inclusions. A CGG repeat expansion in NOTCH2NLC was recently identified to be associated with NIID in patients of Japanese descent. We screened pathologically confirmed European NIID, cases of neurodegenerative disease with intranuclear inclusions and applied in silico-based screening using whole-genome sequencing data from 20 536 participants in the 100 000 Genomes Project. We identified a single European case harbouring the pathogenic repeat expansion with a distinct haplotype structure. Thus, we propose new diagnostic criteria as European NIID represents a distinct disease entity from East Asian cases

Patrolling monocytes control tumor metastasis to the lung

The immune system plays an important role in regulating tumor growth and metastasis. Classical monocytes promote tumorigenesis and cancer metastasis, but how nonclassical "patrolling" monocytes (PMo) interact with tumors is unknown. Here we show that PMo are enriched in the microvasculature of the lung and reduce tumor metastasis to lung in multiple mouse metastatic tumor models. Nr4a1-deficient mice, which specifically lack PMo, showed increased lung metastasis in vivo. Transfer of Nr4a1-proficient PMo into Nr4a1-deficient mice prevented tumor invasion in the lung. PMo established early interactions with metastasizing tumor cells, scavenged tumor material from the lung vasculature, and promoted natural killer cell recruitment and activation. Thus, PMo contribute to cancer immunosurveillance and may be targets for cancer immunotherapy

Nitric Oxide-Induced Activation of the AMP-Activated Protein Kinase α2 Subunit Attenuates IκB Kinase Activity and Inflammatory Responses in Endothelial Cells

BACKGROUND: In endothelial cells, activation of the AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) has been linked with anti-inflammatory actions but the events downstream of kinase activation are not well understood. Here, we addressed the effects of AMPK activation/deletion on the activation of NFκB and determined whether the AMPK could contribute to the anti-inflammatory actions of nitric oxide (NO). METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Overexpression of a dominant negative AMPKα2 mutant in tumor necrosis factor-α-stimulated human endothelial cells resulted in increased NFκB activity, E-selectin expression and monocyte adhesion. In endothelial cells from AMPKα2(-/-) mice the interleukin (IL)-1β induced expression of E-selectin was significantly increased. DETA-NO activated the AMPK and attenuated NFκB activation/E-selectin expression, effects not observed in human endothelial cells in the presence of the dominant negative AMPK, or in endothelial cells from AMPKα2(-/-) mice. Mechanistically, overexpression of constitutively active AMPK decreased the phosphorylation of IκB and p65, indicating a link between AMPK and the IκB kinase (IKK). Indeed, IKK (more specifically residues Ser177 and Ser181) was found to be a direct substrate of AMPKα2 in vitro. The hyper-phosphorylation of the IKK, which is known to result in its inhibition, was also apparent in endothelial cells from AMPKα2(+/+) versus AMPKα2(-/-) mice. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that the IKK is a direct substrate of AMPKα2 and that its phosphorylation on Ser177 and Ser181 results in the inhibition of the kinase and decreased NFκB activation. Moreover, as NO potently activates AMPK in endothelial cells, a portion of the anti-inflammatory effects of NO are mediated by AMPK

Moving beyond neurons: the role of cell type-specific gene regulation in Parkinson's disease heritability

Parkinson’s disease (PD), with its characteristic loss of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons and deposition of α-synuclein in neurons, is often considered a neuronal disorder. However, in recent years substantial evidence has emerged to implicate glial cell types, such as astrocytes and microglia. In this study, we used stratified LD score regression and expression-weighted cell-type enrichment together with several brain-related and cell-type-specific genomic annotations to connect human genomic PD findings to specific brain cell types. We found that PD heritability attributable to common variation does not enrich in global and regional brain annotations or brain-related cell-type-specific annotations. Likewise, we found no enrichment of PD susceptibility genes in brain-related cell types. In contrast, we demonstrated a significant enrichment of PD heritability in a curated lysosomal gene set highly expressed in astrocytic, microglial, and oligodendrocyte subtypes, and in LoF-intolerant genes, which were found highly expressed in almost all tested cellular subtypes. Our results suggest that PD risk loci do not lie in specific cell types or individual brain regions, but rather in global cellular processes detectable across several cell types