Experimental control strategies reducing the fungicide input at a practical scale

Phytophthora infestans is the most devastating disease in potato cultivation. Chemical control is necessary to ensure a healthy crop. At the same time Dutch governmental policy asks for a reduction of the environmental impact of potato late blight control by 75% in 2012 as compared to 1996-1998. The aim of the experiments was to compare Decision Support Systems with different approaches to blight risk management for their ability to reduce the fungicide input without compromising control efficacy. Considerable savings, up to 81% when compared to weekly, full dose rate, spray schedules, can be achieved by using information on cultivar resistance, length of the critical period and disease pressure to decide whether or not to spray. The subroutine calculating the potential for viable transport of spores is only effective on resistant varieties as the threshold was exceeded with every critical period on less resistant cultivars. Implications of the experimental control strategies for agricultural practise are discusse

Collagen content and distribution in the normal and transplanted human heart: A postmortem quantitative light microscopic analysis

Endomyocardial biopsies in heart transplant patients offer the opportunity to study the myocardial interstitium in the context of myocardial function. For that purpose endomyocardial biopsies should reliably reflect the composition of the entire myocardium. We determined whether the collagen content in the subendocardial region of the right side of the interventricular septum (site of right ventricular endomyocardial biopsy), in 16 normal and 30 transplanted human hearts, is representative for the entire myocardium. Moreover we determined whether or not the mean collagen content of the myocardium is altered along with the posttransplantation survival time and which factors might contribute to the development of interstitial myocardial fibrosis. Transmural sections of the right and left ventricular free wall and interventricular septum were stained with Sirius red, which specifically stains collagen fibers. Collagen in the subendocardial region and central parts of the myocardium was quantified using a digital image analyzer. In normal hearts the mean collagen content of the subendocardial region of the right side of the interventricular septum (site of right ventricular endomyocardial biopsy) correlates well with the mean collagen content of the right ventricular wall and the center of the interventricular septum, but it does not reliably reflect the mean collagen content of the left ventricular free wall. In transplanted hearts the collagen content at the site of right ventricular endomyocardial biopsy correlates highly with the mean collagen content of the entire myocardium. In transplanted hearts the increase in collagen content is a result mainly of an increase in collagen of the left ventricular free wall. We conclude that in heart transplant patients, right ventricular endomyocardial biopsies have potential value in the analysis of the causes of left ventricular dysfunction. In transplanted human hearts, the posttransplantation survival time correlates positively with the collagen content, and this is attributable mainly to an increase in the collagen of the left ventricular free wall

Immunomagnetic t-lymphocyte depletion (ITLD) of rat bone marrow using OX-19 monoclonal antibody

Graft versus host disease (GVHD) may be abrogated and host survival prolonged by in vitro depletion of T lymphocytes from bone marrow (BM) prior to allotransplantation. Using a mouse anti-rat pan T-lymphocyte monoclonal antibody (0×19) bound to monosized, magnetic, polymer beads, T lymphocytes were removed in vitro from normal bone marrow. The removal of the T lymphocytes was confirmed by flow cytometry. Injection of the T-lymphocyte-depleted bone marrow into fully allogeneic rats prevents the induction of GVHD and prolongs host survival. A highly efficient technique of T-lymphocyte depletion using rat bone marrow is described. It involves the binding of OX-19, a MoAb directed against all rat thy-mocytes and mature peripheral T lymphocytes, to monosized, magnetic polymer spheres. Magnetic separation of T lymphocytes after mixing the allogeneic bone marrow with the bead/OX-19 complex provides for a simple, rapid depletion of T lymphocytes from the bone marrow. In vitro studies using flow cytometry and the prevention of GVHD in a fully allogeneic rat bone marrow model have been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the depletion procedure. © 1989 Informa UK Ltd All rights reserved: reproduction in whole or part not permitted

Retrieval Contexts and the Concreteness Effect: Dissociations in Memory of Concrete and Abstract Words

Decades of research on the concreteness effect, namely better memory for concrete as compared with abstract words, suggest it is a fairly robust phenomenon. Nevertheless, little attention has been given to limiting retrieval contexts. Two experiments evaluated intentional memory for concrete and abstract word lists in three retrieval contexts: free recall, explicit word-stem completion, and implicit word-stem completion. Concreteness effects were observed in free recall and in explicit word-stem completion, but not in implicit word-stem completion. These findings are consistent with both a bidirectional version of the relational-distinctiveness processing framework (Ruiz-Vargas, Cuevas, & Marschark, 1996) and a second framework combining insights from dual coding theory (Paivio, 1971, 1986) and the transfer appropriate processing framework (Roediger, Weldon, & Challis, 1989). Also, consistent with the relational-distinctiveness framework, the second experiment suggested that concreteness effects might depend on relational processing at encoding: Concreteness effects were observed in explicit memory for related word lists but not for unrelated word lists. © 2005 Psychology Press Ltd

First report of Soybean Mosaic Virus in commercially grown soybean in the Netherlands

In July 2020, plants with crinkled, chlorotic, occasionally necrotic leaves, typical for Soybean Mosaic Virus (SMV), were observed in eight soybean fields (Glycine max L.) in Flevoland, The Netherlands (Supp. Fig. 1). Disease incidence varied from 5-50% and the plants affected often occurred in small or extensive patches. Leaves from several symptomatic plants were sampled from each of two fields planted with soybean variety Green Shell or Summer Shell. Total RNA was extracted from one plant leaf sample per field using InviTrap Spin Plant RNA Mini Kit (Invitek, Germany). One-tube RT-PCRs employing potyvirus generic primers P9502 and CPUP (Van der Vlugt et al, 1999) and SMV-specific primers SMV-dT (5'-TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTAGGACAAC-3') and SMV-Nib-Fw (5'-CAAGGATGARTTTAAGGAG-3') combined with Sanger sequencing confirmed the presence of SMV in all leaf samples. To exclude the presence of other agents in the samples, total RNA from each cultivar was used in standard Illumina library preparation with ribosomal RNA depletion followed by sequencing on an Illumina NovaSeq6000 (paired-end, 150 bp) which yielded 66,579,158 reads (Summer Shell) and 223,953,206 reads (Green Shell). After quality trimming in CLC Genomics Workbench 20.0.4 (CLC-GWB; Qiagen, Hilden), four million reads were randomly sampled for de novo assembly. Contigs over 500 nucleotides (nts) in length with a minimum of 500 reads were annotated by BLASTn against NCBI GenBank. This identified one contig of 9,883 nts (6,233,397 reads) in Summer Shell and one contig of 9,727 nts (3,139,927 reads) in Green Shell with clear homology to SMV (E-value = 0.0). No other viruses were identified in the datasets. Reference assemblies against the SMV reference sequence (NC_002634) mapped 24,090,763 reads (36.2%) for Summer Shell and 175,459,637 reads (78.3%) for Green Shell. Extracted consensus sequences for SMV in both soybean cultivars were 9,584 nts long (excluding the poly-A tail). Sequence data from the de novo and reference assemblies were combined into consensus sequences which showed over 98% overall nt sequence identity to NC_002634 and 99.6% to each other. Both consensus sequences were deposited in GenBank under accession numbers MW822167 (SMV-Summer Shell) and MW822168 (SMV-Green Shell). In addition, the presence of SMV in the field samples was confirmed with an inoculation assay. Leaf samples from both fields were ground in phosphate buffer (0.1M, pH 7.2) and inoculated on cotyledons and first expanded leaves of soybean plants (unknown cv.) 12 days post-germination. Plants showed veinal chlorosis in systemic leaves from 12 days post-inoculation, which developed into veinal necrosis. SMV infections were confirmed by RT-PCR in systemic, chlorotic leaf samples of all symptomatic plants using the SMV-specific primers described above. To our knowledge, this is the first report of SMV in The Netherlands. As soybean is a relatively new but expanding crop in this country, information about emerging diseases is highly relevant. SMV can be transmitted via seeds and aphids, where seeds can serve as primary source of virus inoculum (Cui et al., 2011; Hartman et al., 2016; Hajimorad et al., 2018). Weeds and non-commercial plants can also serve as origin of SMV, particularly in subsequent growing seasons, although this virus infects a limited host range of six plant families (Cui et al., 2011; Hill & Whitham, 2014). Special monitoring would be advised for the recurrence and possible damage by SMV in Dutch soybean fields

The challenges of communicating research evidence in practice: perspectives from UK health visitors and practice nurses

<p>Background: Health practitioners play a pivotal role in providing patients with up-to-date evidence and health information. Evidence-based practice and patient-centred care are transforming the delivery of healthcare in the UK. Health practitioners are increasingly balancing the need to provide evidence-based information against that of facilitating patient choice, which may not always concur with the evidence base. There is limited research exploring how health practitioners working in the UK, and particularly those more autonomous practitioners such as health visitors and practice nurses working in community practice settings, negotiate this challenge. This research provides a descriptive account of how health visitors and practice nurses negotiate the challenges of communicating health information and research evidence in practice.</p> <p>Methods: A total of eighteen in-depth telephone interviews were conducted in the UK between September 2008 and May 2009. The participants comprised nine health visitors and nine practice nurses, recruited via adverts on a nursing website, posters at a practitioner conference and through recommendation. Thematic analysis, with a focus on constant comparative method, was used to analyse the data.</p> <p>Results: The data were grouped into three main themes: communicating evidence to the critically-minded patient; confidence in communicating evidence; and maintaining the integrity of the patient-practitioner relationship. These findings highlight some of the daily challenges that health visitors and practice nurses face with regard to the complex and dynamic nature of evidence and the changing attitudes and expectations of patients. The findings also highlight the tensions that exist between differing philosophies of evidence-based practice and patient-centred care, which can make communicating about evidence a daunting task.</p> <p>Conclusions: If health practitioners are to be effective at communicating research evidence, we suggest that more research and resources need to be focused on contextual factors, such as how research evidence is negotiated, appraised and communicated within the dynamic patient-practitioner relationship.</p&gt

A cloud-based robot system for long-term interaction: principles, implementation, lessons learned

Making the transition to long-term interaction with social-robot systems has been identified as one of the main challenges in human-robot interaction. This article identifies four design principles to address this challenge and applies them in a real-world implementation: cloud-based robot control, a modular design, one common knowledge base for all applications, and hybrid artificial intelligence for decision making and reasoning. The control architecture for this robot includes a common Knowledge-base (ontologies), Data-base, “Hybrid Artificial Brain” (dialogue manager, action selection and explainable AI), Activities Centre (Timeline, Quiz, Break and Sort, Memory, Tip of the Day, ), Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA, i.e., robot and avatar), and Dashboards (for authoring and monitoring the interaction). Further, the ECA is integrated with an expandable set of (mobile) health applications. The resulting system is a Personal Assistant for a healthy Lifestyle (PAL), which supports diabetic children with self-management and educates them on health-related issues (48 children, aged 6–14, recruited via hospitals in the Netherlands and in Italy). It is capable of autonomous interaction “in the wild” for prolonged periods of time without the need for a “Wizard-of-Oz” (up until 6 months online). PAL is an exemplary system that provides personalised, stable and diverse, long-term human-robot interaction

Climate change challenges for central banks and financial regulators

The academic and policy debate regarding the role of central banks and financial regulators in addressing climate-related financial risks has rapidly expanded in recent years. This Perspective presents the key controversies and discusses potential research and policy avenues for the future. Developing a comprehensive analytical framework to assess the potential impact of climate change and the low-carbon transition on financial stability seems to be the first crucial challenge. These enhanced risk measures could then be incorporated in setting financial regulations and implementing the policies of central banks

How stakeholder participation can contribute to systematic reviews of complex interventions

Although patient and public involvement in research is a requirement for research funding in many countries, the knowledge base for how to effectively involve people—and evidence of the effectiveness of involvement—is weak. This article describes how methods used in participatory health research were used to involve patients, clients, providers and community health workers across all stages of a realist review. Sustained involvement enabled better identification of the components of the complex intervention of community-based peer support. It also challenged assumptions of how peer support is constructed, leading the review team to question whether the process of designing and implementing interventions has more influence on effectiveness than previously recognised in empirical studies. We conclude with a discussion on when sustained involvement should be used, and the challenges of incorporating it into the traditional researcher-led approach to systematic reviews