Animal Studies Journal 2015 4 (1): Cover Pages, Table of Contents, Notes on Contributors and Editorial

Cover pages, table of contents, contributor biographies and editorial for Animal Studies Journal Vol. 4 No.1, 2015. Guest editor - Colin Salter

Elucidating the mystery of the tripartite symbiosis plant – mycorrhizal fungi – dark septate endophytes

Non-Peer ReviewedThis study provides information on the tripartite symbiotic relationships formed by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and dark septate endophytes (DSE) in crops growing in the semiarid region of the Canadian Prairie. We found the symbiotic root systems of wheat, pea, chickpea and lentil to be morphologically distinct. The relationship between DSE and AMF abundance in roots ranged from negative in lentil to positive in wheat

Racial/ethnic inequities in the associations of allostatic load with all-cause and cardiovascular-specific mortality risk in U.S. adults

Non-Hispanic blacks have higher mortality rates than non-Hispanic whites whereas Hispanics have similar or lower mortality rates than non-Hispanic blacks and whites despite Hispanics' lower education and access to health insurance coverage. This study examines whether allostatic load, a proxy for cumulative biological risk, is associated with all-cause and cardiovascular (CVD)-specific mortality risks in US adults; and whether these associations vary with race/ethnicity and further with age, sex and education across racial/ethnic groups. Data from the third National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES III, 1988-1994) and the 2015 Linked Mortality File were used for adults 25 years or older (n = 13,673 with 6,026 deaths). Cox proportional hazards regression was used to estimate the associations of allostatic load scores (2 and >= 3 relative to <= 1) with a) all-cause and b) CVD-specific mortality risk among NHANES III participants before and after controlling for selected characteristics. Allostatic load scores are associated with higher all-cause and CVD-specific mortality rates among U.S. adults aged 25 years or older, with stronger rates observed for CVD-specific mortality. All-cause mortality rates for each racial/ethnic group differed with age and education whereas for CVD-specific mortality rates, this difference was observed for sex. Our findings of high allostatic load scores associated with all-cause and CVD-specific mortality among US adults call attention to monitor conditions associated with the allostatic load's biomarkers to identify high-risk groups to help monitor social inequities in mortality risk, especially premature mortality

Socioeconomic Inequalities in Mortality Rates in Old Age in the World Health Organization Europe Region

Socioeconomic adversity is among the foremost fundamental causes of human suffering, and this is no less true in old age. Recent reports on socioeconomic inequalities in mortality rate in old age suggest that a low socioeconomic position continues to increase the risk of death even among the oldest old. We aimed to examine the evidence for socioeconomic mortality rate inequalities in old age, including information about associations with various indicators of socioeconomic position and for various geographic locations within the World Health Organization Region for Europe. The articles included in this review leave no doubt that inequalities in mortality rate by socioeconomic position persist into the oldest ages for both men and women in all countries for which information is available, although the relative risk measures observed were rarely higher than 2.00. Still, the available evidence base is heavily biased geographically, inasmuch as it is based largely on national studies from Nordic and Western European countries and local studies from urban areas in Southern Europe. This bias will hamper the design of European-wide policies to reduce inequalities in mortality rate. We call for a continuous update of the empiric evidence on socioeconomic inequalities in mortality rate

HPC-enabling technologies for high-fidelity combustion simulations

With the increase in computational power in the last decade and the forthcoming Exascale supercomputers, a new horizon in computational modelling and simulation is envisioned in combustion science. Considering the multiscale and multiphysics characteristics of turbulent reacting flows, combustion simulations are considered as one of the most computationally demanding applications running on cutting-edge supercomputers. Exascale computing opens new frontiers for the simulation of combustion systems as more realistic conditions can be achieved with high-fidelity methods. However, an efficient use of these computing architectures requires methodologies that can exploit all levels of parallelism. The efficient utilization of the next generation of supercomputers needs to be considered from a global perspective, that is, involving physical modelling and numerical methods with methodologies based on High-Performance Computing (HPC) and hardware architectures. This review introduces recent developments in numerical methods for large-eddy simulations (LES) and direct-numerical simulations (DNS) to simulate combustion systems, with focus on the computational performance and algorithmic capabilities. Due to the broad scope, a first section is devoted to describe the fundamentals of turbulent combustion, which is followed by a general description of state-of-the-art computational strategies for solving these problems. These applications require advanced HPC approaches to exploit modern supercomputers, which is addressed in the third section. The increasing complexity of new computing architectures, with tightly coupled CPUs and GPUs, as well as high levels of parallelism, requires new parallel models and algorithms exposing the required level of concurrency. Advances in terms of dynamic load balancing, vectorization, GPU acceleration and mesh adaptation have permitted to achieve highly-efficient combustion simulations with data-driven methods in HPC environments. Therefore, dedicated sections covering the use of high-order methods for reacting flows, integration of detailed chemistry and two-phase flows are addressed. Final remarks and directions of future work are given at the end. }The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under the CoEC project, grant agreement No. 952181 and the CoE RAISE project grant agreement no. 951733.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Physiological and biochemical basis for stay-green trait in sorghum

Drought is a major cause of sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] yield losses in rain-fed agriculture, especially in the semi-arid and arid agro-ecological zones of Africa and Asia. Stay-green sorghum genotypes are able to maintain grain filling under drought conditions. The trait has been employed in the selection and breeding for post-flowering drought resistance, even though the genes regulating the trait are still being identified. The objective of this study was to assess how leaf area and chlorophyll are maintained in various sources of stay-green; and to determine whether the integrity of the photosynthetic apparatus and enzymes involved in the maintenance of photosynthesis during post-flowering drought stress are regulated differently. A glasshouse experiment was conducted using three stay-green sorghum lines (B35, KS19 and E36-1) and a senescent control, R16, under well-watered (WW) and water-limited (WL) conditions. The size of the canopy at anthesis varied significantly between genotypes, and this profoundly impacted leaf senescence patterns. For example, green leaf area (GLA) at anthesis was highly correlated with the decline in GLA during the first 21 days of grain filling, under both WW (r = 0.92) and WL (r = 0.86) conditions. These differences in senescence patterns were further exacerbated by the small pot size in this study (10 L). E36-1 is normally designated as a stay-green genotype, but the growth of this ‘high leaf area’, genotype in a small pot resulted in a senescent phenotype. Green leaf area retention was higher in B35 and KS19, and the loss of GLA started 14 days earlier in the WL E36-1 and R16 plants, compared to B35, with little change in KS19. Chlorophyll levels were higher in B35 and KS19 compared with R16 and E36-1 under WL conditions. FPSII, CO2 assimilation rate, leaf conductance, transpiration rate and leaf water use efficiency were higher in the stay-green genotypes under WL conditions compared to R16. Enzymes involved in leaf nitrogen metabolism and chlorophyll biosynthesis, and photosynthesis were retained at higher levels in the stay-green lines than in R16. Therefore, the stay-green mechanism resulted in reduced destruction of the photosynthetic apparatus, better nitrogen metabolism and chlorophyll turnover, and maintenance of active enzymes involved in photosynthesis