FAO/IBPGR technical guidelines for the safe movement of sweet potato germplasm

These guidelines are divided into 2 parts. The first makes general recommendations on how best to move Ipomoea germplasm and mentions available intermediate quarantine facilities. The second part covers the important insect pests and viral, mycoplasmal, bacterial and fungal diseases of quarantine concern. The information given on any particular pest or pathogen concentrates on those aspects most relevant to quarantine. (Abstract © CAB ABSTRACTS, CAB International

Review Section : Nature/Nurture Revisited I

Biologically oriented approaches to the study of human conflict have thus far been limited largely to the study of aggression. A sample of the literature on this topic is reviewed, drawing upon four major approaches: comparative psychology, ethology (including some popularized accounts), evolutionary-based theories, and several areas of human physiology. More sophisticated relationships between so-called "innate" and "acquired" determinants of behavior are discussed, along with the proper relevance of animal behavior studies for human behavior. Unless contained in a comprehensive theory which includes social and psychological variables, biolog ically oriented theories (although often valid within their domain) offer at best severely limited and at worst highly misleading explanations of complex social conflicts. The review concludes with a list of several positive contributions of these biological approaches and suggests that social scientists must become more knowledgeable about them.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68270/2/10.1177_002200277401800206.pd

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Overcoming host- and pathogen-mediated resistance in tomato and tobacco maps to the M RNA of tomato spotted wilt virus

A viral genetic system was used to map the determinants of the ability of Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) to overcome the R gene (Sw-5) in tomato and the resistance conferred by the nucleocapsid gene of TSWV (N gene) in tobacco. A complete set of reassortant genotypes was generated from TSWV isolates A and D. TSWV-A was able to overcome the Sw-5 gene in tomato and the TSWV N gene in tobacco, whereas TSWV-D was repressed by both forms of resistance. The ability to overcome both forms of resistance was associated with the M RNA segment of TSWV-A (MA). Overcoming the Sw-5 gene was linked solely to the presence of MA, and the ability of MA to overcome the TSWV N gene was modified by the L RNA and the S RNA of TSWV-A, which is consistent with previous reports that suggest that the nucleocapsid gene is not the primary determinant for overcoming the nucleocapsid-mediated resistance. Sequence analysis of the M RNA segment of TSWV-A, -D, and the type isolate BR-01 revealed multiple differences in the coding and noncoding regions, which prevented identification of the resistance-breaking nucleotide sequences