From Sea to Sea: Canada's Three Oceans of Biodiversity

Evaluating and understanding biodiversity in marine ecosystems are both necessary and challenging for conservation. This paper compiles and summarizes current knowledge of the diversity of marine taxa in Canada's three oceans while recognizing that this compilation is incomplete and will change in the future. That Canada has the longest coastline in the world and incorporates distinctly different biogeographic provinces and ecoregions (e.g., temperate through ice-covered areas) constrains this analysis. The taxonomic groups presented here include microbes, phytoplankton, macroalgae, zooplankton, benthic infauna, fishes, and marine mammals. The minimum number of species or taxa compiled here is 15,988 for the three Canadian oceans. However, this number clearly underestimates in several ways the total number of taxa present. First, there are significant gaps in the published literature. Second, the diversity of many habitats has not been compiled for all taxonomic groups (e.g., intertidal rocky shores, deep sea), and data compilations are based on short-term, directed research programs or longer-term monitoring activities with limited spatial resolution. Third, the biodiversity of large organisms is well known, but this is not true of smaller organisms. Finally, the greatest constraint on this summary is the willingness and capacity of those who collected the data to make it available to those interested in biodiversity meta-analyses. Confirmation of identities and intercomparison of studies are also constrained by the disturbing rate of decline in the number of taxonomists and systematists specializing on marine taxa in Canada. This decline is mostly the result of retirements of current specialists and to a lack of training and employment opportunities for new ones. Considering the difficulties encountered in compiling an overview of biogeographic data and the diversity of species or taxa in Canada's three oceans, this synthesis is intended to serve as a biodiversity baseline for a new program on marine biodiversity, the Canadian Healthy Ocean Network. A major effort needs to be undertaken to establish a complete baseline of Canadian marine biodiversity of all taxonomic groups, especially if we are to understand and conserve this part of Canada's natural heritage

Seaweeds and their communities in polar regions

Polar seaweeds typically begin to grow in late winter-spring, around the time of sea-ice break up. They can grow under very low light enabling distributions to depths of ≥40 m. Moreover, they are physiologically adapted to low temperatures. Intertidal species exhibit a remarkable stress tolerance against freezing, desiccation and salinity changes. Endemism is much greater in the Antarctic compared to the Arctic species. On rocky shores of the Antarctic Peninsula and of Spitsbergen >80% of the bottom can be covered by seaweeds with standing biomass levels ≥20 kg wet wt m-2. Species richness and biomass declines, however, towards higher latitudes. Seaweeds are the dominant organisms in coastal waters and thus play important roles in benthic food webs and are likely to be of particular importance to benthic detrital food chains. Chemical defenses against herbivores are common in Antarctic, but not in Arctic seaweeds. More research is needed especially to study the effects of global climate changes

OPERATIONAL QUANTUM LOGIC: AN OVERVIEW

The term quantum logic has different connotations for different people, having been considered as everything from a metaphysical attack on classical reasoning to an exercise in abstract algebra. Our aim here is to give a uniform presentation of what we call operational quantum logic, highlighting both its concrete physical origins and its purely mathematical structure. To orient readers new to this subject, we shall recount some of the historical development of quantum logic, attempting to show how the physical and mathematical sides of the subject have influenced and enriched one another

Synthesis and evaluation of resins bearing substrate-like inhibitor functions for capturing copper amine oxidases

none6In order to make new tools available for investigating interactions between enzyme and substrate-like inhibitors in copper amine oxidases (CAOs), a class of enzymes that controls important cellular processes such as the crosslinking of elastin and collagen, cell proliferation and the regulation of intracellular polyamines, starting from a previous work we synthesized the poly(N,N-dimethylacrylamide)-based resin R2 and the new TentaGel resins T3 and T4 obtained by immobilizing onto commercial TentaGel S-Br properly designed CAO substrate-like inhibitor moieties. The anchoring of CAO substrate-like inhibitor moieties was carried out through stable ether bonds onto commercial TentaGel S-Br which contains bromomethyl groups susceptible to nucleophilic substitution reactions. We resorted to polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) experiments to ascertain the capability of the prepared resins to capture plasma amine oxidase (PAO) and diamine oxidase (DAO), members of the CAO family. The poly(N,N-dimethylacrylamide)-based resin R2 resulted able of blocking PAO and DAO being the first insoluble polymeric materials able to capture enzymes of the CAO family.Pocci M; Alfei S; Castellaro S; Lucchesini F; Milanese M; Bertini V.Pocci, Marco; Alfei, Silvana; Castellaro, Sara; Lucchesini, Francesco; Milanese, Marco; Bertini, Vincenz