Catálogo de la flora vascular del Cerro del Toruño (Comarca de Los Alcores, Alcalá de Guadaíra, Sevilla)

Situado en la comarca de Los Alcores, el Cerro del Toruño es un cabezo calcarenítico incluido en el área metropolitana de Sevilla. Se encuentra protegido por la normativa provincial por el valor y naturalidad de su vegetación. El objetivo del presente estudio es la catalogación de su flora y su puesta en valor como reducto de vegetación natural en un paisaje fuertemente antropizado. Se han inventariado un total de 351 especies, 324 de ellas autóctonas, de las que tres están recogidas en la lista roja andaluza. El catálogo incluye 4 novedades corológicas de especies nativas a nivel provincial y 16 a nivel comarcal. La diversidad encontrada en la zona de estudio es comparable a la de zonas cercanas, dada la heterogeneidad de sus hábitats. Se comentan brevemente las comunidades vegetales de acebuchar, palmitar y matorral xerófilo sobre roquedos calcareníticos, en las que se ha observado un mejor grado de conservación. Finalmente se discute la importancia biogeográfica de los Alcores como isla edáfica tanto para especies calcícolas como psammófilas y litorales, dado el carácter mayoritariamente arcilloso de la Depresión del Guadalquivir.Checklist of vascular flora of the Toruño hill (Alcores region, Alcalá de Guadaira, Seville). Located in Los Alcores region, the Cerro del Toruño is a calcarenitic hill included in Sevilla’s metropolitan area. It is protected by provincial regulations due to the value and naturalness of its vegetation. The aim of this study is to catalogue its flora and highlight its importance as a patch of relict natural vegetation within a strongly anthropic landscape. We recorded 351 species, of which 324 are native and three included in the Andalusian red list. The checklist includes 4 new chorological records at the provincial level and 16 at the regional level. Species diversity is comparable to nearby areas, given its habitat heterogeneity. The wild olive copse, Mediterranean fan palm formations, and xerophilous scrublands on calcarenitic rocks display a better conservation situation and are briefly commented. Finally, we discuss the biogeographic importance of Los Alcores region as an edaphic island, surrounded by the mostly clayey Guadalquivir valley, for calcicolous and coastal sand species

Carex divisa, una nueva ciperácea naturalizada en Chile

Carex divisa is recorded for the first time in Chile. A taxonomic discussion for its proper identification is provided.Carex divisa se registra por primera vez en Chile. Se incluye una discusión taxonómica para su apropiada determinación

Specimens at the Center: An Informatics Workflow and Toolkit for Specimen-level analysis of Public DNA database data

Major public DNA databases — NCBI GenBank, the DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ), and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) — are invaluable biodiversity libraries. Systematists and other biodiversity scientists commonly mine these databases for sequence data to use in phylogenetic studies, but such studies generally use only the taxonomic identity of the sequenced tissue, not the specimen identity. Thus studies that use DNA supermatrices to construct phylogenetic trees with species at the tips typically do not take advantage of the fact that for many individuals in the public DNA databases, several DNA regions have been sampled; and for many species, two or more individuals have been sampled. Thus these studies typically do not make full use of the multigene datasets in public DNA databases to test species coherence and select optimal sequences to represent a species. In this study, we introduce a set of tools developed in the R programming language to construct individual-based trees from NCBI GenBank data and present a set of trees for the genus Carex (Cyperaceae) constructed using these methods. For the more than 770 species for which we found sequence data, our approach recovered an average of 1.85 gene regions per specimen, up to seven for some specimens, and more than 450 species represented by two or more specimens. Depending on the subset of genes analyzed, we found up to 42% of species monophyletic. We introduce a simple tree statistic—the Taxonomic Disparity Index (TDI)—to assist in curating specimen-level datasets and provide code for selecting maximally informative (or, conversely, minimally misleading) sequences as species exemplars. While tailored to the Carex dataset, the approach and code presented in this paper can readily be generalized to constructing individual-level trees from large amounts of data for any species group

La vacuna de la rubéola y el embarazo

TeratologíaRubella is a viral infection that when it occurs during pregnancy, especially during the first trimester, could cause congenital rubella embryophaty (CRE) with devastating consequences for the developing embryo and fetus. CRE includes serious birth defects such as: cataracts, deafness and heart disease, among others. However the frequency of CRE has decreased dramatically since the general use of rubella vaccine. The immigrant population in Spain constitutes a group of concern for rubella infection among other infectious diseases due to the lack of previous vaccination in many individuals. Thus, a vaccination programme towards immigrants, specially all young women should be considered. Pregnant women should not be vaccinated, and women who are not pregnant should avoid conceiving for at least 28 days following vaccination. However if a vaccination occurs during pregnancy, the potential risk is only theoretical and a tranquilizer counseling should be performed together with a high resolution ecography.N

Resultados de la actividad de los Servicios de Información Telefónica sobre Teratógenos (SITTE y SITE) durante el año 2004 y análisis del nivel cultural de la población usuaria

Resultados de otras actividades del ECEMCWe present a summary of the activity of the two teratology information services: SITTE (for health professional) and SITE (for the general population), during 2004. A total of 6.407 calls were received, 1.456 of them were made by health professional and the remaining 4.951 by the general population. Drugs were, one more year, the most common question in either services, specially drugs affecting CNS. We also analyzed the cultural level of the women that used the SITE during the last ten years. The results show that most of the users of the service belong to the higher cultural levels, measured by the level of their educational studies. We conclude that is necessary to consider new strategies particularly aimed to reach to those women with low level of education (or low cultural level).N

Cranial and extracranial large-vessel giant cell arteritis share a genetic pattern of interferon-gamma pathway

OBJECTIVES: Two main different clinical phenotypes of giant cell arteritis (GCA) have been described, the classic cranial pattern and the extracranial large-vessel (LV) pattern. Since interferon gamma (IFNG) has shown to be a pivotal cytokine in the pathophysiology of GCA, our aim was to evaluate for the first time the influence of IFNG and IFNG receptor 1 (IFNGR1) polymorphisms in the different clinical phenotypes of GCA. METHODS: Two IFNG polymorphisms (rs2069718 G/A and rs1861493 A/G) and one polymorphism in IFNGR1 (rs1327474 G/A) were genotyped in 191 patients with biopsy-proven cranial GCA, 109 with extracranial LV-GCA and 490 healthy controls. A comparative study was conducted between patients with cranial and extracranial LV-GCA. RESULTS: No significant differences in genotype, allele, and haplotype frequencies of IFNG polymorphisms were found between GCA patients with the classic cranial pattern and the extracranial LV-GCA pattern. Similar results were found for genotype and allele frequencies of IFNGR1 polymorphism. It was also the case when patients with extracranial LV-GCA were compared with healthy controls. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that IFNG and IFNGR1 polymorphisms do not influence the clinical phenotype of expression of GCA. Classic cranial GCA and extracranial LV-GCA seem to share a genetic pattern of IFNG pathway

A tale of worldwide success: Behind the scenes of Carex (Cyperaceae) biogeography and diversification

The megadiverse genus Carex (c. 2000 species, Cyperaceae) has a nearly cosmopolitan distribution, displaying an inverted latitudinal richness gradient with higher species diversity in cold-temperate areas of the Northern Hemisphere. Despite great expansion in our knowledge of the phylogenetic history of the genus and many molecular studies focusing on the biogeography of particular groups during the last few decades, a global analysis of Carex biogeography and diversification is still lacking. For this purpose, we built the hitherto most comprehensive Carex-dated phylogeny based on three markers (ETS–ITS–matK), using a previous phylogenomic Hyb-Seq framework, and a sampling of two-thirds of its species and all recognized sections. Ancestral area reconstruction, biogeographic stochastic mapping, and diversification rate analyses were conducted to elucidate macroevolutionary biogeographic and diversification patterns. Our results reveal that Carex originated in the late Eocene in E Asia, where it probably remained until the synchronous diversification of its main subgeneric lineages during the late Oligocene. E Asia is supported as the cradle of Carex diversification, as well as a “museum” of extant species diversity. Subsequent “out-of-Asia” colonization patterns feature multiple asymmetric dispersals clustered toward present times among the Northern Hemisphere regions, with major regions acting both as source and sink (especially Asia and North America), as well as several independent colonization events of the Southern Hemisphere. We detected 13 notable diversification rate shifts during the last 10 My, including remarkable radiations in North America and New Zealand, which occurred concurrently with the late Neogene global cooling, which suggests that diversification involved the colonization of new areas and expansion into novel areas of niche space.This work was carried out with financial support by the National Science Foundation (Award #1255901 to ALH and Award #1256033 to EHR), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project CGL2016–77401‐P to SM-B and ML), the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (McIntire Stennis project 1018692 to DS) as well as postdoctoral fellowships towards SM‐B (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, PP16/12‐APP), and PJ‐M (National Science Foundation, Award #1256033, and the Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship program)

High Quality Long-Term CD4+ and CD8+ Effector Memory Populations Stimulated by DNA-LACK/MVA-LACK Regimen in Leishmania major BALB/c Model of Infection

Heterologous vaccination based on priming with a plasmid DNA vector and boosting with an attenuated vaccinia virus MVA recombinant, with both vectors expressing the Leishmania infantum LACK antigen (DNA-LACK and MVA-LACK), has shown efficacy conferring protection in murine and canine models against cutaneus and visceral leishmaniasis, but the immune parameters of protection remain ill defined. Here we performed by flow cytometry an in depth analysis of the T cell populations induced in BALB/c mice during the vaccination protocol DNA-LACK/MVA-LACK, as well as after challenge with L. major parasites. In the adaptive response, there is a polyfunctional CD4+ and CD8+ T cell activation against LACK antigen. At the memory phase the heterologous vaccination induces high quality LACK-specific long-term CD4+ and CD8+ effector memory cells. After parasite challenge, there is a moderate boosting of LACK-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. Anti-vector responses were largely CD8+-mediated. The immune parameters induced against LACK and triggered by the combined vaccination DNA/MVA protocol, like polyfunctionality of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells with an effector phenotype, could be relevant in protection against leishmaniasis