Changes in hemlock looper [Lepidoptera: Geometridae] pupal distribution through a 3-year outbreak cycle

La distribution des chrysalides de l’arpenteuse de la pruche, Lambdina fiscellaria, a été étudiée au cours d’un cycle épidémique d’une durée de trois ans près du Lac Princeton sur l’île d’Anticosti au Québec. Au total, 10 sapins ont été coupés et toutes les chrysalides ont été comptées sur le tronc et les branches (partie non-foliée vs foliée) de la cime inférieure, médiane et supérieure, ainsi que sur le tronc sous la cime. En condition préépidémique, les chrysalides ont principalement été trouvées sur les branches des cimes médianes et supérieures. Durant l’épidémie, la densité des chrysalides n’a pas augmenté dans ces sites de pupaison et les larves se sont surtout transformées en chrysalides sur le tronc, à partir du sol jusque dans la cime médiane, ainsi que sur les branches de la cime inférieure. Peu de chrysalides ont été trouvées sur la partie foliée des branches en période post-épidémique, la plupart étant trouvées sur la partie basale non-foliée qui apparaît comme un endroit préférentiel pour la pupaison de l'arpenteuse de la pruche. De façon à optimiser la détection des augmentations de populations dans les réseaux de surveillance, des pièges à chrysalides devraient être placés à hauteur de poitrine sur le tronc de sapins baumiers.The hemlock looper, Lambdina fiscellaria, pupal distribution was studied through a 3-year outbreak cycle near Lac Princeton on Anticosti Island in Quebec. Over the 3 years, 10 balsam fir trees were cut and all pupae were counted on the stem and branches (non-foliated vs foliated parts) of the lower, middle and upper crowns and on the stem below crown. In pre-outbreak conditions, pupae were mostly found on branches of the middle and upper crowns. During the outbreak, pupal density did not increase on these parts of the trees, since pupae were mostly found on the stem, from the ground to the middle crown, and on branches of the lower crown. Few pupae were found on the foliated portion of branches in post-outbreak conditions but most were found on the basal non-foliated part of branches, which appears to be a preferred location for hemlock looper pupation. In order to optimize detection of population increases in monitoring networks, we suggest using pupal traps at breast height on balsam fir trees

Environmental Determinants of Malaria Transmission Around the Koka Reservoir in Ethiopia

New dam construction is known to exacerbate malaria transmission in Africa as the vectors of malaria—Anopheles mosquitoes—use bodies of water as breeding sites. Precise environmental mechanisms of how reservoirs exacerbate malaria transmission are yet to be identified. Understanding of these mechanisms should lead to a better assessment of the impacts of dam construction and to new prevention strategies. Combining extensive multiyear field surveys around the Koka Reservoir in Ethiopia and rigorous model development and simulation studies, environmental mechanisms of malaria transmission around the reservoir were examined. Most comprehensive and detailed malaria transmission model, Hydrology, Entomology, and Malaria Transmission Simulator, was applied to a village adjacent to the reservoir. Significant contributions to the dynamics of malaria transmission are shaped by wind profile, marginal pools, temperature, and shoreline locations. Wind speed and wind direction influence Anopheles populations and malaria transmission during the major and secondary mosquito seasons. During the secondary mosquito season, a noticeable influence was also attributed to marginal pools. Temperature was found to play an important role, not so much in Anopheles population dynamics, but in malaria transmission dynamics. Change in shoreline locations drives malaria transmission dynamics, with closer shoreline locations to the village making malaria transmission more likely. Identified environmental mechanisms help in predicting malaria transmission seasons and in developing village relocation strategies upon dam construction to minimize the risk of malaria

MedZIM: Mediation analysis for Zero-Inflated Mediators with applications to microbiome data

The human microbiome can contribute to the pathogenesis of many complex diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease by mediating disease-leading causal pathways. However, standard mediation analysis is not adequate in the context of microbiome data due to the excessive number of zero values in the data. Zero-valued sequencing reads, commonly observed in microbiome studies, arise for technical and/or biological reasons. Mediation analysis approaches for analyzing zero-inflated mediators are still lacking largely because of challenges raised by the zero-inflated data structure: (a) disentangling the mediation effect induced by the point mass at zero; and (b) identifying the observed zero-valued data points that are actually not zero (i.e., false zeros). We develop a novel mediation analysis method under the potential-outcomes framework to fill this gap. We show that the mediation effect of the microbiome can be decomposed into two components that are inherent to the two-part nature of zero-inflated distributions. The first component corresponds to the mediation effect attributable to a unit-change over the positive relative abundance and the second component corresponds to the mediation effect attributable to discrete binary change of the mediator from zero to a non-zero state. With probabilistic models to account for observing zeros, we also address the challenge with false zeros. A comprehensive simulation study and the applications in two real microbiome studies demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing mediation analysis approaches.Comment: Corresponding: Zhigang L

Mass-to-light ratio gradients in early-type galaxy haloes

Since the near future should see a rapidly expanding set of probes of the halo masses of individual early-type galaxies, we introduce a convenient parameter for characterising the halo masses from both observational and theoretical results: \dML, the logarithmic radial gradient of the mass-to-light ratio. Using halo density profiles from LCDM simulations, we derive predictions for this gradient for various galaxy luminosities and star formation efficiencies $\epsilon_{SF}$. As a pilot study, we assemble the available \dML\ data from kinematics in early-type galaxies - representing the first unbiassed study of halo masses in a wide range of early-type galaxy luminosities - and find a correlation between luminosity and \dML, such that the brightest galaxies appear the most dark-matter dominated. We find that the gradients in most of the brightest galaxies may fit in well with the LCDM predictions, but that there is also a population of fainter galaxies whose gradients are so low as to imply an unreasonably high star formation efficiency $\epsilon_{SF} > 1$. This difficulty is eased if dark haloes are not assumed to have the standard LCDM profiles, but lower central concentrations.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication on MNRA

GBDTMO: as new option for early-stage breast cancer detection and classification using machine learning

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of disease death in women, after lung and bronchus cancer. According to measurements, mammography misses breast cancer in 10% to 15% of cases for women aged 50 to 69 years. In the current study, we used the Wisconsin breast cancer dataset to develop a two-stage model for breast cancer diagnosis. The main goal of this study effort is to effectively carry out feature selection and classification tasks. Gradient Boosting Decision Tree-based Mayfly Optimisation (GBDTMO), an innovative and efficient breast cancer diagnostic machine learning system, is provided. In the second stage, we employ a Mayfly search to determine which subset of traits is the best. Two more well-known datasets on breast cancer, the ICCR and the Cancer Corpus, were also compared for classification accuracy. The accuracy of the suggested GBDTMO model was higher than that of the existing GBDT and Practical Federated Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (PFGBDT), which had accuracy values of 93.25% and 94.25%, respectively. Similarly, the recall, F-measure, and ROC area values were 98.52%, 97.52%, and 96.32%, respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrated a lower RMSE of 0.98 than the existing GBDT and PFGBDT

The ethics of digital well-being: a multidisciplinary perspective

This chapter serves as an introduction to the edited collection of the same name, which includes chapters that explore digital well-being from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, economics, health care, and education. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide a short primer on the different disciplinary approaches to the study of well-being. To supplement this primer, we also invited key experts from several disciplines—philosophy, psychology, public policy, and health care—to share their thoughts on what they believe are the most important open questions and ethical issues for the multi-disciplinary study of digital well-being. We also introduce and discuss several themes that we believe will be fundamental to the ongoing study of digital well-being: digital gratitude, automated interventions, and sustainable co-well-being

Salvia miltiorrhiza water-soluble extract, but not its constituent salvianolic acid B, abrogates LPS-induced NF-kappaB signalling in intestinal epithelial cells

Herbal medicine has become an increasing popular therapeutic alternative among patients suffering from various inflammatory disorders. The Salvia miltiorrhizae water-soluble extract (SME) have been shown to possess antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties in vitro. However, the mechanism of action and impact of SME on LPS-induced gene expression is still unknown. We report that SME significantly abrogated LPS-induced IκB phosphorylation/degradation, NF-κB transcriptional activity and ICAM-1 gene expression in rat IEC-18 cells. Chromatin immunoprecipitation assay demonstrated that LPS-induced RelA recruitment to the ICAM-1 gene promoter was inhibited by SME. Moreover, in vitro kinase assay showed that SME directly inhibits LPS induced IκB kinase (IKK) activity in IEC-18 cells. To investigate the physiological relevance of SME inhibitory activity on NF-κB signalling, we used small intestinal explants and primary intestinal epithelial cells derived from a transgenic mouse expressing the enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) under the transcriptional control of NF-κB cis-elements (cis-NF-κBEGFP). SME significantly blocked LPS-induced EGFP expression and IκBα phosphorylation in intestinal explants and primary IECs, respectively. However, salvianolic acid B, an activate component of SME did not inhibit NF-κB transcriptional activity and IκB phosphorylation/degradation in IEC-18 cells. These results indicate that SME blocks LPS-induced NF-κB signalling pathway by targeting the IKK complex in intestinal epithelial cells. Modulation of bacterial product-mediated NF-κB signalling by natural plant extracts may represent an attractive strategy towards the prevention and treatment of intestinal inflammation

Microbes and colorectal cancer: is there a relationship?

The human colon plays host to as many as 15,000–36,000 bacterial species, amounting to more than 100 trillion bacteria 1,2. The microbiota and their associated prokaryotic genome is an integral part of the host and uniquely contributes to various biologic processes such as maturation and development of the mucosal immune system, metabolic capacity, and intestinal epithelial cell proliferation and differentiation 3. An international effort is currently underway to catalogue the repertoire of microorganisms present in the intestines of healthy humans and of those with pathologic conditions. The human microbiome project—for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health has contributed more than $110 million—is aiming to determine the structure of the microbial community associated with the human body and the functions thereby served in health and disease 3,4

Phytochemicals as antibiotic alternatives to promote growth and enhance host health

There are heightened concerns globally on emerging drug-resistant superbugs and the lack of new antibiotics for treating human and animal diseases. For the agricultural industry, there is an urgent need to develop strategies to replace antibiotics for food-producing animals, especially poultry and livestock. The 2nd International Symposium on Alternatives to Antibiotics was held at the World Organization for Animal Health in Paris, France, December 12-15, 2016 to discuss recent scientific developments on strategic antibiotic-free management plans, to evaluate regional differences in policies regarding the reduction of antibiotics in animal agriculture and to develop antibiotic alternatives to combat the global increase in antibiotic resistance. More than 270 participants from academia, government research institutions, regulatory agencies, and private animal industries from >25 different countries came together to discuss recent research and promising novel technologies that could provide alternatives to antibiotics for use in animal health and production; assess challenges associated with their commercialization; and devise actionable strategies to facilitate the development of alternatives to antibiotic growth promoters (AGPs) without hampering animal production. The 3-day meeting consisted of four scientific sessions including vaccines, microbial products, phytochemicals, immune-related products, and innovative drugs, chemicals and enzymes, followed by the last session on regulation and funding. Each session was followed by an expert panel discussion that included industry representatives and session speakers. The session on phytochemicals included talks describing recent research achievements, with examples of successful agricultural use of various phytochemicals as antibiotic alternatives and their mode of action in major agricultural animals (poultry, swine and ruminants). Scientists from industry and academia and government research institutes shared their experience in developing and applying potential antibiotic-alternative phytochemicals commercially to reduce AGPs and to develop a sustainable animal production system in the absence of antibiotics.Fil: Lillehoj, Hyun. United States Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service; ArgentinaFil: Liu, Yanhong. University of California; Estados UnidosFil: Calsamiglia, Sergio. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; EspañaFil: Fernandez Miyakawa, Mariano Enrique. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria. Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Veterinarias y Agronómicas. Instituto de Patobiología; ArgentinaFil: Chi, Fang. Amlan International; Estados UnidosFil: Cravens, Ron L.. Amlan International; Estados UnidosFil: Oh, Sungtaek. United States Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service; ArgentinaFil: Gay, Cyril G.. United States Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service; Argentin

The struggle within: Microbial influences on colorectal cancer:

Recently, an unprecedented effort has been directed at understanding the interplay between chronic inflammation and development of cancer, with the case of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)-associated colorectal cancer at the forefront of this research endeavor. The last decade has been particularly fertile, with the discovery of numerous innovative paradigms linking various inflammatory, proliferative, and innate and adaptive immune signaling pathways to the development of colorectal cancer. Because of the preponderant role of the intestinal microbiota in the initiation and progression of IBD, recent efforts have been directed at understanding the relationship between bacteria and colorectal cancer. The microbiota and its collective genome, the microbiome, form a diverse and complex ecological community that profoundly impacts intestinal homeostasis and disease states. This review will discuss the differential influence of the microbiota on the development of IBD-associated colorectal cancer and highlight the role of innate immune sensor-dependent as well as -independent mechanisms in this pathology