WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online taxonomic backbone data

The standardization of plant names is a critical step in various fields of biology, including biodiversity, biogeography, and vegetation research. The WorldFlora package is introduced here to help achieve this goal by matching lists of plant names with a static copy from World Flora Online (WFO), an ongoing global effort to complete an online flora of all known vascular plants and bryophytes by 2020. Based on direct and fuzzy matching, WorldFlora inserts matching cases from the WFO to a submitted data set containing taxonomic names. The results and success rates for selecting the expected best single matches are presented for four data sets, including two data sets used in recent comparisons of software tools for correcting taxon names. WorldFlora offers a straightforward pipeline for semi‐automatic plant name checking. For the four data sets, the success rate of credible matches ranged from 94.7% to 99.9%

Quantification of HTLV-I proviral load in experimentally infected rabbits

BACKGROUND: Levels of proviral load in HTLV-1 infected patients correlate with clinical outcome and are reasonably prognostic. Adaptation of proviral load measurement techniques is examined here for use in an experimental rabbit model of HTLV-1 infection. Initial efforts sought to correlate proviral load with route and dose of inoculation and with clinical outcome in this model. These methods contribute to our continuing goal of using the model to test treatments that alleviate virus infection. RESULTS: A real-time PCR assay was used to measure proviral load in blood and tissue samples from a series of rabbits infected using HTLV-1 inocula prepared as either cell-free virus particles, infected cells or blood, or by naked DNA injection. Proviral loads from asymptomatically infected rabbits showed levels corresponding to those reported for human patients with clinically silent HTLV-1 infections. Proviral load was comparably increased in 50% of experimentally infected rabbits that developed either spontaneous benign or malignant tumors while infected. Similarly elevated provirus was found in organs of rabbits with experimentally induced acute leukemia/lymphoma-like disease. Levels of provirus in organs taken at necropsy varied widely suggesting that reservoirs of infections exist in non-lymphoid organs not traditionally thought to be targets for HTLV-1. CONCLUSION: Proviral load measurement is a valuable enhancement to the rabbit model for HTLV-1 infection providing a metric to monitor clinical status of the infected animals as well as a means for the testing of treatment to combat infection. In some cases proviral load in blood did not reflect organ proviral levels, revealing a limitation of this method for monitoring health status of HTLV-1 infected individuals