Working Around the Withdrawal Agreement: Statutory Evidentiary Safeguards Negate the Need for a Withdrawal Agreement in Collaborative Law Proceedings

This Comment will proceed by: (I) comparing state collaborative law statutes; (II) evaluating the current ethical climate surrounding withdrawal agreements in collaborative law; (III) considering the purpose of the withdrawal agreement and how evidentiary safeguards can provide the same incentives; and finally, concluding that statutory evidentiary safeguards eliminate the need for a mandatory withdrawal agreement in the collaborative law setting

A rapid method for an offline glycerol determination during microbial fermentation

Background: The purpose of this work was to find a rapid method for glycerol detection during microbial fermentations. The method requirements were, first, to avoid sample pretreatment, and second, to measure glycerol precisely especially out of fermentation broth. Results: This was achieved by combining two reaction principles \u2014 the Malaprade reaction and the Hantzsch reaction. In the Malaprade reaction, glycerol is converted into formaldehyde. This forms a dye in the Hantzsch reaction after which adsorption is than detected. The subsequent assay was investigated with two different fermentation media, a chemically undefined and a chemically defined media, used for Pichia pastoris fermentation. In both media, as well as in real fermentation samples, glycerol content could be reproducibly detected with the method. Moreover, measurements were more precise than using a standard glycerol detection kit. Conclusions: With this rapid assay, glycerol could be detected easily in microbial fermentation broth. It is reliable over a wide concentration range including advantages such as an easy assay set-up, a short assay time and no sample pretreatment

Comparative assessment of fluorescent proteins for in vivo imaging in an animal model system.

Fluorescent protein tags are fundamental tools used to visualize gene products and analyze their dynamics in vivo. Recent advances in genome editing have expedited the precise insertion of fluorescent protein tags into the genomes of diverse organisms. These advances expand the potential of in vivo imaging experiments and facilitate experimentation with new, bright, photostable fluorescent proteins. Most quantitative comparisons of the brightness and photostability of different fluorescent proteins have been made in vitro, removed from biological variables that govern their performance in cells or organisms. To address the gap, we quantitatively assessed fluorescent protein properties in vivo in an animal model system. We generated transgenic Caenorhabditis elegans strains expressing green, yellow, or red fluorescent proteins in embryos and imaged embryos expressing different fluorescent proteins under the same conditions for direct comparison. We found that mNeonGreen was not as bright in vivo as predicted based on in vitro data but is a better tag than GFP for specific kinds of experiments, and we report on optimal red fluorescent proteins. These results identify ideal fluorescent proteins for imaging in vivo in C. elegans embryos and suggest good candidate fluorescent proteins to test in other animal model systems for in vivo imaging experiments

Infusion of five percent dextrose increases mortality and morbidity following six minutes of cardiac arrest in resuscitated dogs

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of dextrose administration during and following cardiac resuscitation on mortality and morbidity. Thirty-one dogs anesthetized with halothane were subjected to six minutes of ventricular fibrillation and were resuscitated with open chest cardiac message. All dogs were successfully resuscitated. Thirteen received no dextrose infusion and were fully ambulatory, eating and drinking at 24 hours. Ten of the 18 dogs receiving an infusion of 5% dextrose died before 24 hours and the eight that survived were profoundly impaired. Significantly greater neurologic deficits were recorded for dogs with higher blood glucose concentrations. We conclude that the inclusion of dextrose in fluids used in resuscitation increases mortality and morbidity.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26775/1/0000328.pd

Application of genomic tools to avocado (Persea americana) breeding : SNP discovery for genotyping and germplasm characterization

Avocado (Persea americana) is an important tropical and subtropical fruit tree crop. Traditional tree breeding programs face the challenges of long generation time and significant expense in land and personnel resources. Avocado selection and breeding can be more efficient and less expensive through the development of molecular markers for the estimation of germplasm genetic diversity, marker-assisted selection (MAS), and creation of linkage maps. Two important breeding resources, the world's two largest avocado mapping populations and an extensive germplasm collection, are housed at the USDA-ARS Subtropical Horticulture Research Station (SHRS) in Miami, Florida. However, to use these resources to their greatest advantage, many thousands of genetic markers are necessary. Here, we describe the development of the first set of avocado genetic markers based on single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variation in expressed genes. RNA sequencing was used both to build a reference transcriptome from 'Hass', the most widely grown avocado cultivar worldwide, and to identify SNPs by alignment of RNA sequences from the mapping population parents to the ˈHassˈ transcriptome. This study provides a new genomic tool for the avocado community that can be used to assess the genetic diversity of avocado germplasm worldwide and to optimize avocado breeding and selection programs by complementing traditional breeding methods with molecular approaches, thus increasing the efficiency of avocado genetic improvement.http://www.elsevier.com/locate/scihortiam2019BiochemistryForestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI)GeneticsMicrobiology and Plant Patholog

GlobTherm, a global database on thermal tolerances for aquatic and terrestrial organisms

CITATION: Bennett, J. M., et al. 2018. GlobTherm, a global database on thermal tolerances for aquatic and terrestrial organisms. Scientific Data, 5:180022, doi:10.1038/sdata.2018.22.The original publication is available at https://www.nature.comHow climate affects species distributions is a longstanding question receiving renewed interest owing to the need to predict the impacts of global warming on biodiversity. Is climate change forcing species to live near their critical thermal limits? Are these limits likely to change through natural selection? These and other important questions can be addressed with models relating geographical distributions of species with climate data, but inferences made with these models are highly contingent on non-climatic factors such as biotic interactions. Improved understanding of climate change effects on species will require extensive analysis of thermal physiological traits, but such data are both scarce and scattered. To overcome current limitations, we created the GlobTherm database. The database contains experimentally derived species’ thermal tolerance data currently comprising over 2,000 species of terrestrial, freshwater, intertidal and marine multicellular algae, plants, fungi, and animals. The GlobTherm database will be maintained and curated by iDiv with the aim to keep expanding it, and enable further investigations on the effects of climate on the distribution of life on Earth.https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201822Publisher's versio

MicroRNAs in pulmonary arterial remodeling

Pulmonary arterial remodeling is a presently irreversible pathologic hallmark of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). This complex disease involves pathogenic dysregulation of all cell types within the small pulmonary arteries contributing to vascular remodeling leading to intimal lesions, resulting in elevated pulmonary vascular resistance and right heart dysfunction. Mutations within the bone morphogenetic protein receptor 2 gene, leading to dysregulated proliferation of pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells, have been identified as being responsible for heritable PAH. Indeed, the disease is characterized by excessive cellular proliferation and resistance to apoptosis of smooth muscle and endothelial cells. Significant gene dysregulation at the transcriptional and signaling level has been identified. MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNA molecules that negatively regulate gene expression and have the ability to target numerous genes, therefore potentially controlling a host of gene regulatory and signaling pathways. The major role of miRNAs in pulmonary arterial remodeling is still relatively unknown although research data is emerging apace. Modulation of miRNAs represents a possible therapeutic target for altering the remodeling phenotype in the pulmonary vasculature. This review will focus on the role of miRNAs in regulating smooth muscle and endothelial cell phenotypes and their influence on pulmonary remodeling in the setting of PAH

Foraging Behavior and Success of a Mesopelagic Predator in the Northeast Pacific Ocean: Insights from a Data-Rich Species, the Northern Elephant Seal

The mesopelagic zone of the northeast Pacific Ocean is an important foraging habitat for many predators, yet few studies have addressed the factors driving basin-scale predator distributions or inter-annual variability in foraging and breeding success. Understanding these processes is critical to reveal how conditions at sea cascade to population-level effects. To begin addressing these challenging questions, we collected diving, tracking, foraging success, and natality data for 297 adult female northern elephant seal migrations from 2004 to 2010. During the longer post-molting migration, individual energy gain rates were significant predictors of pregnancy. At sea, seals focused their foraging effort along a narrow band corresponding to the boundary between the sub-arctic and sub-tropical gyres. In contrast to shallow-diving predators, elephant seals target the gyre-gyre boundary throughout the year rather than follow the southward winter migration of surface features, such as the Transition Zone Chlorophyll Front. We also assessed the impact of added transit costs by studying seals at a colony near the southern extent of the species’ range, 1,150 km to the south. A much larger proportion of seals foraged locally, implying plasticity in foraging strategies and possibly prey type. While these findings are derived from a single species, the results may provide insight to the foraging patterns of many other meso-pelagic predators in the northeast Pacific Ocean