Effect of Modification of the NI Artificial Diet on the Biological Fitness Parameters of Mass Reared Western Tarnished Plant Bug, Lygus hesperus

The NI artificial diet is the only known successful diet for mass rearing the western tarnished plant bug, Lygus hesperus Knight (Hemiptera: Miridae). This diet has been used for more than a decade. However, because it contains cooked chicken egg, and thus requires laborious preparation (Cohen 2000), this diet is difficult to use. Three modifications (D1, D2, D3) of the NI diet were investigated in hopes of developing a more easily prepared diet that avoids the cooked egg and improves mass fitness parameters of L. hesperus. The modified D3 diet, containing autoclaved chicken egg yolk based component, had the highest egg/cage/day production (13120 ± 812 SE). This was significantly greater than diets D1, containing autoclaved dry chicken egg yolk based component (9027 ± 811 SE), D2, containing autoclaved chicken egg white based component (8311 ± 628 SE), and NI, which contained autoclaved chicken egg yolk + cooked egg diet (7890 ± 761 SE). Significant differences were observed in the weights of all developmental stages except for eggs and first instar nymphs. Higher rates of fertility, hatchability, and low mortality in nymphs during the first instar were also obtained in the modified D3 diet. The results clearly indicated that the D3 diet provided an opportunity to significantly reduce rearing cost by avoiding time-consuming issues with preparation of a cooked egg diet. This should result in an increase in production capacity and a reduction in production costs

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

First Microsatellites From \u3ci\u3eSpodoptera frugiperda\u3c/i\u3e (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) and Their Potential Use for Population Genetics

This is the first report of sequence-specific microsatellite markers (simple sequence repeats [SSRs]) of fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E. Smith) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), an economically important pest of crops on the Americas.Weisolated 192 microsatellite markers by using pyrosequencing and screened 15 individuals from eight isofamilies collected from three geographical areas: Puerto Rico (PR), Texas (TX), and Mississippi (MS). Isofamilies resistant to Cry toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Berliner) (Bacillales: Bacillaceae) also were included. Cluster analysis was performed to determine the potential use of these SSRs in discriminating populations, and colonies were grouped with a reliability of 100% estimated by bootstrap. In this analysis, colonies from TX grouped away from those from PR, but the two MS isofamilies grouped with TX and PR separately. Genetic distance within isofamilies ranged between 0.22 and 0.56, and the minimum distance between isofamilies was 0.83. Unique pattern informative combination (UPIC) scores were calculated, and the 80 SSR markers that had UPIC scores of≥1 are listed according to their discriminating potential. UPIC scores allow reducing costs by choosing fewer and highly informative markers for future studies. From the best 125 markers, 103 had a maximum of two alleles per sample, making them ideal candidates for population genetic studies. BLAST screening of the sequences points to potential biological meaning of marker polymorphisms. The percentage of alleles shared by the three geographic areas was 14%. The markers reported will signifcantly enrich the pool of molecular markers available for S. frugiperda. In addition, they could be used for monitoring migration of populations, in the development of biocontrol agents and for management practices in general

Susceptibility of Isofamilies of \u3ci\u3eSpodoptera frugiperda\u3c/i\u3e (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) to Cry1Ac and Cry1Fa Proteins of \u3ci\u3eBacillus thuringiensis\u3c/i\u3e

The fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (J. E. Smith), is one of the most important insect pests on the American continent. Its control has relied primarily on multiple applications of insecticides that can amount to 1,000 g of active ingredient per hectare on some of approximately 30 crops the insect damages. The use of genetically engineered crops that express Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) Berliner toxins, Bt-corn, Zea mays L.; and Bt-cotton, Gossypium hirsutum L.; are other ways to control this insect. However, fall armyworm is one of the Lepidoptera species least susceptible to Bt proteins, and a case of high tolerance to Bt-corn has already being reported. We found the susceptibility to Cry1 Ac and Cry1 Fa proteins of Bt in 133 isofamilies from five regions of three countries was similar to the susceptibility of two Bt-susceptible laboratory colonies to these proteins. Four isofamilies from Puerto Rico were very tolerant to Cry1 Fa and not so tolerant to Cry1Ac. Two of the four isofamilies were backcrossed with a Bt-susceptible laboratory colony and their progeny was as susceptible to both Bt proteins as was the Bt-susceptible colony, indicating that resistance to Bt is a recessive trait

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press