Alien Registration- Mccutcheon, Allison B. (Houlton, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/34764/thumbnail.jp

Vagina

Writings and artwork promoting vaginal health and awareness.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/feminist_zines/1004/thumbnail.jp

Origin and Examination of a Leafhopper Facultative Endosymbiont

Eukaryotes engage in intimate interactions with microbes that range in age and type of association. Although many conspicuous examples of ancient insect associates are studied (e.g., Buchneraaphidicola), fewer examples of younger associations are known. Here, we further characterize a recently evolved bacterial endosymbiont of the leafhopper Euscelidius variegatus (Hemiptera, Cicadellidae), called BEV. We found that BEV, continuously maintained in E. variegatus hosts at UC Berkeley since 1984, is vertically transmitted with high fidelity. Unlike many vertically transmitted, ancient endosymbioses, the BEV–E. variegatus association is not obligate for either partner, and BEV can be cultivated axenically. Sufficient BEV colonies were grown and harvested to estimate its genome size and provide a partial survey of the genome sequence. The BEV chromosome is about 3.8 Mbp, and there is evidence for an extrachromosomal element roughly 53 kb in size (e.g., prophage or plasmid). We sequenced 438 kb of unique short-insert clones, representing about 12% of the BEV genome. Nearly half of the gene fragments were similar to mobile DNA, including 15 distinct types of insertion sequences (IS). Analyses revealed that BEV not only shares virulence genes with plant pathogens, but also is closely related to the plant pathogenic genera Dickeya, Pectobacterium, and Brenneria. However, the slightly reduced genome size, abundance of mobile DNA, fastidious growth in culture, and efficient vertical transmission suggest that symbiosis with E. variegatus has had a significant impact on genome evolution in BEV

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

Ethnopharmacology of western North American plants with special focus on the genus Artemisia L.

This thesis is comprised of a series of investigations into the pharmacological activities of plants from western North America. In the first phase of the research, one hundred methanolic plant extracts were screened for: antibiotic, antifungal, anti-mycobacterial and antiviral activity. Eighty-nine of these extracts exhibited antibiotic activity and eighty-one exhibited antifungal activity. Nineteen extracts also showed anti-mycobacterial activity. There was a correlation (0.945) between anti-mycobacterial activity and strong activity against the fast growing, non-pathogenic Mycobacterium phlei which was used in the antibiotic screening. Twelve extracts were each active against one of the seven viruses screened. Several interesting observations arose from the analyses of the phase one screening results. There was a significant correlation between anti-mycobacterial activity and the specific usage of the plants to treat tuberculosis. Significantly higher percentages of active plants were found among those categorized as potential antibiotics and antifungals based on their traditional usage. There appeared to be correlations between activity and the taxa to which the active plants belonged and the habitats they were collected from. The phase two screening of one hundred eighty-five extracts was designed to further test these apparent correlations. In these phase two screenings, 77% of the extracts exhibited antibiotic activity. Seventy-five percent (75%) of the plants which were used medicinally were active while only 22% of the non-medicinal plants were active. Of the plants which were classified as potential antibiotics based on their traditional uses, 91% were active. The taxa with the highest percentage of active extracts were the Filicinae and the Gymnospermae. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of the extracts exhibited significant activity in the phase two antifungal screening. The taxon with the largest percentage of active extracts was the Gymnospermae (100% active). There was a great difference in the percentage of active extracts among the traditional plant medicines (32% active) compared to the non-medicinal plants (5% active). Seventy-five percent (75%) of the plants classified as potential antifungals based on their traditional uses were found to have significant activity. Throughout these phase one and two screenings, the members of the genus Artemisia L. assayed were particularity noteworthy for their broad spectrum of activity. Therefore, this genus was chosen for more extensive research on the anti-infectious properties of 74 additional samples from 30 Artemisa taxa. All of the Artemisia samples exhibited antibiotic and antifungal activity. In the antiviral assays, a total of 18 extracts inhibited the virally induced cytopathic effects. A total of twenty-nine extracts exhibited activity in the anti-mycobacterial assays. There were representative samples from each of the four Artemisia subgenera among the active extracts in each of the four screens, although it was noted that the extracts with the strongest activity in the antimycobacterial assays were all members of the subgenera Dracunculus and Tridentatae. In all of the Artemisia assays, there was as much variation in activity among samples of a taxa (species or subspecies) as there was between taxa. Samples of the Artemisia species which were most frequently cited in the ethnobotanical literature (A. dracunculus, A. frigida, A. ludoviciana and A. tridentata) were among the most active extracts in all of the assays.Science, Faculty ofBotany, Department ofGraduat

Alien Registration- Mccutcheon, Allison B. (Houlton, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/34764/thumbnail.jp