Plants Attract Parasitic Wasps to Defend Themselves against Insect Pests by Releasing Hexenol

Plant volatiles play an important role in defending plants against insect attacks by attracting their natural enemies. For example, green leaf volatiles (GLVs) and terpenoids emitted from herbivore-damaged plants were found to be important in the host location of parasitic wasps. However, evidence of the functional roles and mechanisms of these semio-chemicals from a system of multiple plants in prey location by the parasitoid is limited. Little is known about the potential evolutionary trends between herbivore-induced host plant volatiles and the host location of their parasitoids.. Specifically, we found that volatile profiles from healthy plants revealed a partly phylogenetic signal, while the inducible compounds of the infested-plants did not result from the fact that the induced plant volatiles dominate most of the volatile blends of the host and non-host plants of the leafminer pests. We further show that the parasitoids are capable of distinguishing the damaged host plant from the non-host plant of the leafminers.Our results suggest that, as the most passive scenario of plant involvement, leafminers and mechanical damages evoke similar semio-chemicals. Using ubiquitous compounds, such as hexenol, for host location by general parasitoids could be an adaptation of the most conservative evolution of tritrophic interaction. Although for this, other compounds may be used to improve the precision of the host location by the parasitoids

Azimuthal Charged-Particle Correlations and Possible Local Strong Parity Violation

Parity-odd domains, corresponding to nontrivial topological solutions of the QCD vacuum, might be created during relativistic heavy-ion collisions. These domains are predicted to lead to charge separation of quarks along the system’s orbital momentum axis. We investigate a three-particle azimuthal correlator which is a P even observable, but directly sensitive to the charge separation effect. We report measurements of charged hadrons near center-of-mass rapidity with this observable in Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at √sNN=200  GeV using the STAR detector. A signal consistent with several expectations from the theory is detected. We discuss possible contributions from other effects that are not related to parity violation

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

Event-plane-dependent dihadron correlations with harmonic v(n) subtraction in Au plus Au collisions at v root sNN=200 GeV

STAR measurements of dihadron azimuthal correlations (Lambda phi) are reported in midcentral (20-60%) Au + Au collisions at v root sNN = 200 GeV as a function of the trigger particle's azimuthal angle relative to the event plane, phi(s) = | phi(1) -psi(EP)|. The elliptic (v(2)), triangular (v(3)), and quadratic (v(4)) flow harmonic backgrounds are subtracted using the zero yield at mini + Au collisions. It is found that a finite near-side (| Delta phi | pi/2) correlation shows a modification from d+ Au data, varying with fs. The modification may be a consequence of path-length-dependent jet quenching and may lead to a better understanding of high-density QCD