Mealybug (Hemiptera: Pseudococcidae) species associated with cacao mild mosaic virus and evidence of virus acquisition

Theobroma cacao is affected by viruses on every continent where the crop is cultivated, with the most well-known ones belonging to the Badnavirus genus. One of these, cacao mild mosaic virus (CaMMV), is present in the Americas, and is transmitted by several species of Pseudococcidae (mealybugs). To determine which species are associated with virus-affected cacao plants in North America, and to assess their potential as vectors, mealybugs (n = 166) were collected from infected trees in Florida, and identified using COI, ITS2, and 28S markers. The species present were Pseudococcus jackbeardsleyi (38%; n = 63), Maconellicoccus hirsutus (34.3%; n = 57), Pseudococcus comstocki (15.7%; n = 26), and Ferrisia virgata (12%; n = 20). Virus acquisition was assessed by testing mealybug DNA (0.8 ng) using a nested PCR that amplified a 500 bp fragment of the movement protein–coat protein region of CaMMV. Virus sequences were obtained from 34.6 to 43.1% of the insects tested; however, acquisition did not differ among species, X2 (3, N = 166) = 0.56, p < 0.91. This study identified two new mealybug species, P. jackbeardsleyi and M. hirsutus, as potential vectors of CaMMV. This information is essential for understanding the infection cycle of CaMMV and developing effective management strategies

VENTANAS DEL NUBLO [Material gráfico]

Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 201

Soluble factors regulated by epithelial-mesenchymal transition mediate tumour angiogenesis and myeloid cell recruitment.

peer reviewedEpithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) programs provide cancer cells with invasive and survival capacities that might favor metastatic dissemination. Whilst signaling cascades triggering EMT have been extensively studied, the impact of EMT on the crosstalk between tumor cells and the tumor microenvironment remains elusive. We aimed to identify EMT-regulated soluble factors that facilitate the recruitment of host cells in the tumor. Our findings indicate that EMT phenotypes relate to the induction of a panel of secreted mediators, namely IL-8, IL-6, sICAM-1, PAI-1 and GM-CSF, and implicate the EMT-transcription factor Snail as a regulator of this process. We further show that EMT-derived soluble factors are pro-angiogenic in vivo (in the mouse ear sponge assay), ex vivo (in the rat aortic ring assay) and in vitro (in a chemotaxis assay). Additionally, conditioned medium from EMT-positive cells stimulates the recruitment of myeloid cells. In a bank of 40 triple-negative breast cancers, tumors presenting features of EMT were significantly more angiogenic and infiltrated by a higher quantity of myeloid cells compared to tumors with little or no EMT. Taken together, our results show that EMT programs trigger the expression of soluble mediators in cancer cells that stimulate angiogenesis and recruit myeloid cells in vivo, which might in turn favor cancer spread

Understanding private forest owners’ conceptualisation of forest management : Evidence from a survey in seven European countries

Acknowledgements This paper is written as a part of Cost Action FP1201, Forest Land Ownership Changes in Europe: Significance for Management and Policy (FACESMAP). Laura Bouriaud thanks the Romanian Agency UEFISCDI for helping finance this research through the project PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-0017. Philippe Deuffic and Elodie Brahic thank Centre National de la Propriete Forestiere (CNPF). The authors are also grateful to the people involved in data collection in the seven European countries. The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments that helped to improve the article.Peer reviewedPostprin

Towards a Harmonised Total Diet Study Approach: a guidance document:joint guidance of EFSA, FAO and WHO

A Total Diet Study (TDS) can be a complementary approach to traditional monitoring and surveillance programs, which instead of focusing on compliance is designed to provide a solid basis for calculating population dietary exposure and assessing potential impact on public health. A TDS includes the selection of foods based on food consumption data to represent a large portion of a typical diet, their preparation to food as consumed and the subsequent pooling of related foods before analysis. There is already a wealth of international TDS data available, but to better enable comparisons it is important that methods are harmonised to the extent possible. The Working Group of experts provides a definition of the TDS approach highlighting its inherent value; it gives guidance for a harmonised methodology starting from the TDS planning to the collection of analytical results, exposure assessment calculation and communication of TDS results; and it proposes a general approach to facilitate the use of TDS information at international level. A TDS can be used for screening purposes or as a more refined exposure assessment tool. It provides background concentration and exposure levels of chemical substances in a range of representative foods prepared for consumption, while monitoring and surveillance programs can better capture highly contaminated individual food items. Their complementarities would allow the identification of the relative importance of individual sources of chemical substances from the whole diet. In conclusion, a TDS is considered to be a good complement to existing food monitoring or surveillance programs to estimate population dietary exposure to beneficial and harmful chemical substances across the entire diet. Harmonising the TDS methodology will enhance the value of these programs by improving the comparability at international level

Collective atom-cavity coupling and nonlinear dynamics with atoms with multilevel ground states

We investigate experimentally and theoretically the collective coupling between atoms with multilevel ground-state manifolds and an optical cavity mode. In our setup the cavity field optically pumps populations among the ground states. The ensuing dynamics can be conveniently described by means of an effective dynamical atom-cavity coupling strength that depends on the occupation of the individual states and their coupling strengths with the cavity mode. This leads to a dynamical backaction of the atomic populations on the atom-cavity coupling strength which results in a nonexponential relaxation dynamics. We experimentally observe this effect with laser-cooled 87Rb atoms, for which we monitor the collective normal-mode splitting in real time. Our results show that the multilevel structure of electronic ground states can significantly alter the relaxation behavior in atom-cavity settings as compared to ensembles of two-level atoms

From FreEM to D'AlemBERT: a Large Corpus and a Language Model for Early Modern French

8 pages, 2 figures, 4 tablesInternational audienceLanguage models for historical states of language are becoming increasingly important to allow the optimal digitisation and analysis of old textual sources. Because these historical states are at the same time more complex to process and more scarce in the corpora available, specific efforts are necessary to train natural language processing (NLP) tools adapted to the data. In this paper, we present our efforts to develop NLP tools for Early Modern French (historical French from the 16th to the 18th centuries). We present the FreEMmax corpus of Early Modern French and D'AlemBERT, a RoBERTa-based language model trained on FreEMmax. We evaluate the usefulness of D'AlemBERT by fine-tuning it on a part-of-speech tagging task, outperforming previous work on the test set. Importantly, we find evidence for the transfer learning capacity of the language model, since its performance on lesser-resourced time periods appears to have been boosted by the more resourced ones. We release D'AlemBERT and the open-sourced subpart of the FreEMmax corpus