Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time, and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space. While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes, vast areas of the tropics remain understudied. In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity, but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases. To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge, it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

Report on a visceral and cutaneous leishmaniases focus in the town of Jequié, State of Bahia, Brazil

Submitted by Ana Maria Fiscina Sampaio ([email protected]) on 2012-10-30T20:14:26Z No. of bitstreams: 1 A.J.Oliveira dos Santos Report on a visceral....pdf: 126541 bytes, checksum: 38044be3cdc8a50c28299f90c1dae838 (MD5)Made available in DSpace on 2012-10-30T20:14:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 A.J.Oliveira dos Santos Report on a visceral....pdf: 126541 bytes, checksum: 38044be3cdc8a50c28299f90c1dae838 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1993Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. Centro de Pesquisas Gonçalo Moniz. Salvador, BA, BrasilSecretaria de Saúde do Estado da Bahia. Jequié, BA, BrazilFundação Oswaldo Cruz. Centro de Pesquisas Gonçalo Moniz. Salvador, BA, BrasilFundação Oswaldo Cruz. Centro de Pesquisas Gonçalo Moniz. Salvador, BA, Brasi

Procyclin Null Mutants of Trypanosoma brucei Express Free Glycosylphosphatidylinositols on Their Surface

Procyclins are abundant, glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored proteins on the surface of procyclic (insect) form trypanosomes. To investigate whether trypanosomes are able to survive without a procyclin coat, all four procyclin genes were deleted sequentially. Bloodstream forms of the null mutant exhibited no detectable phenotype and were able to differentiate to procyclic forms. Initially, differentiated null mutant cells were barely able to grow, but after an adaptation period of 2 mo in culture they proliferated at the same rate as wild-type trypanosomes. Analysis of these culture-adapted null mutants revealed that they were covered by free GPIs. These were closely related to the mature procyclin anchor in structure and were expressed on the surface in numbers comparable with that of procyclin in wild-type cells. However, free GPIs were smaller than the procyclin anchor, indicative of a lower number of poly-N-acetyllactosamine repeats, and a proportion contained diacylphosphatidic acid. Free GPIs are also expressed by wild-type cells, although to a lesser extent. These have been overlooked in the past because they partition in a solvent fraction (chloroform/water/methanol) that is normally discarded when GPI-anchored proteins are purified