42 research outputs found

    Biosecurity and Yield Improvement Technologies Are Strategic Complements in the Fight against Food Insecurity

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    The delivery of food security via continued crop yield improvement alone is not an effective food security strategy, and must be supported by pre- and post-border biosecurity policies to guard against perverse outcomes. In the wake of the green revolution, yield gains have been in steady decline, while post-harvest crop losses have increased as a result of insufficiently resourced and uncoordinated efforts to control spoilage throughout global transport and storage networks. This paper focuses on the role that biosecurity is set to play in future food security by preventing both pre- and post-harvest losses, thereby protecting crop yield. We model biosecurity as a food security technology that may complement conventional yield improvement policies if the gains in global farm profits are sufficient to offset the costs of implementation and maintenance. Using phytosanitary measures that slow global spread of the Ug99 strain of wheat stem rust as an example of pre-border biosecurity risk mitigation and combining it with post-border surveillance and invasive alien species control efforts, we estimate global farm profitability may be improved by over US$4.5 billion per annum

    Polygenic Risk Scores for Prediction of Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Subtypes.

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    Stratification of women according to their risk of breast cancer based on polygenic risk scores (PRSs) could improve screening and prevention strategies. Our aim was to develop PRSs, optimized for prediction of estrogen receptor (ER)-specific disease, from the largest available genome-wide association dataset and to empirically validate the PRSs in prospective studies. The development dataset comprised 94,075 case subjects and 75,017 control subjects of European ancestry from 69 studies, divided into training and validation sets. Samples were genotyped using genome-wide arrays, and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were selected by stepwise regression or lasso penalized regression. The best performing PRSs were validated in an independent test set comprising 11,428 case subjects and 18,323 control subjects from 10 prospective studies and 190,040 women from UK Biobank (3,215 incident breast cancers). For the best PRSs (313 SNPs), the odds ratio for overall disease per 1 standard deviation in ten prospective studies was 1.61 (95%CI: 1.57-1.65) with area under receiver-operator curve (AUC) = 0.630 (95%CI: 0.628-0.651). The lifetime risk of overall breast cancer in the top centile of the PRSs was 32.6%. Compared with women in the middle quintile, those in the highest 1% of risk had 4.37- and 2.78-fold risks, and those in the lowest 1% of risk had 0.16- and 0.27-fold risks, of developing ER-positive and ER-negative disease, respectively. Goodness-of-fit tests indicated that this PRS was well calibrated and predicts disease risk accurately in the tails of the distribution. This PRS is a powerful and reliable predictor of breast cancer risk that may improve breast cancer prevention programs

    Picosecond self-diffusion in ethanol–water mixtures

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    We report the self-diffusion in ethanol-water mixtures as a function of the water-ethanol ratio measured at different temperatures using quasi-elastic neutron spectroscopy (QENS). For our protiated samples, QENS is mainly sensitive to the dominant ensemble averaged incoherent scattering from the hydrogen atoms of the liquid mixtures. The energy range and resolution render our experiment sensitive to the picosecond time scale and nanometer length scale. These observation scales complement different scales accessible by nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. Subsequent to testing different models, we find that a simple jump diffusion model averaging over both types of molecules, water and ethanol, best fits our data

    Electromagnetic susceptibility anisotropy and its importance for paramagnetic NMR and optical spectroscopy in lanthanide coordination chemistry

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    The importance of the directional dependence of magnetic susceptibility in magnetic resonance and of electric susceptibility in the optical spectroscopy of lanthanide coordination complexes is assessed. A body of more reliable shift, relaxation and optical emission data is emerging for well-defined isostructural series of complexes, allowing detailed comparative analyses to be undertaken. Such work is highlighting the limitations of the current NMR shift and relaxation theories, as well as emphasising the absence of a compelling theoretical framework to explain optical emission phenomena

    Top-Beiträge aus unseren Schwesterzeitschriften

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    Lighting up focal adhesion organization: With recent advances in super-resolution microscopy, in particular with the emergence of single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM), it has become possible to probe the spatial and temporal organization of focal adhesions at unprecedented resolution. Here, the applications of SMLM to focal adhesion structure and dynamics, as well as recent improvements in SMLM instrumentation and analysis are discussed
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