Politics and the resilience of ecosystem services

© Cambridge University Press 2015Decisions around which ecosystem services are the focus for resilience-building initiatives, and ensuring that these choices do not lead to undesirable lock-in effects that compromise the possibility for future adaptation and change, are far from ..

Phylogeography Study of Ammodytes personatus in Northwestern Pacific: Pleistocene Isolation, Temperature and Current Conducted Secondary Contact

To assess the role of historical process and contemporary factors in shaping population structures in Northwestern Pacific, mitochondrial control region sequences were analyzed to characterize the phylogeography and population structure of the Japanese sand lance Ammodytes personatus. A total of 429 individuals sampled from 17 populations through the species' range are sequenced. Two distinct lineages are detected, which might have been divergent in the Sea of Japan and Pacific costal waters of Japanese Island, during the low sea level. Significant genetic structure is revealed between the Kuroshio and Oyashio Currents. However, significant genetic structure is also detected in the Sea of Japan, contracting expected homogenization hypothesis in Tsushima Current. The haplotype frequency of lineages in both sides of Japanese Island and significant genetic structure between north and south groups revealed that the distribution of lineage B and north group were highly limited by the annual sea temperature. The lack of lineage B in Qingdao population with low sea temperature reflects the sea temperature barrier. Lack of genetic structure in the south group and north group populations indicated that ocean currents within groups facilitated the dispersal of A. personatus

Plasmodesmal receptor-like kinases identified through analysis of rice cell wall extracted proteins

In plants, plasmodesmata (PD) are intercellular channels that function in both metabolite exchange and the transport of proteins and RNAs. Currently, many of the PD structural and regulatory components remain to be elucidated. Receptor-like kinases (RLKs) belonging to a notably expanded protein family in plants compared to the animal kingdom have been shown to play important roles in plant growth, development, pathogen resistance, and cell death. In this study, cell biological approaches were used to identify potential PD-associated RLK proteins among proteins contained within cell walls isolated from rice callus cultured cells. A total of 15 rice RLKs were investigated to determine their subcellular localization, using an Agrobacterium-mediated transient expression system. Of these six PD-associated RLKs were identified based on their co-localization with a viral movement protein that served as a PD marker, plasmolysis experiments, and subcellular localization at points of wall contact between spongy mesophyll cells. These findings suggest potential PD functions in apoplasmic signaling in response to environmental stimuli and developmental inputs

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference

Toward principles for enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services

AlgemeenStellenbosse Instituut vir Gevorderde Navorsing (SIGNA)Please help us populate SUNScholar with the post print version of this article. It can be e-mailed to: [email protected]