A global assessment of parasite diversity in galaxiid fishes

Free-living species often receive greater conservation attention than the parasites they support, with parasite conservation often being hindered by a lack of parasite biodiversity knowl edge. This study aimed to determine the current state of knowledge regarding parasites of the Southern Hemisphere freshwater fish family Galaxiidae, in order to identify knowledge gaps to focus future research attention. Specifically, we assessed how galaxiid–parasite knowledge differs among geographic regions in relation to research effort (i.e., number of studies or fish individuals examined, extent of tissue examination, taxonomic resolution), in addition to ecological traits known to influ ence parasite richness. To date, ~50% of galaxiid species have been examined for parasites, though the majority of studies have focused on single parasite taxa rather than assessing the full diversity of macro- and microparasites. The highest number of parasites were observed from Argentinean galaxiids, and studies in all geographic regions were biased towards the highly abundant and most widely distributed galaxiid species, Galaxias maculatus. Parasite diversity generally increased with the number of studies and individual fish examined, however studies which examined parasites from all body tissues could overcome the effects of low study effort. In order to promote further understanding of galaxiid–parasite biodiversity, we provide a series of recommendations, including the use of molecular techniques to verify parasite identity, and highlight the future roles both fish biologists and parasitologists can plapublishedVersio

The Midwest Feeds Consortium: Final Report

The strategic intent of the Midwest Feeds Consortium (MFC) was to decrease the dependence of the U.S. agriculture and aquaculture feed industries on imported marine protein meals and to increase the utilization and export of plant and animal coproduct protein meals to the international aquaculture industry. Replacement of marine meals in feeds traditionally dependent on these protein sources with grains, oilseed, and animal coproduct protein meals common to the U.S. Midwest would be accomplished through innovative, value-added ingredient processing technology. Through systematic, integrated, industry-directed research to develop ingredient composition, quality, digestibility, and economic values, the U.S. and international feed industry would then be able to rapidly incorporate the findings into their ingredient and equipment-purchasing decisions. The work described herein drew heavily upon recommendations developed by the MFC workshop, which was the first United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)-funded undertaking by the Consortium. The priority activities were industry linkages, ingredient processing, ingredient testing, and technology transfer. After the initial workshop, the Consortium underwent several changes in management structure, participants, and directions, which slowed progress considerably. In May 1997, a focus meeting was held in Des Moines, Iowa, between principal Consortium participants to modify priorities and reestablish timelines. The project reemerged with objectives designed to meet the priority issues of the project

A global assessment of parasite diversity in galaxiid fishes

Free-living species often receive greater conservation attention than the parasites they support, with parasite conservation often being hindered by a lack of parasite biodiversity knowledge. This study aimed to determine the current state of knowledge regarding parasites of the Southern Hemisphere freshwater fish family Galaxiidae, in order to identify knowledge gaps to focus future research attention. Specifically, we assessed how galaxiid–parasite knowledge differs among geographic regions in relation to research effort (i.e., number of studies or fish individuals examined, extent of tissue examination, taxonomic resolution), in addition to ecological traits known to influence parasite richness. To date, ~50% of galaxiid species have been examined for parasites, though the majority of studies have focused on single parasite taxa rather than assessing the full diversity of macro-and microparasites. The highest number of parasites were observed from Argentinean galaxiids, and studies in all geographic regions were biased towards the highly abundant and most widely distributed galaxiid species, Galaxias maculatus. Parasite diversity generally increased with the number of studies and individual fish examined, however studies which examined parasites from all body tissues could overcome the effects of low study effort. In order to promote further understanding of galaxiid–parasite biodiversity, we provide a series of recommendations, including the use of molecular techniques to verify parasite identity, and highlight the future roles both fish biologists and parasitologists can play.Fil: Paterson, Rachel A.. Norwegian Institute For Nature Research.; NoruegaFil: Viozzi, Gustavo Pedro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universidad Bariloche. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; ArgentinaFil: Rauque Perez, Carlos Alejandro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universidad Bariloche. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; ArgentinaFil: Flores, Verónica Roxana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universidad Bariloche. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; ArgentinaFil: Poulin, Robert. University of Otago; Nueva Zeland

Patient involvement in clinical research: Why, when, and how

The development of a patient-centered approach to medicine is gradually allowing more patients to be involved in their own medical decisions. However, this change is not happening at the same rate in clinical research, where research generally continues to be carried out on patients, but not with patients. This work describes the why, when, and how of more active patient participation in the research process. Specific measures are proposed to improve patient involvement in 1) setting priorities, 2) study leadership and design, 3) improved access to clinical trials, 4) preparation and oversight of the information provided to participants, 5) post-study evaluation of the patient experience, and 6) the dissemination and application of results. In order to achieve these aims, the relative emphases on the ethical principles underlying research need to be changed. The current model based on the principle of beneficence must be left behind, and one that upholds the ethical principles of autonomy and non maleficence should be embraced. There is a need to improve the level of information that patients and society as a whole have on research objectives and processes; the goal is to promote the gradual emergence of the expert patient

Modelization of flow electrification in a polymer melt

Flow electrification of polymer melts is an important side effect of polymer processing. The studies dealing with this phenomenon are seldom and most of the scientific work has been focused on flow electrification of aqueous and insulating Newtonian liquids. From that prior art it is well established that the flow electrification in Newtonian liquids is a consequence of the formation of an ionic double layer. Convection of this layer induces the electrification of the liquid at the outlet of the pipe. In those models, the key parameters governing the flow electrification are thus the intrinsic electrical properties of the polymer and the flow characteristics. In this work, we reconsider the assumptions made previously and we propose a new approach to modelise the flow electrification in the particular case of non-Newtonian polymer materials in laminar flow conditions. We establish that, a key parameter for the electrification quantification in the polymer melt is the shape of the velocity profile. Additionally, in some cases, we show that a slip velocity at the polymer/die wall interface must be considered to describe accurately the electrification. As a consequence, we deduce that the slip velocity at the interface can be calculated by measuring the electrification: this work gives an alternative manner to measure the slip velocity during polymer flow

Hierarchical Shape Construction and Complexity for Slidable Polyominoes under Uniform External Forces

Advances in technology have given us the ability to create and manipulate robots for numerous applications at the molecular scale. At this size, fabrication tool limitations motivate the use of simple robots. The individual control of these simple objects can be infeasible. We investigate a model of robot motion planning, based on global external signals, known as the tilt model. Given a board and initial placement of polyominoes, the board may be tilted in any of the 4 cardinal directions, causing all slidable polyominoes to move maximally in the specified direction until blocked. We propose a new hierarchy of shapes and design a single configuration that is strongly universal for any w × h bounded shape within this hierarchy (it can be reconfigured to construct any w × h bounded shape in the hierarchy). This class of shapes constitutes the most general set of buildable shapes in the literature, with most previous work consisting of just the first-level of our hierarchy. We accompany this result with a O(n4 log n)-time algorithm for deciding if a given hole-free shape is a member of the hierarchy. For our second result, we resolve a long-standing open problem within the field: We show that deciding if a given position may be covered by a tile for a given initial board configuration is PSPACEcomplete, even when all movable pieces are 1 × 1 tiles with no glues. We achieve this result by a reduction from Non-deterministic Constraint Logic for a one-player unbounded game

A novel retinoblastoma therapy from genomic and epigenetic analyses.

Retinoblastoma is an aggressive childhood cancer of the developing retina that is initiated by the biallelic loss of RB1. Tumours progress very quickly following RB1 inactivation but the underlying mechanism is not known. Here we show that the retinoblastoma genome is stable, but that multiple cancer pathways can be epigenetically deregulated. To identify the mutations that cooperate with RB1 loss, we performed whole-genome sequencing of retinoblastomas. The overall mutational rate was very low; RB1 was the only known cancer gene mutated. We then evaluated the role of RB1 in genome stability and considered non-genetic mechanisms of cancer pathway deregulation. For example, the proto-oncogene SYK is upregulated in retinoblastoma and is required for tumour cell survival. Targeting SYK with a small-molecule inhibitor induced retinoblastoma tumour cell death in vitro and in vivo. Thus, retinoblastomas may develop quickly as a result of the epigenetic deregulation of key cancer pathways as a direct or indirect result of RB1 loss

High star formation rates as the origin of turbulence in early and modern disk galaxies

High spatial and spectral resolution observations of star formation and kinematics in early galaxies have shown that two-thirds are massive rotating disk galaxies with the remainder being less massive non-rotating objects. The line of sight averaged velocity dispersions are typically five times higher than in today's disk galaxies. This has suggested that gravitationally-unstable, gas-rich disks in the early Universe are fuelled by cold, dense accreting gas flowing along cosmic filaments and penetrating hot galactic gas halos. However these accreting flows have not been observed, and cosmic accretion cannot power the observed level of turbulence. Here we report on a new sample of rare high-velocity-dispersion disk galaxies we have discovered in the nearby Universe where cold accretion is unlikely to drive their high star-formation rates. We find that the velocity dispersion is most fundamentally correlated with their star-formation rates, and not their mass nor gas fraction, which leads to a new picture where star formation itself is the energetic driver of galaxy disk turbulence at all cosmic epochs.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, Supplimentary Info available at: http://pulsar.swin.edu.au/~agreen/nature/sigma_mean_arXiv.pdf. Accepted for publication in Natur

ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profile: Pospiviroidae

[EN] Members of the family Pospiviroidae have single-stranded circular RNA genomes that adopt a rod-like or a quasi-rod-like conformation. These genomes contain a central conserved region that is involved in replication in the nucleus through an asymmetric RNA-RNA rolling-circle mechanism. Members of the family Pospiviroidae lack the hammerhead ribozymes that are typical of viroids classified in the family Avsunviroidae. The family Pospiviroidae includes the genera Apscaviroid, Cocadviroid, Coleviroid, Hostuviroid and Pospiviroid, with >25 species. This is a summary of the ICTV Report on the family Pospiviroidae, which is available at ictv.global/report/pospiviroidae.Production of this summary, the online chapter, and associated resources was funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust (WT108418AIA).Di Serio, F.; Owens, RA.; Li, S.; Matousek, J.; Pallás Benet, V.; Randles, JW.; Sano, T.... (2021). ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profile: Pospiviroidae. Journal of General Virology. 102(2):1-2. https://doi.org/10.1099/jgv.0.00154312102