Trans‐generational parasite protection associated with paternal diet

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110089/1/jane12289.pd

Elevated atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide reduce monarch tolerance and increase parasite virulence by altering the medicinal properties of milkweeds

Hosts combat their parasites using mechanisms of resistance and tolerance, which together determine parasite virulence. Environmental factors, including diet, mediate the impact of parasites on hosts, with diet providing nutritional and medicinal properties. Here, we present the first evidence that ongoing environmental change decreases host tolerance and increases parasite virulence through a loss of dietary medicinal quality. Monarch butterflies use dietary toxins (cardenolides) to reduce the deleterious impacts of a protozoan parasite. We fed monarch larvae foliage from four milkweed species grown under either elevated or ambient CO2, and measured changes in resistance, tolerance, and virulence. The most high‐cardenolide milkweed species lost its medicinal properties under elevated CO2; monarch tolerance to infection decreased, and parasite virulence increased. Declines in medicinal quality were associated with declines in foliar concentrations of lipophilic cardenolides. Our results emphasize that global environmental change may influence parasite–host interactions through changes in the medicinal properties of plants.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/1/ele13101-sup-0003-TableS1.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/2/ele13101-sup-0007-TableS5.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/3/ele13101-sup-0006-TableS4.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/4/ele13101.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/5/ele13101_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/6/ele13101-sup-0004-TableS2.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/7/ele13101-sup-0009-AppendixS1.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/8/ele13101-sup-0005-TableS3.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/9/ele13101-sup-0002-FigS2.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/10/ele13101-sup-0008-TableS6.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145415/11/ele13101-sup-0001-FigS1.pd

Investigating the Impact of Stakeholder Management on the Implementation of a Public Access Project: The Case of Smart Cape

This paper reports on a study that uses the Stakeholder Management Theory to analyse the implementation of a pilot phase of public access project, the Smart Cape Access Initiative, a Cape Town City Council e-government initiative. Data for the study was gathered through in-depth interviews with individuals who were involved, influenced and were affected by the implementation of the pilot project. The study identified the major stakeholders of the project and assessed their importance and influence on the project. Numerous interactions between the stakeholders were identified. It was further noted that no formal stakeholder management was undertaken at the identification and planning stages of the project lifecycle. In addition, results showed that there were missed opportunities for appropriate stakeholder management throughout the project. This study offers insights into agencies involved in planning and running public access projects

Phytochemical changes in milkweed induced by elevated CO2 alter wing morphology but not toxin sequestration in monarch butterflies

Environmental change has the potential to influence trophic interactions by altering the defensive phenotype of prey.Here, we examine the effects of a pervasive environmental change driver, elevated atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (eCO2), on toxin sequestration and flight morphology of a specialist herbivore.We fed monarch butterfly larvae, Danaus plexippus, foliage from four milkweed, Asclepias, species of varying chemical defence profiles grown under either ambient or eCO2. We also infected a subset of these herbivores with a protozoan parasite, Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, to understand how infection and environmental change combine to alter herbivore defences. We measured changes in phytochemistry induced by eCO2 and assessed cardenolide, toxic steroid, sequestration and wing morphology of butterflies.Monarchs compensated for lower plant cardenolide concentrations under eCO2 by increasing cardenolide sequestration rate, maintaining similar cardenolide composition and concentrations in their wings under both CO2 treatments. We suggest that these increases in sequestration rate are a by‐product of compensatory feeding aimed at maintaining a nutritional target in response to declining dietary quality under eCO2.Monarch wings were more suitable for sustained flight (more elongated) when reared on plants grown under eCO2 or when reared on Asclepias syriaca or Asclepias incarnata rather than on Asclepias curassavica or Asclepias speciosa. Parasite infection engendered wings less suitable for sustained flight (wings became rounder) on three of four milkweed species. Wing loading (associated with powered flight) was higher on A. syriaca than on other milkweeds, whereas wing density was lower on A. curassavica. Monarchs that fed on high cardenolide milkweed developed rounder, thinner wings, which are less efficient at gliding flight.Ingesting foliage from milkweed high in cardenolides may provide protection from enemies through sequestration yet come at a cost to monarchs manifested as lower quality flight phenotypes: rounder, thinner wings with lower wing loading values.Small changes in morphology may have important consequences for enemy evasion and migration success in many animals. Energetic costs associated with alterations in defence and morphology may, therefore, have important consequences for trophic interactions in a changing world.A plain language summary is available for this article.Plain Language SummaryPeer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/1/fec13270-sup-0006-TableS2.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/2/fec13270-sup-0003-FigS2.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/3/fec13270-sup-0004-FigS3.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/4/fec13270-sup-0002-FigS1.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/5/fec13270-sup-0008-TableS4.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/6/fec13270-sup-0005-TableS1.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/7/fec13270-sup-0009-AppendixS1.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/8/fec13270_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/9/fec13270-sup-0001-Summary.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/10/fec13270.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148239/11/fec13270-sup-0007-TableS3.pd

South Africa's Socio-Techno Divide: A critical disourse analysis of government speeches

This paper aims at contributing to the debate about the digital divide. We first focus on what to us constitutes the root problem: the typical approaches to the development of people through and by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). In contrast to governmental, political and technological attempts that focus almost exclusively on providing access to digital communication technologies, and expect "development" naturally to flow from that, we argue for a focus on "development" which is based on our notion of sustainable socio-economic development. We refer to "technocentric approaches" when the approaches propose and pursue technological interventions and show little regard for the actual needs of the people involved. At the other end of the scale, where the focus is on people and their developmental needs, we will speak of "sociocentric approaches". This presents us with a different divide, which we will refer to as the "socio-techno divide". We argue that it is this divide that has to be addressed - not the digital divide - and then present an analysis of the socio-techno divide. This analysis takes the form of two types of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), namely Foucauldian and Habermassian. The analysis of the South African government's rhetoric illuminates the issues that need our attention and indicates an agenda for constructive engagement about the use of ICT for development in the Third and Fourth worlds

Immune-mediated competition in rodent malaria is most likely caused by induced changes in innate immune clearance of merozoites

Malarial infections are often genetically diverse, leading to competitive interactions between parasites. A quantitative understanding of the competition between strains is essential to understand a wide range of issues, including the evolution of virulence and drug resistance. In this study, we use dynamical-model based Bayesian inference to investigate the cause of competitive suppression of an avirulent clone of Plasmodium chabaudi (AS) by a virulent clone (AJ) in immuno-deficient and competent mice. We test whether competitive suppression is caused by clone-specific differences in one or more of the following processes: adaptive immune clearance of merozoites and parasitised red blood cells (RBCs), background loss of merozoites and parasitised RBCs, RBC age preference, RBC infection rate, burst size, and within-RBC interference. These processes were parameterised in dynamical mathematical models and fitted to experimental data. We found that just one parameter μ, the ratio of background loss rate of merozoites to invasion rate of mature RBCs, needed to be clone-specific to predict the data. Interestingly, μ was found to be the same for both clones in single-clone infections, but different between the clones in mixed infections. The size of this difference was largest in immuno-competent mice and smallest in immuno-deficient mice. This explains why competitive suppression was alleviated in immuno-deficient mice. We found that competitive suppression acts early in infection, even before the day of peak parasitaemia. These results lead us to argue that the innate immune response clearing merozoites is the most likely, but not necessarily the only, mediator of competitive interactions between virulent and avirulent clones. Moreover, in mixed infections we predict there to be an interaction between the clones and the innate immune response which induces changes in the strength of its clearance of merozoites. What this interaction is unknown, but future refinement of the model, challenged with other datasets, may lead to its discovery

Feature learning for information-extreme classifier

The feature learning algorithm for information-extreme classifier by clustering of Fast Retina Keypoint binary descriptor, calculated for local features, and usage of spatial pyramid kernel for increasing noise immunity and informativeness of feature representation are considered. Proposed a method of parameters optimization for feature extractor and decision rules based on multi-level coarse features coding using information criterion and population-based search algorithm

Behavioural resistance against a protozoan parasite in the monarch butterfly

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89483/1/j.1365-2656.2011.01901.x.pd

Supercritical CO2 Extraction as a Tool to Isolate Anti-Inflammatory Sesquiterpene Lactones from Cichorium intybus L. Roots

Funding: This work was conducted under the “CHIC” project (H2020-NMBP-BIO-2017) with financial support received from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 760891.Cichorium intybus L. or chicory plants are a natural source of health-promoting compounds in the form of supplements such as inulin, as well as other bioactive compounds such as sesquiterpene lactones (SLs). After inulin extraction, chicory roots are considered waste, with most SLs not being harnessed. We developed and optimized a new strategy for SL extraction that can contribute to the conversion of chicory root waste into valuable products to be used in human health-promoting applications. In our work, rich fractions of SLs were recovered from chicory roots using supercritical CO2. A response surface methodology was used to optimize the process parameters (pressure, temperature, flow rate, and co-solvent percentage) for the extraction performance. The best operating conditions were achieved at 350 bar, 40 °C, and 10% EtOH as a co-solvent in a 15 g/min flow rate for 120 min. The extraction with supercritical CO2 revealed to be more selective for the SLs than the conventional solid-liquid extraction with ethyl acetate. In our work, 1.68% mass and a 0.09% sesquiterpenes yield extraction were obtained, including the recovery of two sesquiterpene lactones (8-deoxylactucin and 11β,13-dihydro-8-deoxylactucin), which, to the best of our knowledge, are not commercially available. A mixture of the abovementioned compounds were tested at different concentrations for their toxic profile and anti-inflammatory potential towards a human calcineurin/NFAT orthologue pathway in a yeast model, the calcineurin/Crz1 pathway. The SFE extract obtained, rich in SLs, yielded results of inhibition of 61.74 ± 6.87% with 50 µg/mL, and the purified fraction containing 8-deoxylactucin and 11β,13-dihydro-8-deoxylactucin inhibited the activation of the reporter gene up to 53.38 ± 3.9% at 10 µg/mL. The potential activity of the purified fraction was also validated by the ability to inhibit Crz1 nuclear translocation and accumulation. These results reveal a possible exploitable green technology to recover potential anti-inflammatory compounds from chicory roots waste after inulin extraction.publishersversionpublishe

Evaluation of large-Eddy simulations via observations of nocturnal marine stratocumulus

Data from the first research flight (RF01) of the second Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus (DYCOMS-II) field study are used to evaluate the fidelity with which large-eddy simulations (LESs) can represent the turbulent structure of stratocumulus-topped boundary layers. The initial data and forcings for this case placed it in an interesting part of parameter space, near the boundary where cloud-top mixing is thought to render the cloud layer unstable on the one hand, or tending toward a decoupled structure on the other hand. The basis of this evaluation consists of sixteen 4-h simulations from 10 modeling centers over grids whose vertical spacing was 5 m at the cloud-top interface and whose horizontal spacing was 35 m. Extensive sensitivity studies of both the configuration of the case and the numerical setup also enhanced the analysis. Overall it was found that (i) if efforts are made to reduce spurious mixing at cloud top, either by refining the vertical grid or limiting the effects of the subgrid model in this region, then the observed turbulent and thermodynamic structure of the layer can be reproduced with some fidelity; (ii) the base, or native configuration of most simulations greatly overestimated mixing at cloud top, tending toward a decoupled layer in which cloud liquid water path and turbulent intensities were grossly underestimated; (iii) the sensitivity of the simulations to the representation of mixing at cloud top is, to a certain extent, amplified by particulars of this case. Overall the results suggest that the use of LESs to map out the behavior of the stratocumulus-topped boundary layer in this interesting region of parameter space requires a more compelling representation of processes at cloud top. In the absence of significant leaps in the understanding of subgrid-scale (SGS) physics, such a representation can only be achieved by a significant refinement in resolution—a refinement that, while conceivable given existing resources, is probably still beyond the reach of most centers