Traits in Lepidoptera assemblages are differently influenced by local and landscape scale factors in farmland habitat islands

Semi-natural grassland islands have a key role in slowing down biodiversity decline in intensively cultivated agricultural landscapes. Assemblages in such habitat patches are not only limited by local habitat quality, but are also influenced by the suitability and distribution of different habitat types in the surrounding landscape. If we want to preserve a functionally diverse Lepidoptera fauna, both local and landscape scale environmental effects, including land use and management, should be considered. In the present study, we describe trait-based characteristics of noctuid dominated macro-moth assemblages (MMAs) in grassland remnants of an intensively cultivated agricultural area. By gathering environmental data from local to landscape scales, we aimed to identify the most influential scales, possible interactions between scales and the role of integrated arable fields in shaping MMAs. We conducted abundance weighted trait-based multivariate analysis of the assemblages based on six trait groups. Both local and landscape scale variables had important influence, acting on different traits of the assemblages. By variance partitioning, we could identify variables that exerted maximal effect at 50 m and 250 m radii circles. Variables describing local vegetation and identity of neighbouring crop were responsible for species richness and rarity status, while the area of arable and wooded habitats within 250 m were responsible for total catch and pest status related traits. There was significant interaction between principal components axes representing local and landscape variables. Rarity, more than other traits, was influenced by the interaction. Integrated fields had no effect on MMAs. The present study highlights the contributions of both local and landscape scales to the shaping of MMAs and suggests that the preservation of both local habitat quality and landscape heterogeneity are important if we would like to maintain species rich and functionally diverse Lepidoptera fauna

Signal Space Separation Beamformer

We have combined Signal Space Separation and beamformers (SSS beamformer). The SSS beamformer was tested by simulation in the presence of simulated brain noise. The SSS beamformer performs at least as well as the conventional beamformer, provided that the expansion order is sufficiently high. For beamformer outputs which depend on power or power difference normalized by the projected noise, the spatial resolution of the SSS beamformer is significantly better than that of the conventional beamformers if the sources are deeper, and about the same as that of the conventional beamformer when the sources are superficial. For beamformer outputs which depend on the ratio of powers, the spatial resolutions of the SSS and conventional beamfomers are the same. The sensor noise covariance matrix in the SSS basis is non-diagonal. The SSS beamformers with diagonalized noise covariance matrix exhibit better spatial resolution than that with non-diagonal noise covariance matrix. The SSS beamformers are computationally more efficient than the conventional beamformers

How and When Socially Entrepreneurial Nonprofit Organizations Benefit From Adopting Social Alliance Management Routines to Manage Social Alliances?

Social alliance is defined as the collaboration between for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Building on the insights derived from the resource-based theory, we develop a conceptual framework to explain how socially entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations (SENPOs) can improve their social alliance performance by adopting strategic alliance management routines. We test our framework using the data collected from 203 UK-based SENPOs in the context of cause-related marketing campaign-derived social alliances. Our results confirm a positive relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. We also find that relational mechanisms, such as mutual trust, relational embeddedness, and relational commitment, mediate the relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. Moreover, our findings suggest that different types of social alliance motivation can influence the impact of social alliance management routines on different types of the relational mechanisms. In general, we demonstrate that SENPOs can benefit from adopting social alliance management routines and, in addition, highlight how and when the social alliance management routines–social alliance performance relationship might be shaped. Our study offers important academic and managerial implications, and points out future research directions

Formin Proteins FHOD1 and INF2 in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer: Association With Basal Markers and Functional Activities

Basal-like breast cancer is an aggressive form of breast cancer with limited treatment options. The subgroup can be identified immunohistochemically, by lack of hormone receptor expression combined with expression of basal markers such as CK5/6 and/or epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). In vitro, several regulators of the actin cytoskeleton are essential for efficient invasion of basal-like breast cancer cell lines. Whether these proteins are expressed in vivo determines the applicability of these findings in clinical settings. The actin-regulating formin protein FHOD1 participates in invasion of the triple-negative breast cancer cell line MDA-MB-231. Here, we measure the expression of FHOD1 protein in clinical triple-negative breast cancers by using immunohistochemistry and further characterize the expression of another formin protein, INF2. We report that basal-like breast cancers frequently overexpress formin proteins FHOD1 and INF2. In cell studies using basal-like breast cancer cell lines, we show that knockdown of FHOD1 or INF2 interferes with very similar processes: maintenance of cell shape, migration, invasion, and proliferation. Inhibition of EGFR, PI3K, or mitogen-activated protein kinase activity does not alter the expression of FHOD1 and INF2 in these cell lines. We conclude that the experimental studies on these formins have implications in the clinical behavior of basal-like breast cancer.</p

Influence of wiring cost on the large-scale architecture of human cortical connectivity

In the past two decades some fundamental properties of cortical connectivity have been discovered: small-world structure, pronounced hierarchical and modular organisation, and strong core and rich-club structures. A common assumption when interpreting results of this kind is that the observed structural properties are present to enable the brain's function. However, the brain is also embedded into the limited space of the skull and its wiring has associated developmental and metabolic costs. These basic physical and economic aspects place separate, often conflicting, constraints on the brain's connectivity, which must be characterized in order to understand the true relationship between brain structure and function. To address this challenge, here we ask which, and to what extent, aspects of the structural organisation of the brain are conserved if we preserve specific spatial and topological properties of the brain but otherwise randomise its connectivity. We perform a comparative analysis of a connectivity map of the cortical connectome both on high- and low-resolutions utilising three different types of surrogate networks: spatially unconstrained (‘random’), connection length preserving (‘spatial’), and connection length optimised (‘reduced’) surrogates. We find that unconstrained randomisation markedly diminishes all investigated architectural properties of cortical connectivity. By contrast, spatial and reduced surrogates largely preserve most properties and, interestingly, often more so in the reduced surrogates. Specifically, our results suggest that the cortical network is less tightly integrated than its spatial constraints would allow, but more strongly segregated than its spatial constraints would necessitate. We additionally find that hierarchical organisation and rich-club structure of the cortical connectivity are largely preserved in spatial and reduced surrogates and hence may be partially attributable to cortical wiring constraints. In contrast, the high modularity and strong s-core of the high-resolution cortical network are significantly stronger than in the surrogates, underlining their potential functional relevance in the brain

Preserved cognitive functions with age are determined by domain-dependent shifts in network responsivity

Healthy ageing has disparate effects on different cognitive domains. The neural basis of these differences, however, is largely unknown. We investigated this question by using Independent Components Analysis to obtain functional brain components from 98 healthy participants aged 23-87 years from the population-based Cam-CAN cohort. Participants performed two cognitive tasks that show age-related decrease (fluid intelligence and object naming) and a syntactic comprehension task that shows age-related preservation. We report that activation of task-positive neural components predicts inter-individual differences in performance in each task across the adult lifespan. Furthermore, only the two tasks that show performance declines with age show age-related decreases in task-positive activation of neural components and decreasing default mode (DM) suppression. Our results suggest that distributed, multi-component brain responsivity supports cognition across the adult lifespan, and the maintenance of this, along with maintained DM deactivation, characterizes successful ageing and may explain differential ageing trajectories across cognitive domains