Climate warming, marine protected areas and the ocean-scale integrity of coral reef ecosystems

Coral reefs have emerged as one of the ecosystems most vulnerable to climate variation and change. While the contribution of a warming climate to the loss of live coral cover has been well documented across large spatial and temporal scales, the associated effects on fish have not. Here, we respond to recent and repeated calls to assess the importance of local management in conserving coral reefs in the context of global climate change. Such information is important, as coral reef fish assemblages are the most species dense vertebrate communities on earth, contributing critical ecosystem functions and providing crucial ecosystem services to human societies in tropical countries. Our assessment of the impacts of the 1998 mass bleaching event on coral cover, reef structural complexity, and reef associated fishes spans 7 countries, 66 sites and 26 degrees of latitude in the Indian Ocean. Using Bayesian meta-analysis we show that changes in the size structure, diversity and trophic composition of the reef fish community have followed coral declines. Although the ocean scale integrity of these coral reef ecosystems has been lost, it is positive to see the effects are spatially variable at multiple scales, with impacts and vulnerability affected by geography but not management regime. Existing no-take marine protected areas still support high biomass of fish, however they had no positive affect on the ecosystem response to large-scale disturbance. This suggests a need for future conservation and management efforts to identify and protect regional refugia, which should be integrated into existing management frameworks and combined with policies to improve system-wide resilience to climate variation and change

A survey of haptics in serious gaming

Serious gaming often requires high level of realism for training and learning purposes. Haptic technology has been proved to be useful in many applications with an additional perception modality complementary to the audio and the vision. It provides novel user experience to enhance the immersion of virtual reality with a physical control-layer. This survey focuses on the haptic technology and its applications in serious gaming. Several categories of related applications are listed and discussed in details, primarily on haptics acts as cognitive aux and main component in serious games design. We categorize haptic devices into tactile, force feedback and hybrid ones to suit different haptic interfaces, followed by description of common haptic gadgets in gaming. Haptic modeling methods, in particular, available SDKs or libraries either for commercial or academic usage, are summarized. We also analyze the existing research difficulties and technology bottleneck with haptics and foresee the future research directions

Ontology-guided data preparation for discovering genotype-phenotype relationships

International audienceComplexity of post-genomic data and multiplicity of mining strategies are two limits to Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) in life sciences. Because they provide a semantic frame to data and because they benefit from the progress of semantic web technologies, bio-ontologies should be considered for playing a key role in the KDD process. In the frame of a case study relative to the search of genotype-phenotype relationships, we demonstrate the capability of bio-ontologies to guide data selection during the preparation step of the KDD process. We propose three scenarios to illustrate how domain knowledge can be taken into account in order to select or aggregate data to mine, and consequently how it can facilitate result interpretation at the end of the process

Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms Underlying the Strong Neonatal IL-12 Response of Lamb Mesenteric Lymph Node Cells to R-848

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APC Activation Restores Functional CD4+CD25+ Regulatory T Cells in NOD Mice that Can Prevent Diabetes Development

BACKGROUND: Defects in APC and regulatory cells are associated with diabetes development in NOD mice. We have shown previously that NOD APC are not effective at stimulating CD4(+)CD25(+) regulatory cell function in vitro. We hypothesize that failure of NOD APC to properly activate CD4(+)CD25(+) regulatory cells in vivo could compromise their ability to control pathogenic cells, and activation of NOD APC could restore this defect, thereby preventing disease. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: To test these hypotheses, we used the well-documented ability of complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA), an APC activator, to prevent disease in NOD mice. Phenotype and function of CD4(+)CD25(+) regulatory cells from untreated and CFA-treated NOD mice were determined by FACS, and in vitro and in vivo assays. APC from these mice were also evaluated for their ability to activate regulatory cells in vitro. We have found that sick NOD CD4(+)CD25(+) cells expressed Foxp3 at the same percentages, but decreased levels per cell, compared to young NOD or non-NOD controls. Treatment with CFA increased Foxp3 expression in NOD cells, and also increased the percentages of CD4(+)CD25(+)Foxp3(+) cells infiltrating the pancreas compared to untreated NOD mice. Moreover, CD4(+)CD25(+) cells from pancreatic LN of CFA-treated, but not untreated, NOD mice transferred protection from diabetes. Finally, APC isolated from CFA-treated mice increased Foxp3 and granzyme B expression as well as regulatory function by NOD CD4(+)CD25(+) cells in vitro compared to APC from untreated NOD mice. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These data suggest that regulatory T cell function and ability to control pathogenic cells can be enhanced in NOD mice by activating NOD APC