Diffusion, Adoption, and Network Constraint: Can Understanding Personal Networks of Afghan Women Improve the Adoption 0f Agricultural Innovations

A plethora of case studies conducted in myriad locations find that factors influencing the adoption of agricultural innovation are different, emphasizing the need for locality specific understanding (Waddingon 2014). The diffusion of agricultural innovations may be influenced by the structure of the social system in which that diffusion is taking place. This study investigates the social structure of rural Afghan women, in an effort to determine how they interact and exchange information, and how the personal network structure, and the nature of the women’s interaction influences adoption of innovations. With the objective of framing rural development programs targeting women in Afghanistan to maximize potential beneficial effects, the ego- network data of rural Afghan women in 18 villages was collected. Lead-farmers were identified based upon her relative position in her network. The lead-farmers were trained in two agricultural innovations and adoption rate was observed among the women in each Farmer Field School (FFS). Consistent with the literature, a higher adoption rate was observed among the women in the FFS of the lead-farmer with higher brokering indices as compared to those with larger networks or those chosen at random. Contrary to the literature, communication beyond the FFS does not occur. The results of this study indicate that the dense social structure and cultural values in Afghanistan hinder the diffusion of agricultural innovations. The classical diffusion model which promotes trickle-down transfer of technology framework for agricultural development is not appropriate among women in rural Afghanistan. This study suggests that a rural development model in which broker women in the community are identified and trained to implement agricultural innovations, then supported to provide a formal atmosphere in which they transfer that technology to other farmers, is more appropriate

Stability of grassland soil C and N pools despite 25years of an extreme climatic and disturbance regime

Citation: Wilcox, K. R., Blair, J. M., & Knapp, A. K. (2016). Stability of grassland soil C and N pools despite 25years of an extreme climatic and disturbance regime. Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, 121(7), 1934-1945. doi:10.1002/2016jg003370Global changes are altering many important drivers of ecosystem functioning, with precipitation amount and disturbance frequency being especially important. Carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools are key contemporary attributes of ecosystems that can also influence future C uptake via plant growth. Thus, understanding the impacts of altered precipitation amounts (through controls of primary production inputs) and disturbance regimes (through losses of C and N in biomass) is important to project how ecosystem services will respond to future global changes. A major difficulty inherent within this task is that drivers of ecosystem function and processes often interact, resulting in novel ecosystem responses. To examine how changes in precipitation affect grassland ecosystem responses under a frequent disturbance regime (annual fire), we assessed the biogeochemical and ecological consequences of more than two decades of irrigation in an annually burned mesic grassland in the central United States. In this experiment, precipitation amount was increased by 31% relative to ambient and 1 in 3years were statistically extreme relative to the long-term historical record. Despite evidence that irrigation decreased root:shoot ratios and increased rates of N cyclingeach expected to reduce soil C and N with annual burningwe detected no changes in these biogeochemical pools. This surprising biogeochemical resistance highlights the need to explore additional mechanisms within long-term experiments concerning the consequences of global change impacts on ecosystems

Design and Characterization of a Human Monoclonal Antibody that Modulates Mutant Connexin 26 Hemichannels Implicated in Deafness and Skin Disorders

Background: Mutations leading to changes in properties, regulation, or expression of connexin-made channels have been implicated in 28 distinct human hereditary diseases. Eight of these result from variants of connexin 26 (Cx26), a protein critically involved in cell-cell signaling in the inner ear and skin. Lack of non-toxic drugs with defined mechanisms of action poses a serious obstacle to therapeutic interventions for diseases caused by mutant connexins. In particular, molecules that specifically modulate connexin hemichannel function without affecting gap junction channels are considered of primary importance for the study of connexin hemichannel role in physiological as well as pathological conditions. Monoclonal antibodies developed in the last three decades have become the most important class of therapeutic biologicals. Recombinant methods permit rapid selection and improvement of monoclonal antibodies from libraries with large diversity.Methods: By screening a combinatorial library of human single-chain fragment variable (scFv) antibodies expressed in phage, we identified a candidate that binds an extracellular epitope of Cx26. We characterized antibody action using a variety of biochemical and biophysical assays in HeLa cells, organotypic cultures of mouse cochlea and human keratinocyte-derived cells.Results: We determined that the antibody is a remarkably efficient, non-toxic, and completely reversible inhibitor of hemichannels formed by connexin 26 and does not affect direct cell-cell communication via gap junction channels. Importantly, we also demonstrate that the antibody efficiently inhibits hyperative mutant Cx26 hemichannels implicated in autosomal dominant non-syndromic hearing impairment accompanied by keratitis and hystrix-like ichthyosis-deafness (KID/HID) syndrome. We solved the crystal structure of the antibody, identified residues that are critical for binding and used molecular dynamics to uncover its mechanism of action.Conclusions: Although further studies will be necessary to validate the effect of the antibody in vivo, the methodology described here can be extended to select antibodies against hemichannels composed by other connexin isoforms and, consequently, to target other pathologies associated with hyperactive hemichannels. Our study highlights the potential of this approach and identifies connexins as therapeutic targets addressable by screening phage display libraries expressing human randomized antibodies

The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C): Rationale, design, infrastructure, and deployment.

OBJECTIVE: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses societal challenges that require expeditious data and knowledge sharing. Though organizational clinical data are abundant, these are largely inaccessible to outside researchers. Statistical, machine learning, and causal analyses are most successful with large-scale data beyond what is available in any given organization. Here, we introduce the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), an open science community focused on analyzing patient-level data from many centers. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The Clinical and Translational Science Award Program and scientific community created N3C to overcome technical, regulatory, policy, and governance barriers to sharing and harmonizing individual-level clinical data. We developed solutions to extract, aggregate, and harmonize data across organizations and data models, and created a secure data enclave to enable efficient, transparent, and reproducible collaborative analytics. RESULTS: Organized in inclusive workstreams, we created legal agreements and governance for organizations and researchers; data extraction scripts to identify and ingest positive, negative, and possible COVID-19 cases; a data quality assurance and harmonization pipeline to create a single harmonized dataset; population of the secure data enclave with data, machine learning, and statistical analytics tools; dissemination mechanisms; and a synthetic data pilot to democratize data access. CONCLUSIONS: The N3C has demonstrated that a multisite collaborative learning health network can overcome barriers to rapidly build a scalable infrastructure incorporating multiorganizational clinical data for COVID-19 analytics. We expect this effort to save lives by enabling rapid collaboration among clinicians, researchers, and data scientists to identify treatments and specialized care and thereby reduce the immediate and long-term impacts of COVID-19

Nutritionally Enhanced Staple Food Crops

Crop biofortification is a sustainable and cost-effective strategy to address malnutrition in developing countries. This review synthesizes the progress toward developing seed micronutrient-dense cereals and legumes cultivars by exploiting natural genetic variation using conventional breeding and/or transgenic technology, and discusses the associated issues to strengthen crop biofortification research and development. Some major QTL for seed iron and zinc, seed phosphorus, and seed phytate in common bean, rice,J;md wheat have been mapped. An iron reductase QTL associated with seed-iron ~QTL is found in common bean where the genes coding for candidate enzymes involved in phytic acid synthesis have also been mapped. Candidate genes for Ipa co segregate with mutant phenotypes identified in rice and soybean. The Gpe-B1 locus in wild emmer wheat accelerates senescence and increases nutrient remobilization from leaves to developing seeds, and another gene named TtNAM-B1 affecting these traits has been cloned. Seed iron-dense common bean and rice in Latin America; seed iron-dense common bean in eastern and southern Africa;....