Field margins as rapidly evolving local diversity hotspots for ground beetles (Coleoptera : Carabidae) in northern China

The diversity of carabid assemblages at newly established field margins was compared to the diversity in surrounding fields and woodland habitats at Dongbeiwang village, Beijing. Carabids were sampled using 6 pitfalls per plot at a total of 12 plots in the year 2000. Although sampled only a year after their establishment, field margins harbored the most abundant and diverse carabids assemblages of all sites. More than a quarter of carabid species encountered were furthermore restricted to catches from field margins. Also woodland and fields under rotational wheat/maize cultivation harbored some unique species. Therefore, a short term establishment of field margins is effective in enhancing diversity and abundance of carabids, an important predator group in the agricultural landscape, while only the preservation of a heterogeneous landscape will enable the conservation of the overall species diversity

Disentangling effects of abiotic factors and biotic interactions on cross-taxon congruence in species turnover patterns of plants, moths and beetles

High cross-taxon congruence in species diversity patterns is essential for the use of surrogate taxa in biodiversity conservation, but presence and strength of congruence in species turnover patterns, and the relative contributions of abiotic environmental factors and biotic interaction towards this congruence, remain poorly understood. In our study, we used variation partitioning in multiple regressions to quantify cross-taxon congruence in community dissimilarities of vascular plants, geometrid and arciinid moths and carabid beetles, subsequently investigating their respective underpinning by abiotic factors and biotic interactions. Significant cross-taxon congruence observed across all taxon pairs was linked to their similar responses towards elevation change. Changes in the vegetation composition were closely linked to carabid turnover, with vegetation structure and associated microclimatic conditions proposed causes of this link. In contrast, moth assemblages appeared to be dominated by generalist species whose turnover was weakly associated with vegetation changes. Overall, abiotic factors exerted a stronger influence on cross-taxon congruence across our study sites than biotic interactions. The weak congruence in turnover observed particularly between plants and moths highlights the importance of multi-taxon approaches based on groupings of taxa with similar turnovers, rather than the use of single surrogate taxa or environmental proxies, in biodiversity assessments

Combination of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor and irbesartan for the treatment of heart failure

published_or_final_versio

Self-rated health in middle-aged and elderly Chinese : distribution, determinants and associations with cardio-metabolic risk factors

Background: Self-rated health (SRH) has been demonstrated to be an accurate reflection of a person's health and a valid predictor of incident mortality and chronic morbidity. We aimed to evaluate the distribution and factors associated with SRH and its association with biomarkers of cardio-metabolic diseases among middle-aged and elderly Chinese. Methods: Survey of 1,458 men and 1,831 women aged 50 to 70 years, conducted in one urban and two rural areas of Beijing and Shanghai in 2005. SRH status was measured and categorized as good (very good and good) vs. not good (fair, poor and very poor). Determinants of SRH and associations with biomarkers of cardio-metabolic diseases were evaluated using logistic regression. Results: Thirty two percent of participants reported good SRH. Males and rural residents tended to report good SRH. After adjusting for potential confounders, residence, physical activity, employment status, sleep quality and presence of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and depression were the main determinants of SRH. Those free from cardiovascular disease (OR 3.68; 95%CI 2.39; 5.66), rural residents (OR 1.89; 95% CI 1.47; 2.43), non-depressed participants (OR 2.50; 95% CI 1.67; 3.73) and those with good sleep quality (OR 2.95; 95% CI 2.22; 3.91) had almost twice or over the chance of reporting good SRH compared to their counterparts. There were significant associations -and trend- between SRH and levels of inflammatory markers, insulin levels and insulin resistance. Conclusion: Only one third of middle-aged and elderly Chinese assessed their health status as good or very good. Although further longitudinal studies are required to confirm our findings, interventions targeting social inequalities, lifestyle patterns might not only contribute to prevent chronic morbidity but as well to improve populations' perceived health

Asynchronous In Situ Processing with Gromacs: Taking Advantage of GPUs

International audienceNumerical simulations using supercomputers are producing an ever growing amount of data. Efficient production and analysis of these data are the key to future discoveries. The in situ paradigm is emerging as a promising solution to avoid the I/O bottleneck encountered in the file system for both the simulation and the analytics by treating the data as soon as they are produced in memory. Various strategies and implementations have been proposed in the last years to support in situ treatments with a low impact on the simulation performance. Yet, little efforts have been made when it comes to perform in situ analytics with hybrid simulations supporting accelerators like GPUs. In this article, we propose a study of the in situ strategies with Gromacs, a molecular dynamic simulation code supporting multi-GPUs, as our application target. We specifically focus on the computational resources usage of the machine by the simulation and the in situ analytics. We finally extend the usual in situ placement strategies to the case of in situ analytics running on a GPU and study their impact on both Gromacs performance and the resource usage of the machine. We show in particular that running in situ analytics on the GPU can be a more efficient solution than on the CPU especially when the CPU is the bottleneck of the simulation

Determining appropriate approaches for using data in feature selection

Feature selection is increasingly important in data analysis and machine learning in big data era. However, how to use the data in feature selection, i.e. using either ALL or PART of a dataset, has become a serious and tricky issue. Whilst the conventional practice of using all the data in feature selection may lead to selection bias, using part of the data may, on the other hand, lead to underestimating the relevant features under some conditions. This paper investigates these two strategies systematically in terms of reliability and effectiveness, and then determines their suitability for datasets with different characteristics. The reliability is measured by the Average Tanimoto Index and the Inter-method Average Tanimoto Index, and the effectiveness is measured by the mean generalisation accuracy of classification. The computational experiments are carried out on ten real-world benchmark datasets and fourteen synthetic datasets. The synthetic datasets are generated with a pre-set number of relevant features and varied numbers of irrelevant features and instances, and added with different levels of noise. The results indicate that the PART approach is more effective in reducing the bias when the size of a dataset is small but starts to lose its advantage as the dataset size increases

Disentangling effects of abiotic factors and biotic interactions on cross-taxon congruence in species turnover patterns of plants, moths and beetles

High cross-taxon congruence in species diversity patterns is essential for the use of surrogate taxa in biodiversity conservation, but presence and strength of congruence in species turnover patterns, and the relative contributions of abiotic environmental factors and biotic interaction towards this congruence, remain poorly understood. In our study, we used variation partitioning in multiple regressions to quantify cross-taxon congruence in community dissimilarities of vascular plants, geometrid and arciinid moths and carabid beetles, subsequently investigating their respective underpinning by abiotic factors and biotic interactions. Significant cross-taxon congruence observed across all taxon pairs was linked to their similar responses towards elevation change. Changes in the vegetation composition were closely linked to carabid turnover, with vegetation structure and associated microclimatic conditions proposed causes of this link. In contrast, moth assemblages appeared to be dominated by generalist species whose turnover was weakly associated with vegetation changes. Overall, abiotic factors exerted a stronger influence on cross-taxon congruence across our study sites than biotic interactions. The weak congruence in turnover observed particularly between plants and moths highlights the importance of multi-taxon approaches based on groupings of taxa with similar turnovers, rather than the use of single surrogate taxa or environmental proxies, in biodiversity assessments

Sorting of chromosomes by magnetic separation

Chromosomes were isolated from Chinese hamster x human hybrid cell lines containing four and nine human chromosomes. Human genomic DNA was biotinylated by nick translation and used to label the human chromosomes by in situ hybridization in suspension. Streptavidin was covalently coupled to the surface of magnetic beads and these were incubated with the hybridized chromosomes. The human chromosomes were bound to the magnetic beads through the strong biotin-streptavidin complex and then rapidly separated from nonlabeled Chinese hamster chromosomes by a simple permanent magnet. The hybridization was visualized by additional binding of avidin-FITC (fluorescein) to the unoccupied biotinylated human DNA bound to the human chromosomes. After magnetic separation, up to 98% of the individual chromosomes attached to magnetic beads were classified as human chromosomes by fluorescence microscopy

Small inhibitor of Bcl-2, HA14-1, selectively enhanced the apoptotic effect of cisplatin by modulating Bcl-2 family members in MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells

Inhibition or downregulation of Bcl-2 represents a new therapeutic approach to by-pass chemoresistance in cancer cells. Therefore, we explored the potential of this approach in breast cancer cells. Cisplatin and paclitaxel induced apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner in MCF-7 (drug-sensitive) and MDA-MB-231 (drug-insensitive) cells. Furthermore, when we transiently silenced Bcl-2, both cisplatin and paclitaxel induced apoptosis more than parental cells. Dose dependent induction of apoptosis by drugs was enhanced by the pre-treatment of these cells with HA14-1, a Bcl-2 inhibitor. Although the effect of cisplatin was significant on both cell lines, the effect of paclitaxel was much less potent only in MDA-MB-231 cells. To further understand the distinct role of drugs in MDA-MB-231 cells pretreated with HA14-1, caspases and Bcl-2 family proteins were studied. The apoptotic effect of cisplatin with or without HA14-1 pre-treatment is shown to be caspase-dependent. Among pro-apoptotic Bcl-2 proteins, Bax and Puma were found to be up-regulated whereas Bcl-2 and Bcl-x(L) were down-regulated when cells were pretreated with HA14-1 followed by paclitaxel or cisplatin. Enforced Bcl-2 expression in MDA-MB-231 cells abrogated the sensitizing effect of HA14-1 in cisplatin induced apoptosis. These results suggest that the potentiating effect of HA14-1 is drug and cell type specific and may not only depend on the inhibition of Bcl-2. Importantly, alteration of other pro-apoptotic or anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 family members may dictate the apoptotic response when HA14-1 is combined with chemotherapeutic drugs