The impacts of the food, fuel and financial crises on households in Nigeria. A retrospective approach for research enquiry

This paper examines the impacts of the financial, food and fuel crises on the livelihoods of low-income households Nigeria. It uses primary household level data from Nigeria to analyse the impacts of induced price variability on household welfare. Our results indicate that aggregate shocks have significant adverse effects on household consumption, human capital, and labour decisions with a degree of impact variability between northern and southern regions of the country. We find that the coping strategies adopted by the poor to deal with the short-term effects of the crises, and which include substitution for lower quality food, increasing the intensity of work, withdrawing children from school – especially girls – and engaging children in child labour, can lock households in a low-income equilibrium or poverty trap. Provided that covariate shocks exacerbate these effects, tackling the effects of covariate risks becomes central for present and future development policy

Social Assistance in Developing Countries Database Version 5.0

The Social Assistance in Developing Countries Database is a user-friendly tool that provides summary information on social assistance interventions in developing countries. It provides a summary of the evidence available on the effectiveness of social assistance interventions in developing countries. It focuses on programmes seeking to combine the reduction and mitigation of poverty, with strengthening and facilitating household investments capable of preventing poverty and securing development in the longer term. The inclusion of programmes is on the basis of the availability of information on design features, evaluation, size, scope, or significance. Version 5 of the database updates information on existing programmes and incorporates information on pilot social assistance programmes in Latin America, Asia and Africa. It also adopts a new typology that distinguishes between social assistance programmes providing pure income transfers; programmes that provide transfers plus interventions aimed at human, financial, or physical asset accumulation; and integrated poverty reduction programmes. This new typology has, in our view, several advantages. It is a more flexible, and more accurate, template with which to identify key programme features. It provides a good entry point into the conceptual underpinnings of social assistance programmes

Diversidad de musgos epifitos de la zona metropolitana del valle de Toluca, México

La riqueza y abundancia de briofitas en espacios urbanos puede ser un indicador de calidad del ambiente. En México los estudios sobre la diversidad briológica de áreas urbanas y su uso en el monitoreo ambiental son escasos. En este estudio se identificó la riqueza de musgos epifitos de la zona metropolitana del valle de Toluca (ZMVT) a partir de la recolecta de todas las especies. Adicionalmente, las colonias de musgos se muestrearon por el método en parcela, para determinar las variaciones de su diversidad en 16 zonas verdes. Se encontró una riqueza de 41 especies y variedades incluidas en 16 familias: la familia Pottiaceae fue la más numerosa y frecuente. El 65% de las especies tienen una distribución geográfica amplia. Los estimadores Jacknife 1 y bootstrap indican que el inventario presenta entre el 71 y 85% de los taxones esperados. Las colonias de musgos epifitos tienden a ser diversas (H= 2.3) y están representadas en orden de importancia por Syntrichia amphidiacea, Leskea angustata, Syntrichia fragilis, Syntrichia pagorum y Fabronia ciliaris, que fueron las especies con mayor peso ecológico. Las zonas verdes analizadas presentan baja similitud promedio (ISj= 0.30) asociada potencialmente a las condiciones microclimáticas y a su cercanía a los centros urbanos

Mitigación de la Generación de gases efecto invernadero mediante un modelo de gestión integral de RSU

Instituto Politécnico Nacional CIIDIR Oaxac

A biaryl-linked tripeptide from Planomonospora reveals a widespread class of minimal RiPP gene clusters

Microbial natural products impress by their bioactivity, structural diversity, and ingenious biosynthesis. While screening the less exploited actinobacterial genus Planomonospora, two cyclopeptides were discovered, featuring an unusual Tyr-His biaryl bridging across a tripeptide scaffold, with the sequences N-acetyl-Tyr-Tyr-His and N-acetyl-Tyr-Phe-His. Planomonospora genomes pointed toward a ribosomal synthesis of the cyclopeptide from a pentapeptide precursor encoded by 18-bp bytA, to our knowledge the smallest coding gene ever reported. Closely linked to bytA is bytO, encoding a cytochrome P450 monooxygenase likely responsible for biaryl installment. In Streptomyces, the bytAO segment was sufficient to direct production of the crosslinked N-acetylated Tyr-Tyr-His tripeptide. Bioinformatic analysis of related cytochrome P450 monooxygenases indicated that they constitute a widespread family of enzymes, and the corresponding genes are closely linked to 5-amino acid coding sequences in approximately 200 (actino)bacterial genomes, all with potential for biaryl linkage between amino acids 1 and 3. We propose the named biarylitides this family of RiPPs

Vulnerabilidad y adaptación a las amenazas del cambio climático y la gestión del agua en San Luis Potosí

Instituto Politécnico Nacional CIIDIR Oaxac

Effective approaches to discover new microbial metabolites in a large strain library

Natural products have provided many molecules to treat and prevent illnesses in humans, animals and plants. While only a small fraction of the existing microbial diversity has been explored for bioactive metabolites, tens of thousands of molecules have been reported in the literature over the past 80 years. Thus, the main challenge in microbial metabolite screening is to avoid the re-discovery of known metabolites in a cost-effective manner. In this perspective, we report and discuss different approaches used in our laboratory over the past few years, ranging from bioactivity-based screening to looking for metabolic rarity in different datasets to deeply investigating a single Streptomyces strain. Our results show that it is possible to find novel chemistry through a limited screening effort, provided that appropriate selection criteria are in place