La Conferencia de Examen del TNP

Del 3 al 28 de mayo de 2010 se celebra una nueva Conferencia de Examen del Tratado de No Proliferación de las Armas Nucleares (TNP) en Nueva York. Desde que se acordó la extensión indefinida del TNP en 1995, sus Estados Partes celebran cada cinco años una Conferencia de Examen, para repasar el funcionamiento del Tratado en los años anteriores y fijar unos nuevos objetivos de futuro. De este modo, se hace un seguimiento de la puesta en práctica de los acuerdos y se fija un nuevo consenso quinquenal sobre el régimen internacional de no proliferación y desarme nuclear. La Conferencia de 2000 concluyó con un largo y denso documento de consenso, aunque todavía no se han cumplido muchos de los compromisos que se asumieron entonces. La Conferencia de 2005, en pleno auge de las políticas unilaterales en este ámbito de la Administración de George W. Bush, terminó en un rotundo fracaso. Este ARI valora las expectativas de éxito de la Conferencia de 2010, bastante elevadas tras las últimas iniciativas de desarme nuclear y no proliferación del presidente Obama, así como las dificultades y divergencias que se plantean para lograr un documento final con el imprescindible “equilibrio” entre sus diferentes objetivos. Un reto para el que la UE, bajo la coordinación de la Presidencia española, viene preparándose desde hace meses para contribuir decisivamente al éxito de este trascendental reto diplomático

Eslovaquia 16 años después

El 1 de enero de 2009 cumplió la República Eslovaca 16 años como Estado soberano. Ese mismo día se integró en la zona euro, el primero en hacerlo de los cuatro países de Visegrado. El devenir de la Eslovaquia contemporánea fue, en un principio, convulso, pero en los últimos diez años ha logrado grandes niveles de estabilidad política y económica. Desde los motivos de su separación de Checoslovaquia hasta el importante apoyo electoral otorgado a Vladimir Meciar, la historia reciente de Eslovaquia es todavía poco conocida o comprendida. Pero a partir de 1998, la superación de su aislamiento internacional y las audaces reformas estructurales iniciadas por el Gobierno de centro-derecha presidido por Mikulas Dzurinda la situaron en la senda de un destacado crecimiento económico, basado en buena medida en la llegada masiva de inversiones extranjeras, que le valieron la denominación del “tigre centroeuropeo”. Hace cuatro años se fijó el objetivo estratégico de acceder a la zona euro en 2009 y las elecciones de 2006, que supusieron un cambio radical de la coalición de Gobierno, que pasó a dirigir el socialdemócrata Robert Fico, no conllevaron cambios determinantes en las políticas económicas necesarias para alcanzar dicha meta. Aunque quedan retos importantes, como la superación de las grandes diferencias de desarrollo regional entre la zona occidental y la zona oriental del país, lograr una mayor integración de la población roma o reducir las instancias de corrupción en las empresas y en la Administración, Eslovaquia hoy presenta unos niveles de estabilidad política y económica envidiables

Las propuestas de la administración Obama frente a los retos del desarme nuclear y la no proliferación

Los primeros meses de la Administración Obama se han caracterizado por otorgar gran relevancia a las cuestiones de desarme nuclear y no proliferación. Se han anunciado importantes propuestas y se han dado ya algunos pasos concretos. Falta comprobar si serán suficientes para hacer frente a los retos que se plantean hoy en el régimen internacional

Los nuevos compromisos de desarme y no proliferación nuclear

La Conferencia de Examen del Tratado de No Proliferación celebrada en Nueva York, del 3 al 28 de mayo de 2010, acordó por consenso un Documento Final sobre “Conclusiones y recomendaciones sobre medidas de seguimiento”, tres Planes de Acción sobre Desarme, No Proliferación y Usos Pacíficos de la Energía Nuclear y la organización de una conferencia en 2012 para una zona libre de armas nucleares en Oriente Medio

A conceptual framework for the phylogenetically constrained assembly of microbial communities

Microbial communities play essential and preponderant roles in all ecosystems. Understanding the rules that govern microbial community assembly will have a major impact on our ability to manage microbial ecosystems, positively impacting, for instance, human health and agriculture. Here, I present a phylogenetically constrained community assembly principle grounded on the well-supported facts that deterministic processes have a significant impact on microbial community assembly, that microbial communities show significant phylogenetic signal, and that microbial traits and ecological coherence are, to some extent, phylogenetically conserved. From these facts, I derive a few predictions which form the basis of the framework. Chief among them is the existence, within most microbial ecosystems, of phylogenetic core groups (PCGs), defined as discrete portions of the phylogeny of varying depth present in all instances of the given ecosystem, and related to specific niches whose occupancy requires a specific phylogenetically conserved set of traits. The predictions are supported by the recent literature, as well as by dedicated analyses. Integrating the effect of ecosystem patchiness, microbial social interactions, and scale sampling pitfalls takes us to a comprehensive community assembly model that recapitulates the characteristics most commonly observed in microbial communities. PCGs' identification is relatively straightforward using high-throughput 16S amplicon sequencing, and subsequent bioinformatic analysis of their phylogeny, estimated core pan-genome, and intra-group co-occurrence should provide valuable information on their ecophysiology and niche characteristics. Such a priori information for a significant portion of the community could be used to prime complementing analyses, boosting their usefulness. Thus, the use of the proposed framework could represent a leap forward in our understanding of microbial community assembly and functionThis work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant BIO2016-80101-

Sobre el ejercicio de la medicina en al-Andalus: una fetua de Ibn SahI.

Sin resume

A comprehensive human minimal gut metagenome extends the host’s metabolic potential

Accumulating evidence suggests that humans could be considered as holobionts in which the gut microbiota play essential functions. Initial metagenomic studies reported a pattern of shared genes in the gut microbiome of different individuals, leading to the definition of the minimal gut metagenome as the set of microbial genes necessary for homeostasis and present in all healthy individuals. This study analyses the minimal gut metagenome of the most comprehensive dataset available, including individuals from agriculturalist and industrialist societies, also embodying highly diverse ethnic and geographical backgrounds. The outcome, based on metagenomic predictions for community composition data, resulted in a minimal metagenome comprising 3412 genes, mapping to 1856 reactions and 128 metabolic pathways predicted to occur across all individuals. These results were substantiated by the analysis of two additional datasets describing the microbial community compositions of larger Western cohorts, as well as a substantial shotgun metagenomics dataset. Subsequent analyses showed the plausible metabolic complementarity provided by the minimal gut metagenome to the human genomeThis work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, grant numbers BIO2016-80101-R and PID2019-108797RB-I0

Considering external information to improve the phylogenetic comparison of microbial communities: A new approach based on constrained Double Principal Coordinates Analysis (cDPCoA)

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The use of next-generation sequencing technologies is revolutionizing microbial ecology by allowing a deep phylogenetic coverage of tens to thousands of samples simultaneously. Double Principal Coordinates Analysis (DPCoA) is a multivariate method, developed in community ecology, able to integrate a distance matrix describing differences among species (e.g. phylogenetic distances) in the analysis of a species abundance matrix. This ordination technique has been used recently to describe microbial communities taking into account phylogenetic relatedness. In this work, we extend DPCoA to integrate the information of external variables measured on communities. The constrained Double Principal Coordinates Analysis (cDPCoA) is able to enforce a priori classifications to retrieve subtle differences and (or) remove the effect of confounding factors. We describe the main principles of this new approach and demonstrate its usefulness by providing application examples based on published 16S rRNA gene data sets.Peer Reviewe

Ecological response of tree saplings to simulated climate change along an elevational gradient (CLIMARBRE)

Switzerland will face higher temperature increases than the global average, which will have strong impacts on the mountain ecosystems. How tree species will respond to future climate change scenarios, and what mechanisms will they adopt, remains as a gap of knowledge in ecological research. Foresters will have to make short-term decisions and plan future managements under the great uncertainty of climate change and they demand answers to know if the current species will cope with the predicted climate change and to what extent the ecological goods and services will be affected (e.g. timber industry). The project CLIMARBRE was developed in order to ease and support their decision making by providing an advanced knowledge about the responses of beech and spruce regeneration to simulated climate change (specifically, warmer and drier conditions) in the wooded pastures of the Swiss Jura mountains. This project, which was built on the interface between fundamental research in forestry ecology and applied sciences, should attract the attention of foresters, managers of natural environments and of the general public. By using transplantation along an elevational gradient, in the Jura mountains, ârealisticâ climate conditions were created to specifically simulated three potential future climatic scenarios from the IPCC (from A1B to A2). This space for time approach enabled the assessment of saplingsâ responses to simulated climate change and their acclimation abilities. Saplings adapted to subalpine conditions at 1350 m were collected and transplanted towards lower altitudes exposing them to an average increase of 6.3áµC and a reduction in 30% of precipitation, at the lowest site throughout the study period. The main findings include i) a longer growing season due to induced-elevation warming (downward shift) could not fully account for the species-specific positive growth responses; (ii) the contrasting species growth responses were linked to different sensitivities to elevated vapor-pressure deficits; (iii) models could better account for the growth response to warming after incorporating extreme climatic events and their effects; iv) beech leaves showed an increase of xeromorphism through the increase of the cuticle thickness, vein network and smaller stomata, associated, to a higher leaf area v) which allowed it to grow in warmer conditions while coping with an increase of evaporative; vi) and finally, the linkage between responses at tree, leaf, tissue and soil level, through a multiple level approach, improved the mechanistic understanding of these species capacities to respond to simulated climate change

Uso terapéutico de sustancias aromáticas en al-Andalus

En el mundo árabe antiguo, las sustancias aromáticas se usaban con fines terapéuticos, igual que se hacía en otras culturas de su tiempo y anteriores. La cultura islámica oriental, hacia el siglo X, contaba ya con un corpus consolidado de sustancias aromáticas seleccionadas para dicho uso. Este trabajo constituye una introducción al conocimiento que de estas sustancias se tenía en al-Andalus en el siglo XI (considerado como la «Edad de Oro» de la farmacología andalusí), a partir del estudio comparado del Kitab yawahir al-tib al-mufrada de Ibn Masawayh y el Kitab al-adwiya al-mufrada de Ibn Wafid