301 research outputs found
The costs of kleptoparasitism: a study of mixed-species seabird breeding colonies
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this record.Mixed-species assemblages are common in nature, providing mutual benefits to associating species including anti-predator advantages or resource facilitation. However, associating with other species may also impose costs through kleptoparasitism (food theft). Identification of these costs, and how they vary when different species breed alongside one another, is essential to understand the payoffs of mixed-species assemblages. We explore the costs of kleptoparasitism for greater crested terns Thalasseus bergii provisioning offspring at a single-species colony, where individuals suffer kleptoparasitism from conspecifics, and at a mixed colony where terns breed alongside Hartlaubâs gulls Chroicocephalus hartlaubii and are vulnerable to both intra and interspecific kleptoparasitism. Gull presence likely contributes to increases in both kleptoparasitic attacks and the proportion of prey lost or stolen during provisioning, relative to the single-species colony. Provisioning adults suffered additional energetic costs in response to gull kleptoparasitism, requiring more attempts to deliver prey, taking longer to do so, and swallowing more prey (to the detriment of their offspring). Gulls also appear to increase the duration of tern vulnerability to kleptoparasitism, because they continued to steal food from adults and chicks after precocial chicks left the nest, when intraspecific kleptoparasitism is negligible. Terns breeding in a mixed colony, therefore, suffer direct and indirect costs through decreased provisioning and increased provisioning effort, which may ultimately affect reproductive success, resulting in colony decline where kleptoparasitism is frequent. This study illustrates how forming a mixed-species seabird breeding assemblage has costs as well as benefits, potentially fluctuating between a parasitic and a mutualistic relationship.This work was supported by a Department of Science and TechnologyCentre
of Excellence grant to the FitzPatrick Institute of African
Ornithology. R.B.S. was supported by a fellowship from the Leiden
Conservation Foundation. This research was approved by SANParks
(CONM1182), the Department of Environmental Affairs (RES2013/24,
RES2014/83, and RES2015/65) and the animal ethics committee of the
University of Cape Town (2013/V3/TC)
A non-invasive approach to estimate the energetic requirements of an increasing seabird population in a perturbed marine ecosystem
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Nature via the DOI in this record.There is a growing desire to integrate the food requirements of predators living in marine
ecosystems impacted by humans into sustainable fisheries management. We used non-
invasive video-recording, photography and focal observations to build time-energy budget
models and to directly estimate the fish mass delivered to chicks by adult greater crested terns
Thalasseus bergii breeding in the Benguela ecosystem. Mean modelled adult daily food
intake increased from 140.9 g¡dâ1 of anchovy Engraulis capensis during incubation to 171.7g¡dâ1
and 189.2 g¡dâ1 when provisioning small and large chicks, respectively. Modelled prey
intake expected to be returned to chicks was 58.3 g¡dâ1 (95% credible intervals: 44.9â75.8 g¡dâ1)
over the entire growth period. Based on our observations, chicks were fed 19.9 g¡dâ1
(17.2â23.0 g¡dâ1) to 45.1 g¡dâ1 (34.6â58.7 g¡dâ1 25 ) of anchovy during early and late
provisioning, respectively. Greater crested terns have lower energetic requirements at the
individual (range: 15â34%) and population level (range: 1â7%) than the other Benguela
endemic seabirds that feed on forage fish. These modest requirements â based on a small
body size and low flight costs â coupled with foraging plasticity have allowed greater crested
terns to cope with changing prey availability, unlike the other seabirds species using the same
exploited prey base.Our research was supported by a Department of Science and Technology-National Research
Foundation Centre of Excellence grant to the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, the
Leiden Conservation Foundation (RBS) and our institutes. Robben Island Museum provided
logistical support and access to the tern colonies
Chemical composition of essential oils from Pantelleria Island autochthonous and naturalized spices and evaluation of their individual and combined antimicrobial activities
In this study, the antimicrobial activity of the essential oils (EOs) from Origanum majorana L. and Rosmarinus officinalis L. growing in Pantelleria (Sicily, Italy) were tested alone and in combination against some prokaryotic and eukaryotic food-borne pathogens. The chemical composition of the EOs as well as the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) against the most sensitive strains were also determined. Both EOs showed interesting antimicrobial effects against all bacteria and yeasts tested. MIC was in the range 1.25-2.50 mu l/ml. Interestingly, O. majorana was particularly rich in thymol acetate, while carvacrol was present at very low percentages. Also R. officinalis EOs composition was different from rosemary collected in different areas, as being particularly rich in caryophyllene. Furthermore, the antimicrobial activity of the combination of O. majorana and R. officinalis EOs indicated their potential as food biopreservatives
A large factory-scale application of selected autochthonous lactic acid bacteria for PDO Pecorino Siciliano cheese production
The main hypothesis of this study was that the autochthonous lactic acid bacteria (LAB) selected for their
dairy traits are able to stabilize the production of PDO (Protected Denomination of Origin) Pecorino
Siciliano cheese, preserving its typicality. The experimental plan included the application of a multistrain
lactic acid bacteria (LAB) culture, composed of starter (Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis CAG4 and
CAG37) and non starter (Enterococcus faecalis PSL71, Lactococcus garviae PSL67 and Streptococcus macedonicus
PSL72) strains, during the traditional production of cheese at large scale level in six factories
located in different areas of Sicily. The cheese making processes were followed from milk to ripened
cheeses and the effects of the added LAB were evaluated on the microbiological, chemico-physical and
sensorial characteristics of the final products. Results highlighted a high variability for all investigated
parameters and the dominance of LAB cocci in bulk milk samples. The experimental curds showed a
faster pH drop than control curds and the levels of LAB estimated in 5-month ripened experimental
cheeses (7.59 and 7.27 Log CFU/g for rods and cocci, respectively) were higher than those of control
cheeses (7.02 and 6.61 Log CFU/g for rods and cocci, respectively). The comparison of the bacterial isolates
by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)-PCR evidenced the dominance of the added
starter lactococci over native milk and vat LAB, while the added non starter LAB were found at almost the
same levels of the indigenous strains. The sensory evaluation showed that the mixed LAB culture did not
influence the majority of the sensory attributes of the cheeses and that each factory produced cheeses
with unique characteristics. Finally, the multivariate statistical analysis based on all parameters evaluated
on the ripened cheeses showed the dissimilarities and the relationships among cheeses. Thus, the main
hypothesis of the work was accepted since the quality parameters of the final cheeses were stabilized,
but all cheeses maintained their local typicality
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KNOWLEDGE AND VIEWPOINTS ON THE EFFECTS OF CORRUPTION ON HEALTHCARE: A SURVEY CONDUCTED AMONG STUDENTS OF PALERMO UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOL, ITALY
Corruption affects healthcare effectiveness and efficiency and limits equity in access to health
services. Aim of the survey was to document knowledge and viewpoints on the impact of
corruption on healthcare system in a sample of students attending pre-lauream healthcare
professional courses at Palermo University Medical school and to evaluate any improvement in
their awareness on this topic after a dedicated multidisciplinary educational intervention.
An anonymous questionnaire was administered to students before and after the intervention.
Absolute and relative frequency of correct and incorrect answers was computed. Chi-squared test
was used to compare answers given before and after the educational intervention.
Approximately less than a quarter of the respondents were able to correctly estimate impact of
corruption, inappropriateness and waste in healthcare on NHS.
The study documented how improving students\u2019 knowledge of the impact of corruption in the
healthcare system could represent a possible strategy to prevent corruption in healthcare
Transcriptomics and metabolomics integration reveals redox-dependent metabolic rewiring in breast cancer cells
Rewiring glucose metabolism toward aerobic glycolysis provides cancer cells with a rapid generation of pyruvate, ATP, and NADH, while pyruvate oxidation to lactate guarantees refueling of oxidized NAD+ to sustain glycolysis. CtPB2, an NADH-dependent transcriptional co-regulator, has been proposed to work as an NADH sensor, linking metabolism to epigenetic transcriptional reprogramming. By integrating metabolomics and transcriptomics in a triple-negative human breast cancer cell line, we show that genetic and pharmacological down-regulation of CtBP2 strongly reduces cell proliferation by modulating the redox balance, nucleotide synthesis, ROS generation, and scavenging. Our data highlight the critical role of NADH in controlling the oncogene-dependent crosstalk between metabolism and the epigenetically mediated transcriptional program that sustains energetic and anabolic demands in cancer cells
A 3D Human Posture Approach for Activity Recognition Based on Depth Camera
Human activity recognition plays an important role in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), providing useful tools to improve people quality of life. This work presents an activity recognition algorithm based on the extraction of skeleton joints from a depth camera. The system describes an activity using a set of few and basic postures extracted by means of the X-means clustering algorithm. A multi-class Support Vector Machine, trained with the Sequential Minimal Optimization is employed to perform the classification. The system is evaluated on two public datasets for activity recognition which have different skeleton models, the CAD-60 with 15 joints and the TST with 25 joints. The proposed approach achieves precision/recall performances of 99.8 % on CAD-60 and 97.2 %/91.7 % on TST. The results are promising for an applied use in the context of AAL
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The BioDICE Taverna plugin for clustering and visualization of biological data: a workflow for molecular compounds exploration
Background: In many experimental pipelines, clustering of multidimensional biological datasets is used to detect
hidden structures in unlabelled input data. Taverna is a popular workflow management system that is used to design
and execute scientific workflows and aid in silico experimentation. The availability of fast unsupervised methods for clustering and visualization in the Taverna platform is important to support a data-driven scientific discovery in complex and explorative bioinformatics applications.
Results: This work presents a Taverna plugin, the Biological Data Interactive Clustering Explorer (BioDICE), that performs clustering of high-dimensional biological data and provides a nonlinear, topology preserving projection for the visualization of the input data and their similarities. The core algorithm in the BioDICE plugin is Fast Learning Self Organizing Map (FLSOM), which is an improved variant of the Self Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm. The plugin generates an interactive 2D map that allows the visual exploration of multidimensional data and the identification of groups of similar objects. The effectiveness of the plugin is demonstrated on a case study related to chemical
compounds.
Conclusions: The number and variety of available tools and its extensibility have made Taverna a popular choice for the development of scientific data workflows. This work presents a novel plugin, BioDICE, which adds a data-driven knowledge discovery component to Taverna. BioDICE provides an effective and powerful clustering tool, which can be adopted for the explorative analysis of biological datasets
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