bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Mites as biological tags of their hosts
Authors: BRUYNDONCKX NADIA , BIOLLAZ FRANÇOIS , DUBEY SYLVAIN , GOUDET JÉRÔME , CHRISTE PHILIPPE 
Published: June 2010

AbstractMovements and spatial distribution of host populations are expected to shape the genetic structure of their parasite populations. Comparing the genetic patterns of both interacting species may improve our understanding of their evolutionary history. Moreover, genetic analyses of parasites with horizontal transmission may serve as indicators of historical events or current demographic processes that are not apparent in the genetic signature of their hosts. Here, we compared mitochondrial variation in populations of the ectoparasitic mite Spinturnix myoti with the genetic pattern of its host, the Maghrebian bat Myotis punicus in North Africa and in the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. Mite mitochondrial differentiation among populations was correlated with both host mitochondrial and nuclear differentiation, suggesting spatial co‐differentiation of the lineages of the two interacting species. Therefore our results suggest that parasite dispersal is exclusively mediated by host movements, with open water between landmasses as a main barrier for host and parasite dispersal. Surprisingly the unique presence of a continental European mite lineage in Corsica was inconsistent with host phylogeographical history and strongly suggests the former presence of European mouse‐eared bats on this island. Parasites may thus act as biological tags to reveal the presence of their now locally extinct host.
Juvenile compensatory growth has negative consequences for reproduction in Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata)
Authors: Auer Sonya K. , Arendt Jeffrey D. , Chandramouli Radhika , Reznick David N. 
Published: June 2010

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 998–1007AbstractCompensatory or ‘catch‐up’ growth may be an adaptive mechanism that buffers the growth trajectory of young organisms from deviations caused by reduced food availability. Theory generally assumes that rapid juvenile compensatory growth impacts reproduction only through its positive effects on age and size at maturation, but potential reproductive costs to juvenile compensatory growth remain virtually unexplored. We used a food manipulation experiment to examine the reproductive consequences of compensatory growth in Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata). Compensatory growth did not affect adult growth rates, litter production rates or investment in offspring size. However, compensatory growth had negative effects on litter size, independent of the effects of female body length, resulting in a 20% decline in offspring production. We discuss potential mechanisms behind this observed cost to reproduction.
Who to include in measures of sexual selection is no trivial matter
Authors: Klug Hope , Lindström Kai , Kokko Hanna 
Published: June 2010

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 1094–1102AbstractIn many animals acquiring limited reproductive opportunities involves competition for resources, mates and opposite‐sex gametes. There is ambiguity in which competitive steps are included in measures of sexual selection: individuals who fail to obtain resources necessary for reproduction are often excluded. We illustrate the implications of variation in who is included in measures of selection. We quantified selection on male length and the opportunity for selection associated with nest acquisition, mate acquisition, and fertility of mates at two levels of density and two levels of nest availability in the sand goby. Both measures varied significantly across the three episodes of selection. Nest and mate acquisition contributed substantially to the overall opportunity for selection and selection on male size. Focusing only on males with nests led to lower estimates of selection. The effects of density and nest availability depended on the selective episodes considered. While there is nothing wrong with focusing on particular episodes of interest, inconsistency in who is included in measures of sexual selection across studies will make it difficult to answer broad research questions.
Metagenomic analyses of novel viruses and plasmids from a cultured environmental sample of hyperthermophilic neutrophiles
Authors: Garrett Roger A. , Prangishvili David , Shah Shiraz A. , Reuter Monika , Stetter Karl O. , Peng Xu 
Published: June 2010

SummaryTwo novel viral genomes and four plasmids were assembled from an environmental sample collected from a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, USA, and maintained anaerobically in a bioreactor at 85°C and pH 6. The double‐stranded DNA viral genomes are linear (22.7 kb) and circular (17.7 kb), and derive apparently from archaeal viruses HAV1 and HAV2. Genomic DNA was obtained from samples enriched in filamentous and tadpole‐shaped virus‐like particles respectively. They yielded few significant matches in public sequence databases reinforcing, further, the wide diversity of archaeal viruses. Several variants of HAV1 exhibit major genomic alterations, presumed to arise from viral adaptation to different hosts. They include insertions up to 350 bp, deletions up to 1.5 kb, and genes with extensively altered sequences. Some result from recombination events occurring at low complexity direct repeats distributed along the genome. In addition, a 33.8 kb archaeal plasmid pHA1 was characterized, encoding a possible conjugative apparatus, as well as three cryptic plasmids of thermophilic bacterial origin, pHB1 of 2.1 kb and two closely related variants pHB2a and pHB2b, of 5.2 and 4.8 kb respectively. Strategies are considered for assembling genomes of smaller genetic elements from complex environmental samples, and for establishing possible host identities on the basis of sequence similarity to host CRISPR immune systems.
Who attends a UK diabetes screening programme? Findings from the ADDITION‐Cambridge study
Authors: Sargeant L. A. , Simmons R. K. , Barling R. S. , Butler R. , Williams K. M. , Prevost A. T. , Kinmonth A. L. , Wareham N. J. , Griffin S. J. 
Published: June 2010

Diabet. Med. 27, 995–1003 (2010)AbstractAims  One of the factors influencing the cost‐effectiveness of population screening for Type 2 diabetes may be uptake. We examined attendance and practice‐ and individual‐level factors influencing uptake at each stage of a diabetes screening programme in general practice.Methods  A stepwise screening programme was undertaken among 135 825 people aged 40–69 years without known diabetes in 49 general practices in East England. The programme included a score based on routinely available data (age, sex, body mass index and prescribed medication) to identify those at high risk, who were offered random capillary blood glucose (RBG) and glycosylated haemoglobin tests. Those screening positive were offered fasting capillary blood glucose (FBG) and confirmatory oral glucose tolerance tests (OGTT).Results  There were 33 539 high‐risk individuals invited for a RBG screening test; 24 654 (74%) attended. Ninety‐four per cent attended the follow‐up FBG test and 82% the diagnostic OGTT. Seventy per cent of individuals completed the screening programme. Practices with higher general practitioner staff complements and those located in more deprived areas had lower uptake for RBG and FBG tests. Male sex and a higher body mass index were associated with lower attendance for RBG testing. Older age, prescription of antihypertensive medication and a higher risk score were associated with higher attendance for FBG and RBG tests.Conclusions  High attendance rates can be achieved by targeted stepwise screening of individuals assessed as high risk by data routinely available in general practice. Different strategies may be required to increase initial attendance, ensure completion of the screening programme, and reduce the risk that screening increases health inequalities.
Continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion in Type 1 diabetes: patient experiences of ‘living with a machine’
Authors: Todres L. , Keen S. , Kerr D. 
Published: June 2010

Diabet. Med. 27, 1201–1204 (2010)AbstractAims  The aims of this study were to provide in‐depth insight into the changes that may be experienced by patients embarking on continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion and to answer the research question, what is it like to live with an insulin pump?Methods  An in‐depth, qualitative, multiple interview study of individuals with Type 1 diabetes using continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion in a secondary care setting in the south of England. Four patients (two male, two female) across the age range and with varied experience of pump use, were recruited from a specialist diabetes centre.Results  Switching from multiple injection therapy to insulin pump therapy presents challenges in the short term. Over a longer period, use of this technology is associated with a significant improvement in quality of life for the users and also a change in the relationship between the patient and their specialist healthcare provider.Conclusions  Insulin pump therapy has additional qualitative benefits beyond improvements in glycaemic control and reducing the risk of hypoglycaemia for people with Type 1 diabetes.
Low local but high beta diversity of tropical forest dung beetles in Madagascar
Authors: Viljanen Heidi , Escobar Federico , Hanski Ilkka 
Published: June 2010

ABSTRACTAims  We have compared local (alpha) and regional (beta) species diversities of dung beetles in wet forests in the main tropical regions including Madagascar. Madagascar is exceptional in lacking native large herbivorous mammals which produce the key resource for dung beetles elsewhere.Location  Central and South America, mainland Africa, Madagascar and Southeast Asia.Methods  Trapping data on dung beetles and data on mammalian faunas were obtained from published and unpublished studies. We used our original data for Madagascar.Results  Species richness of dung beetles and that of large‐bodied (> 15 mm length) species in particular were highly significantly explained by the regional number of large‐bodied (> 10 kg) mammals (R2 from 50 to 80%). For a given pairwise spatial distance between two communities, beta diversity was significantly higher in Madagascar than elsewhere, explaining the very high total species richness in Madagascar in spite of low local diversity.Main conclusion  The presence and numbers of large herbivorous mammals greatly influence the species richness of dung beetles in tropical wet forests. The lack of native large herbivores rather than a limited species pool explains the low local diversity in Madagascar. Exceptionally high beta diversity in Madagascar suggests a pattern of old radiation involving extensive allopatric speciation.
Ethical and public policy aspects of childhood obesity: opinions of scientists working on an intervention study
Authors: Wickins‐Drazilova D. , Williams G. 
Published: June 2010

SummaryScientists working on an obesity intervention project were asked questions, via questionnaire and interviews, relating to ethical and public‐policy aspects of tackling childhood obesity. The main areas of enquiry concerned elements responsible for the rise in childhood obesity, key ethical areas of obesity interventions, helpfulness and effectiveness of policy measures, socioeconomic factors, and media coverage and political debate. Key results from this indicate that: there is disagreement about the amount of information about the causes of obesity that is needed before implementing interventions; an improvement in health and nutrition education of both children and adults through positive messages is seen as highly desirable; scientists regard environment, rather than genetics, as playing the major role in rising obesity levels; the level of individual responsibility being placed on parents and children may be unfair and unhelpful; whole‐system, long‐term and sensitive policy actions are needed rather than relying on quick fixes such as miracle pills; and there are country‐specific issues related to rising obesity levels that need to be considered, though the respondents tended to have a great deal of faith in EU‐wide interventions.
Nesfatin‐1: a novel inhibitory regulator of food intake and body weight
Authors: Stengel A. , Goebel M. , Taché Y. 
Published: June 2010

SummaryThe protein nucleobindin 2 (NUCB2) or NEFA (DNA binding/EF‐hand/acidic amino acid rich region) was identified over a decade ago and implicated in intracellular processes. New developments came with the report that post‐translational processing of hypothalamic NUCB2 may result in nesfatin‐1, nesfatin‐2 and nesfatin‐3 and convergent studies showing that nesfatin‐1 and full length NUCB2 injected in the brain potently inhibit the dark phase food intake in rodents including leptin receptor deficient Zucker rats. Nesfatin‐1 also reduces body weight gain, suggesting a role as a new anorexigenic factor and modulator of energy balance. In light of the obesity epidemic and its associated diseases, underlying new mechanisms regulating food intake may be promising targets in the drug treatment of obese patients particularly as the vast majority of them display reduced leptin sensitivity or leptin resistance while nesfatin‐1's mechanism of action is leptin independent. Although much progress on the localization of NUCB2/nesfatin‐1 in the brain and periphery as well as on the understanding of nesfatin‐1's anorexic effect have been achieved during the past three years, several important mechanisms have yet to be unraveled such as the identification of the nesfatin‐1 receptor and the regulation of NUCB2 processing and nesfatin‐1 release.
Bayesian Change-Point Analysis for Atomic Force Microscopy and Soft Material Indentation
Authors: Rudoy Daniel , Yuen Shelten G. , Howe Robert D. , Wolfe Patrick J. 
Published: June 2010

SummaryMaterial indentation studies, in which a probe is brought into controlled physical contact with an experimental sample, have long been a primary means by which scientists characterize the mechanical properties of materials. More recently, the advent of atomic force microscopy, which operates on the same fundamental principle, has in turn revolutionized the nanoscale analysis of soft biomaterials such as cells and tissues. The paper addresses the inferential problems that are associated with material indentation and atomic force microscopy, through a framework for the change-point analysis of pre-contact and post-contact data that is applicable to experiments across a variety of physical scales. A hierarchical Bayesian model is proposed to account for experimentally observed change-point smoothness constraints and measurement error variability, with efficient Monte Carlo methods developed and employed to realize inference via posterior sampling for parameters such as Young’s modulus, which is a key quantifier of material stiffness. These results are the first to provide the materials science community with rigorous inference procedures and quantification of uncertainty, via optimized and fully automated high throughput algorithms, implemented as the publicly available software package BayesCP. To demonstrate the consistent accuracy and wide applicability of this approach, results are shown for a variety of data sets from both macromaterials and micromaterials experiments—including silicone, neurons and red blood cells—conducted by the authors and others.
A Bayesian Model for Biclustering with Applications
Authors: Zhang Jian 
Published: June 2010

SummaryThe paper proposes a Bayesian method for biclustering with applications to gene microarray studies, where we want to cluster genes and experimental conditions simultaneously. We begin by embedding bicluster analysis into the framework of a plaid model with random effects. The corresponding likelihood is then regularized by the hierarchical priors in each layer. The resulting posterior, which is asymptotically equivalent to a penalized likelihood, can attenuate the effect of high dimensionality on cluster predictions. We provide an empirical Bayes algorithm for sampling posteriors, in which we estimate the cluster memberships of all genes and samples by maximizing an explicit marginal posterior of these memberships. The new algorithm makes the estimation of the Bayesian plaid model computationally feasible and efficient. The performance of our procedure is evaluated on both simulated and real microarray gene expression data sets. The numerical results show that our proposal substantially outperforms the original plaid model in terms of misclassification rates across a range of scenarios. Applying our method to two yeast gene expression data sets, we identify several new biclusters which show the enrichment of known annotations of yeast genes.
Assessing the long‐term impact of Ranavirus infection in wild common frog populations
Authors: Teacher A. G. F. , Cunningham A. A. , Garner T. W. J. 
Published: June 2010

AbstractAmphibians are declining worldwide, and one cause of this is infectious disease emergence. Mass mortalities caused by a virus or a group of viruses belonging to the genus Ranavirus have occurred in wild common frogs Rana temporaria in England since the 1980s, and ranaviral disease is widespread in amphibians in North America and Canada, where it can also cause mass die‐offs. Although there have been numerous reports of Ranavirus‐associated mass mortality events, no study has yet evaluated the long‐term impacts of this disease. This study follows up archived records of English common frog mortalities likely caused by Ranavirus. There is a preliminary indication that common frog populations can respond differently to the emergence of disease: emergence may be transient, catastrophic, or persistent with recurrent mortality events. We subsequently focused on populations that had recurring mortality events (n=18), and we report median declines of 81% in the number of adult frogs in these populations from 1996 to 2008. Comparable uninfected populations (n=16) showed no change in population size over the same time period. Regressions show that larger frog populations may be more likely to experience larger declines than smaller populations, and linear models show that percentage population size change is significantly correlated with disease status, but that habitat age (a possible proxy for environmental quality) has no significant effect on population size change. Our results provide the first evidence of long‐term localized population declines of an amphibian species which appear to be best explained by the presence of Ranavirus infection.
Elevated augmentation index derived from peripheral arterial tonometry is associated with abnormal ventricular–vascular coupling
Authors: Heffernan Kevin S. , Patvardhan Eshan A. , Hession Michael , Ruan Jenny , Karas Richard H. , Kuvin Jeffrey T. 
Published: June 2010

SummaryBackground:  Although typically derived from the contour of arterial pressure waveform, augmentation index (AIx) may also be derived from the digital pulse volume waveform using finger plethysmography (peripheral arterial tonometry, PAT). Little is known regarding the physiologic correlates of AIx derived from PAT. In this study, we investigated the relation of PAT‐AIx with measures of ventricular–vascular coupling.Methods:  Pulse volume waves were measured via PAT and used to derive AIx. Using 2‐dimensional echocardiography, effective arterial elastance index (EaI) was estimated as end‐systolic pressure/stroke volume index. Left ventricular (LV) end‐systolic elastance index (ELVI) was calculated as end‐systolic pressure/end‐systolic volume index. Ventricular–vascular coupling ratio was defined as EaI/ELVI.Results:  Given the bi‐directional nature of ventricular–vascular uncoupling as measured by echocardiography, patients were separated into three groups: low EaI/ELVI (<0·6, n = 21), optimal EaI/ELVI (mean 0·6–1·2, n = 16) and high EaI/ELVI (>1·2, n = 10). Adjusting for potential confounders (age, mean arterial pressure, height and heart rate), patients with optimal EaI/ELVI had lower AIx (1 ± 4%, P<0·05) compared to those with low EaI/ELVI (13 ± 4%) and high EaI/ELVI (19 ± 5%).Conclusions:  Abnormal ventricular–vascular coupling, arising from either increased effective arterial elastance or increased ventricular elastance, is associated with increased AIx as measured by PAT. Additional research is needed to examine other vascular correlates of PAT‐AIx.
Three‐Dimensional Computer‐Aided Design–Based Geometric Modeling of a New Trileaflet Aortic Valve
Authors: Praveen Kumar Gideon , Mathew Lazar 
Published: June 2010

AbstractOur objective was to design a new trileaflet aortic valve using computer‐aided design (CAD). Quantification of aortic valve geometries is essential in understanding normal and pathological valvular function and eventually in the design of valves. We have designed a new tissue valve model to investigate its suitability in aortic valve replacement. Steps involved in three‐dimensional CAD‐based geometric modeling of a trileaflet aortic valve and the effects of different component dimensions on the mechanical behavior of valve are presented in this article. Conceptual designing of individual components was used to build the total geometric model. A new geometric model of a trileaflet aortic valve was designed. This may be of great interest to designers of new prosthetic heart valve models, as well as to surgeons involved in valve‐sparing surgery.
Adh1 first intron polymorphisms in Argentinean populations of Ceratitis capitata
Authors: Lanzavecchia SB , Remis MI , Cladera JL , Zandomeni RO 
Published: June 2010

AbstractDNA size polymorphisms were utilized in a study of 24 natural populations of Ceratitis capitata Wiedemann (Diptera: Tephritidae) from Argentina. The first intron of alcohol dehydrogenase 1 gene (Adh1) was amplified using exon priming intron crossing‐polymerase chain reaction. Three size variants were detected among the 307 samples analyzed. To better differentiate the size variants, further digestion of PCR products with the EcoRI restriction enzyme was carried out. Complete nucleotide sequences of the three‐allele variants were obtained and single changes, insertions, deletions, and EcoRI recognition sites were located. Population allele frequencies were analyzed and a global mean heterozygosity (He) of 0.33 was obtained. In most populations, observed allelic frequencies conformed to Hardy–Weinberg expectations. Significant differences between provinces and sampling sites within these provinces, and among some populations were found. The average number of insects exchanged among populations (Nm) was estimated and high values were observed between Argentina and populations from two African countries (Morocco and Kenya), Australia, and Hawaii (Kauai). Pest introduction sources and dispersion patterns in Argentina are discussed based on these results as well as on available bibliographical data.