The Frequency of Mediastinal Injury in Acute Posterior Sternoclavicular Dislocations: A Multicenter Study.

Background: Acute posterior sternoclavicular dislocations (APSCD) are rare injuries that historically have prompted concern for injury to the great vessels and other mediastinal structures from initial trauma or subsequent treatment, resulting in the recommendation that a thoracic or vascular surgeon be present or available during operative treatment. The objectives of the study were to characterize the demographic, clinical, and radiographic characteristics of a large series of APSCDs in skeletally immature patients and to describe the rate and nature of any vascular or mediastinal complications that occurred during treatment.

Methods: Following Institutional Review Board approval, records of consecutive patients under 25 years of age treated for APSCD were collected from each of 6 participating centers.

Pollen on Stigmas of Herbarium Specimens: A Window into the Impacts of a Century of Environmental Disturbance on Pollen Transfer.

Pollination is necessary for plant reproduction but often highly susceptible to disruption, for example, by habitat fragmentation and climate change. Here, we indirectly evaluated on a century timescale pollination interactions for species in one of the historically most disturbed habitats on earth-tropical dry forests of Hawai'i. We employed a novel method for acquiring a historical perspective on temporal change in pollination by characterizing pollen on stigmas of herbarium specimens from six remnant native species collected from 1909-2002.

Consequences of invasion for pollen transfer and pollination revealed in a tropical island ecosystem.

Pollination is known to be sensitive to environmental change but we lack direct estimates of how quantity and quality of pollen transferred between plant species shifts along disturbance gradients. This limits our understanding of how species compositional change impacts pollen receipt per species and structure of pollen transfer networks. We constructed pollen transfer networks along a plant invasion gradient in the Hawaiian dry tropical forest ecosystem.

Considering the unintentional consequences of pollinator gardens for urban native plants: is the road to extinction paved with good intentions?

Urban centers are important foci for plant biodiversity and yet widespread planting of wildflower gardens in cities to sustain pollinator biodiversity is on the rise, without full consideration of potential ecological consequences. The impact of intentional wildflower plantings on remnant native plant diversity in urban and peri-urban settings has not received attention, although shared pollinators are likely to mediate several types of biotic interactions between human-introduced plants and remnant native ones. Additionally, if wildflower species escape gardens these indirect effects may be compounded with direct ones.

Comparative mapping reveals autosomal origin of sex chromosome in octoploid Fragaria virginiana.

Recent evolution of separate sexes in flowering plants provides unparalleled opportunities for understanding the early stages of sex chromosome evolution, including their origin from autosomes. Moreover, the transition from combined to separate sexes can be associated with speciation via polyploidization in angiosperms, suggesting that genome doubling/merger may facilitate sterility mutations required for sex chromosome formation. To gain insight into the origin of sex chromosomes in a polyploid plant, we doubled the simple sequence repeat (SSR) density and increased genome coverage in a genetic map of octoploid Fragaria virginiana, a species purported to have a "proto-sex" chromosome, where limited recombination occurs between 2 linked "loci" carrying the male- and female-sterility mutations.