Functional protein representations from biological networks enable diverse cross-species inference.

Transferring knowledge between species is key for many biological applications, but is complicated by divergent and convergent evolution. Many current approaches for this problem leverage sequence and interaction network data to transfer knowledge across species, exemplified by network alignment methods. While these techniques do well, they are limited in scope, creating metrics to address one specific problem or task.

Leveraging Organismal Biology to Forecast the Effects of Climate Change.

Despite the pressing need for accurate forecasts of ecological and evolutionary responses to environmental change, commonly used modeling approaches exhibit mixed performance because they omit many important aspects of how organisms respond to spatially and temporally variable environments. Integrating models based on organismal phenotypes at the physiological, performance, and fitness levels can improve model performance. We summarize current limitations of environmental data and models and discuss potential remedies.

Insect Development, Thermal Plasticity and Fitness Implications in Changing, Seasonal Environments.

Historical data show that recent climate change has caused advances in seasonal timing (phenology) in many animals and plants, particularly in temperate and higher latitude regions. The population and fitness consequences of these phenological shifts for insects and other ectotherms have been heterogeneous: warming can increase development rates and the number of generations per year (increasing fitness), but can also lead to seasonal mismatches between animals and their resources and increase exposure to environmental variability (decreasing fitness). Insect populations exhibit local adaptation in their developmental responses to temperature, including lower developmental thresholds and the thermal requirements to complete development, but climate change can potentially disrupt seasonal timing of juvenile and adult stages and alter population fitness.

Adult valvular heart disease: a practical approach.

The diagnosis and management of valvular heart disease is an important element of primary care practice. This article reviews the essential elements of four common valvular disorders, including signs and symptoms. The disorders reviewed are aortic stenosis, aortic regurgitation, mitral stenosis, and mitral regurgitation.