The reef manta ray is present throughout most island groups that form the Raja Ampat archipelago, Indonesia. The species is protected regionally and nationally and is currently managed as a single homogeneous population within the 6.7 million ha archipelago.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDystroglycan is a ubiquitously expressed heterodimeric cell-surface laminin receptor with roles in cell adhesion, signalling, and membrane stabilisation. More recently, the transmembrane β-subunit of dystroglycan has been shown to localise to both the nuclear envelope and the nucleoplasm. This has led to the hypothesis that dystroglycan may have a structural role at the nuclear envelope analogous to its role at the plasma membrane.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCamera traps or acoustic recorders are often used to sample wildlife populations. When animals can be individually identified, these data can be used with spatial capture-recapture (SCR) methods to assess populations. However, obtaining animal identities is often labor-intensive and not always possible for all detected animals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpatial capture-recapture methods are often used to produce density surfaces, and these surfaces are often misinterpreted. In particular, spatial change in density is confused with spatial change in uncertainty about density. We illustrate correct and incorrect inference visually by treating a grayscale image of the Mona Lisa as an activity center intensity or density surface and simulating spatial capture-recapture survey data from it.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany gibbon species are threatened with extinction, including the endangered northern yellow-cheeked crested gibbon, Nomascus annamensis. Assessing gibbon populations and understanding how human disturbances and environmental factors impact these populations is vital for effective conservation planning. In 2010, auditory surveys revealed that Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park (VSSP) in Cambodia contains one of the largest known N.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe appearance of genetic changes in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) presents a concern for their use in research and regenerative medicine. Variant hPSCs that harbor recurrent culture-acquired aneuploidies display growth advantages over wild-type diploid cells, but the mechanisms that yield a drift from predominantly wild-type to variant cell populations remain poorly understood. Here, we show that the dominance of variant clones in mosaic cultures is enhanced through competitive interactions that result in the elimination of wild-type cells.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpatial capture-recapture (SCR) models are commonly used to estimate animal density from surveys on which detectors passively detect animals without physical capture, for example, using camera traps, hair snares, or microphones. An individual is more likely to be recorded by detectors close to its activity center, the centroid of its movement throughout the survey. Existing models to account for this spatial heterogeneity in detection probabilities rely on an assumption of independence between detection records at different detectors conditional on the animals' activity centers, which are treated as latent variables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFis an ascomycete yeast often found at the isthmus of the ventriculus and proventriculus of infected birds. Antemortem diagnosis has traditionally involved direct visualization of organisms on wet-mount or gram-stained fecal preparations, cloacal and crop swabs, or by both methods; however, different in-clinic diagnostic techniques have never been compared to establish an optimum test for the identification of in an avian patient. We compared 5 microscopically evaluated diagnostic testing methods: fecal Gram's stain, direct fecal wet preparation, macro suspension technique, macro suspension with Gram's stain, and macro suspension stained with new methylene blue.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe anticipate that unmanned aerial vehicles will become popular wildlife survey platforms. Because detecting animals from the air is imperfect, we develop a mark-recapture line transect method using two digital cameras, possibly mounted on one aircraft, which cover the same area with a short time delay between them. Animal movement between the passage of the cameras introduces uncertainty in individual identity, so individual capture histories are unobservable and are treated as latent variables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiagnosis and prognosis of cancer are informed by the architecture inherent in cancer patient tissue sections. This architecture is typically identified by pathologists, yet advances in computational image analysis facilitate quantitative assessment of this structure. In this article, we develop a spatial point process approach to describe patterns in cell distribution within tissue samples taken from colorectal cancer (CRC) patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCapture-recapture methods for estimating wildlife population sizes almost always require their users to identify every detected animal. Many modern-day wildlife surveys detect animals without physical capture-visual detection by cameras is one such example. However, for every pair of detections, the surveyor faces a decision that is often fraught with uncertainty: are they linked to the same individual? An inability to resolve every such decision to a high degree of certainty prevents the use of standard capture-recapture methods, impeding the estimation of animal density.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmphotericin B is widely used for the treatment of Macrorhabdus ornithogaster infections. To date, however, there have been no randomized controlled trials confirming its efficacy where cure was confirmed by postmortem examination. To determine the efficacy of amphotericin B against M.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInorganic phosphate is the major bioavailable form of the essential nutrient phosphorus. However, the concentration of phosphate in most natural habitats is low enough to limit microbial growth. Under phosphate-depleted conditions some bacteria utilise phosphite and hypophosphite as alternative sources of phosphorus, but the molecular basis of reduced phosphorus acquisition from the environment is not fully understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSome animal species are hard to see but easy to hear. Standard visual methods for estimating population density for such species are often ineffective or inefficient, but methods based on passive acoustics show more promise. We develop spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) methods for territorial vocalising species, in which humans act as an acoustic detector array.
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