Fine-scale monitoring and mapping of biodiversity and ecosystem services reveals multiple synergies and few tradeoffs in urban green space management.

Urban watersheds can play a critical role in supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services in a rapidly changing world. However, managing for multiple environmental and social objectives in urban landscapes is challenging, especially if the optimization of one ecosystem service conflicts with another. Urban ecology research has frequently been limited to a few indicators - typically either biodiversity or ecosystem service indices - making tradeoffs and synergies difficult to assess.

Microarrays of lentiviruses for gene function screens in immortalized and primary cells.

Here we describe lentivirus-infected cell microarrays for the high-throughput screening of gene function in mammalian cells. To create these arrays, we cultured mammalian cells on glass slides 'printed' with lentiviruses pseudotyped as vesicular stomatitis virus glycoprotein, which encode short hairpin RNA or cDNA. Cells that land on the printed 'features' become infected with lentivirus, creating a living array of stably transduced cell clusters within a monolayer of uninfected cells.

Automated oscillometric determination of the ankle-brachial index provides accuracy necessary for office practice.

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) remains underdiagnosed by primary care and cardiovascular physicians. The office-based assessment of PAD is limited by the need for specialized equipment and the time required for performance of the ankle-brachial index (ABI). We explored whether the accuracy of automated ABI measurement by oscillometry compared favorably with the gold-standard method using continuous-wave Doppler ultrasound.

RNAi living-cell microarrays for loss-of-function screens in Drosophila melanogaster cells.

RNA interference (RNAi)-mediated loss-of-function screening in Drosophila melanogaster tissue culture cells is a powerful method for identifying the genes underlying cell biological functions and for annotating the fly genome. Here we describe the development of living-cell microarrays for screening large collections of RNAi-inducing double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) in Drosophila cells. The features of the microarrays consist of clusters of cells 200 mum in diameter, each with an RNAi-mediated depletion of a specific gene product.