Collapse of terrestrial mammal food webs since the Late Pleistocene.

Food webs influence ecosystem diversity and functioning. Contemporary defaunation has reduced food web complexity, but simplification caused by past defaunation is difficult to reconstruct given the sparse paleorecord of predator-prey interactions. We identified changes to terrestrial mammal food webs globally over the past ~130,000 years using extinct and extant mammal traits, geographic ranges, observed predator-prey interactions, and deep learning models.

The effects of defaunation on plants' capacity to track climate change.

Half of all plant species rely on animals to disperse their seeds. Seed dispersal interactions lost through defaunation and gained during novel community assembly influence whether plants can adapt to climate change through migration. We develop trait-based models to predict pairwise interactions and dispersal function for fleshy-fruited plants globally.

Health monitoring in birds using bio-loggers and whole blood transcriptomics.

Monitoring and early detection of emerging infectious diseases in wild animals is of crucial global importance, yet reliable ways to measure immune status and responses are lacking for animals in the wild. Here we assess the usefulness of bio-loggers for detecting disease outbreaks in free-living birds and confirm detailed responses using leukocyte composition and large-scale transcriptomics. We simulated natural infections by viral and bacterial pathogens in captive mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), an important natural vector for avian influenza virus.

Accelerating homogenization of the global plant-frugivore meta-network.

Introductions of species by humans are causing the homogenization of species composition across biogeographic barriers. The ecological and evolutionary consequences of introduced species derive from their effects on networks of species interactions, but we lack a quantitative understanding of the impacts of introduced species on ecological networks and their biogeographic patterns globally. Here we address this data gap by analysing mutualistic seed-dispersal interactions from 410 local networks, encompassing 24,455 unique pairwise interactions between 1,631 animal and 3,208 plant species.

A Murine Model of Fetal Exposure to Maternal Inflammation to Study the Effects of Acute Chorioamnionitis on Newborn Intestinal Development.

Chorioamnionitis is a common precipitant of preterm birth and is associated with many of the morbidities of prematurity, including necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). However, a mechanistic link between these two conditions remains yet to be discovered. We have adopted a murine model of chorioamnionitis involving lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced fetal exposure to maternal inflammation (FEMI).

The changing landscape of SARS-CoV-2: Implications for the maternal-infant dyad.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents the greatest challenge to date faced by the medical community in the 21st century. The rate of rapid dissemination, magnitude of viral contagiousness, person to person transmission at an asymptomatic phase of illness pose a unique and dangerous challenge for all patients, including neonatal and obstetric patients. Although scientific understanding of the pathophysiology of the disease, nature of transmission, and efficacy of mitigation strategies is growing, neither a cure or vaccine have been developed.

Intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of intraspecific variation in seed dispersal are diverse and pervasive.

There is growing realization that intraspecific variation in seed dispersal can have important ecological and evolutionary consequences. However, we do not have a good understanding of the drivers or causes of intraspecific variation in dispersal, how strong an effect these drivers have, and how widespread they are across dispersal modes. As a first step to developing a better understanding, we present a broad, but not exhaustive, review of what is known about the drivers of intraspecific variation in seed dispersal, and what remains uncertain.

[Radium-223 for the treatment of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) : The androgen receptor-independent active agent in the therapeutic sequence].

Background: Radium-223 improves overall survival and preserves quality of life in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) and symptomatic bone metastases and no known visceral metastases. Radium-223 can be used in combination with a luteinizing hormone releasing hormone (LHRH) analogue and as part of a sequential treatment scheme if disease progresses after at least two prior lines of systemic mCRPC therapies or if no other available systemic treatment is eligible.

Objectives: Today physicians are faced with a previously unknown multitude and complexity of options for the treatment of mCRPC.

Fetal exposure to maternal inflammation interrupts murine intestinal development and increases susceptibility to neonatal intestinal injury.

Fetal exposure to chorioamnionitis can impact the outcomes of the developing fetus both at the time of birth and in the subsequent neonatal period. Infants exposed to chorioamnionitis have a higher incidence of gastrointestinal (GI) pathology, including necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC); however, the mechanism remains undefined. To simulate the fetal exposure to maternal inflammation (FEMI) induced by chorioamnionitis, pregnant mice (C57BL/6J, , or ) were injected intraperitoneally on embryonic day (E)15.

Animal movement drives variation in seed dispersal distance in a plant-animal network.

Frugivores play differing roles in shaping dispersal patterns yet seed dispersal distance is rarely quantified across entire communities. We model seed dispersal distance using gut passage times and bird movement for the majority (39 interactions) of known bird-tree interactions on the island of Saipan to highlight differences in seed dispersal distances provided by the five avian frugivores. One bird species was found to be a seed predator rather than a disperser.

Lipopolysaccharide-induced maternal inflammation induces direct placental injury without alteration in placental blood flow and induces a secondary fetal intestinal injury that persists into adulthood.

Problem: Premature birth complicates 10%-12% of deliveries. Infection and inflammation are the most common etiologies and are associated with increased offspring morbidity and mortality. We hypothesize that lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced maternal inflammation causes direct placenta injury and subsequent injury to the fetal intestine.

Seed dispersal as an ecosystem service: frugivore loss leads to decline of a socially valued plant, Capsicum frutescens.

Species interactions, both mutualistic and antagonistic, are widely recognized as providing important ecosystem services. Fruit-eating animals influence plant recruitment by increasing germination during gut passage and moving seeds away from conspecifics. However, relative to studies focused on the importance of frugivores for plant population maintenance, few studies target frugivores as ecosystem service providers, and frugivores are underappreciated as ecosystem service providers relative to other mutualists such as pollinators.

EANM guideline for radionuclide therapy with radium-223 of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

Radium Ra-223 dichloride (radium-223, Xofigo®) is a targeted alpha therapy approved for the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) with symptomatic bone metastases and no known visceral metastatic disease. Radium-223 is the first targeted alpha therapy in this indication providing a new treatment option, with evidence of a significant survival benefit, both in overall survival and in the time to the first symptomatic skeletal-related event. The skeleton is the most common metastatic site in patients with advanced prostate cancer.

Defaunation leads to interaction deficits, not interaction compensation, in an island seed dispersal network.

Following defaunation, the loss of interactions with mutualists such as pollinators or seed dispersers may be compensated through increased interactions with remaining mutualists, ameliorating the negative cascading impacts on biodiversity. Alternatively, remaining mutualists may respond to altered competition by reducing the breadth or intensity of their interactions, exacerbating negative impacts on biodiversity. Despite the importance of these responses for our understanding of the dynamics of mutualistic networks and their response to global change, the mechanism and magnitude of interaction compensation within real mutualistic networks remains largely unknown.

Clonal rolling circle amplification for on-chip DNA cluster generation.

Generation of monoclonal DNA clusters on a surface is a useful method for digital nucleic acid detection applications (e.g. microarray or next-generation sequencing).

Mutualistic strategies minimize coextinction in plant-disperser networks.

The global decline of mutualists such as pollinators and seed dispersers may cause negative direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity. Mutualistic network models used to understand the stability of mutualistic systems indicate that species with low partner diversity are most vulnerable to coextinction following mutualism disruption. However, existing models have not considered how species vary in their dependence on mutualistic interactions for reproduction or survival, overlooking the potential influence of this variation on species' coextinction vulnerability and on network stability.

Measuring the demographic impact of conspecific negative density dependence.

Rare plant species often suffer stronger conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD) in studies that assess the impact of local conspecific density on individual survival. All else equal, this causes a relative disadvantage among rare species that appears inconsistent with the role of CNDD in coexistence. The resolution to this apparent paradox is for lower species abundance to decrease the frequency of conspecific interactions sufficiently to outweigh the disadvantage of stronger CNDD.

Effects of an invasive predator cascade to plants via mutualism disruption.

Invasive vertebrate predators are directly responsible for the extinction or decline of many vertebrate species, but their indirect impacts often go unmeasured, potentially leading to an underestimation of their full impact. When invasives extirpate functionally important mutualists, dependent species are likely to be affected as well. Here, we show that the invasive brown treesnake, directly responsible for the extirpation of forest birds from the island of Guam, is also indirectly responsible for a severe decline in plant recruitment as a result of disrupting the fruit-frugivore mutualism.

[Therapy of bone metastases with radium-223. German guidelines].

This document describes the guideline for therapy of bone metastases with radium-223 ((223)Ra) published by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Wissenschaftlichen Medizinischen Fachgesellschaften in Germany (AWMF) under the auspices of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nuklearmedizin (DGN), Östereichische Gesellschaft für Nuklearmedizin (OGN), and Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Nuklearmedizin (SGNM). This guidance is based on an interdisciplinary consensus. These recommendations are a prerequisite for the quality management in the treatment of patients with bone metastases from prostate cancer using (223)Ra.

The mechanical defence advantage of small seeds.

Seed size and toughness affect seed predators, and size-dependent investment in mechanical defence could affect relationships between seed size and predation. We tested how seed toughness and mechanical defence traits (tissue density and protective tissue content) are related to seed size among tropical forest species. Absolute toughness increased with seed size.

Gut passage and secondary metabolites alter the source of post-dispersal predation for bird-dispersed chili seeds.

Plants can influence the source and severity of seed predation through various mechanisms; the use of secondary metabolites for chemical defense, for example, is well documented. Gut passage by frugivores can also reduce mortality of animal-dispersed seeds, although this mechanism has gained far less attention than secondary metabolites. Apart from influencing the severity of seed predation, gut passage may also influence the source of seed predation.