Articular cartilage is distinguished by the unique alignment of type II collagen, a feature crucial for its mechanical properties and function. This characteristic organization is established during postnatal development of the tissue, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this study, a potential mechanism for type II collagen alignment by cartilage-specific growth from within the tissue was investigated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRestoration methods that seed juvenile corals show promise as scalable interventions to promote population persistence through anthropogenic warming. However, challenges including predation by fishes can threaten coral survival. Coral-seeding devices with refugia from fishes offer potential solutions to limit predation-driven mortality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNearly a billion people depend on tropical seascapes. The need to ensure sustainable use of these vital areas is recognised, as one of 17 policy commitments made by world leaders, in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 ('Life below Water') of the United Nations. SDG 14 seeks to secure marine sustainability by 2030.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInsights into assemblages that can persist in extreme environments are still emerging. Ocean warming and acidification select against species with low physiological tolerance (trait-based 'filtering'). However, intraspecific trait variation can promote species adaptation and persistence, with potentially large effects on assemblage structure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCoral reefs are iconic ecosystems with immense ecological, economic and cultural value, but globally their carbonate-based skeletal construction is threatened by ocean acidification (OA). Identifying coral species that have specialised mechanisms to maintain high rates of calcification in the face of declining seawater pH is of paramount importance in predicting future species composition, and growth of coral reefs. Here, we studied multiple coral species from two distinct volcanic CO seeps in Papua New Guinea to assess their capacity to control their calcifying fluid (CF) chemistry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnthropogenic climate change is a rapidly intensifying selection pressure on biodiversity across the globe and, particularly, on the world's coral reefs. The rate of adaptation to climate change is proportional to the amount of phenotypic variation that can be inherited by subsequent generations (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLarge quantities of coal are transported through tropical regions; however, little is known about the sub-lethal effects of coal contamination on tropical marine organisms, including fish. Here, we measured aerobic metabolism and gill morphology in a planktivorous coral reef damselfish, Acanthochromis polyacanthus to elucidate the sub-lethal effects of suspended coal particles over a range of coal concentrations and exposure durations. Differences in the standard oxygen consumption rates (M) between control fish and fish exposed to coal particles (38 and 73 mg L) were minimal and generally not dose dependent; however, the M of fish exposed to 38 mg coal L (21 days) and 73 mg coal L (31 days) were both significantly higher than the M of control fish.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe discovery of multi-species synchronous spawning of scleractinian corals on the Great Barrier Reef in the 1980s stimulated an extraordinary effort to document spawning times in other parts of the globe. Unfortunately, most of these data remain unpublished which limits our understanding of regional and global reproductive patterns. The Coral Spawning Database (CSD) collates much of these disparate data into a single place.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCoral reef replenishment is threatened by global climate change and local water-quality degradation, including smothering of coral recruits by sediments generated by anthropogenic activities. Here we show that the ability of Acropora millepora recruits to remove sediments diminishes under future climate conditions, leading to increased mortality. Recruits raised under future climate scenarios for fourteen weeks (highest treatment: +1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a severe, progressive neuromuscular disorder caused by reading frame disrupting mutations in the DMD gene leading to absence of functional dystrophin. Antisense oligonucleotide (AON)-mediated exon skipping is a therapeutic approach aimed at restoring the reading frame at the pre-mRNA level, allowing the production of internally truncated partly functional dystrophin proteins. AONs work in a sequence specific manner, which warrants generating humanized mouse models for preclinical tests.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStructurally complex habitats tend to contain more species and higher total abundances than simple habitats. This ecological paradigm is grounded in first principles: species richness scales with area, and surface area and niche density increase with three-dimensional complexity. Here we present a geometric basis for surface habitats that unifies ecosystems and spatial scales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To evaluate the potential clinical and technical utility to manage in practice the use of a robotic MRI in-bore-targeted prostate biopsies in the current work-up of prostate cancer diagnosis.
Methods: Thirty patients with a single cancer suspicious lesion interpreted on MRI using PI-RADSv2.1 category ≥ 3 underwent in-bore robotic transrectal MRI remote-controlled-guided biopsy.
Mutualisms play a critical role in ecological communities; however, the importance and prevalence of mutualistic associations can be modified by external stressors. On coral reefs, elevated sediment deposition can be a major stressor reducing the health of corals and reef resilience. Here, we investigated the influence of severe sedimentation on the mutualistic relationship between small damselfishes ( and ) and their coral host ().
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe disturbance regimes of ecosystems are changing, and prospects for continued recovery remain unclear. New assemblages with altered species composition may be deficient in key functional traits. Alternatively, important traits may be sustained by species that replace those in decline (response diversity).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCoral reefs are increasingly affected by the consequences of global change such as increasing temperatures or pollution. Lately, microplastics (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objective of our study was to analyze the feasibility and potential role of robotic-assisted transrectal MRI-guided biopsy for the diagnosis of prostate cancer. A total of 57 patients (mean age, 67 ± 6 [SD] years; age range, 57-83 years; mean prostate-specific antigen level, 10.7 ± 6.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
August 2019
Species have evolved different mechanisms to cope with spatial and temporal temperature variability. Species with broad geographical distributions may be thermal generalists that perform well across a broad range of temperatures, or they might contain subpopulations of locally adapted thermal specialists. We quantified the variation in thermal performance of two coral species, Porites cylindrica and Acropora spp.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLand-based sources contribute approximately 80% of anthropogenic debris in marine environments. A main pathway is believed to be rivers and storm-water systems, yet this input is rarely quantified. We aimed to quantify the abundance of land-based debris entering a river system through storm drains in an urban area of tropical Australia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChanges in disturbance regimes due to climate change are increasingly challenging the capacity of ecosystems to absorb recurrent shocks and reassemble afterwards, escalating the risk of widespread ecological collapse of current ecosystems and the emergence of novel assemblages. In marine systems, the production of larvae and recruitment of functionally important species are fundamental processes for rebuilding depleted adult populations, maintaining resilience and avoiding regime shifts in the face of rising environmental pressures. Here we document a regional-scale shift in stock-recruitment relationships of corals along the Great Barrier Reef-the world's largest coral reef system-following unprecedented back-to-back mass bleaching events caused by global warming.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlobal environmental change has the potential to disrupt well established species interactions, with impacts on nutrient cycling and ecosystem function. On coral reefs, fish living within the branches of coral colonies can promote coral performance, and it has been hypothesized that the enhanced water flow and nutrients provided by fish to corals could ameliorate coral bleaching. The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of small, aggregating damselfish on the health of their host corals (physiology, recovery, and survival) before, during, and after a thermal-bleaching event.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is growing interest to implement multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) and MR-guided biopsy (MRGB) for biopsy-naïve men with suspected prostate cancer.
Objective: Primary objective was to compare and evaluate an MRI pathway and a transrectal ultrasound-guided biopsy (TRUSGB) pathway in biopsy-naïve men with prostate-specific antigen levels of ≥3ng/ml.
Design, Setting, And Population: A prospective, multicenter, powered, comparative effectiveness study included 626 biopsy-naïve patients (from February 2015 to February 2018).
Sustaining ecological functions as biodiversity changes will be a major challenge in the 21st century [1]. However, our understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function is still emerging on tropical coral reefs [2], where reef-building corals form highly productive assemblages [3, 4] and species respond in different ways to their neighbors [5] and their environment (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhototrophic sessile organisms, such as reef corals, adjust their photosynthetic apparatus to optimize the balance of light capture versus protection in response to variable light availability (photoacclimation). In shallow marine environments, daily light integrals (DLI) can vary several-fold in response to water clarity and clouds. This laboratory study investigated the responses of two coral species to fluctuations in DLI.
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