Archaeology demonstrates sustainable ancestral Coast Salish salmon stewardship over thousands of years.

Salmon are an essential component of the ecosystem in Tsleil-Waututh Nation's traditional, ancestral, and contemporary unceded territory, centred on present-day Burrard Inlet, BC, Canada, where Tsleil-Waututh people have been harvesting salmon, along with a wide variety of other fishes, for millennia. Tsleil-Waututh Nation is a Coast Salish community that has called the Inlet home since time immemorial. This research assesses the continuity and sustainability of the salmon fishery at təmtəmíxʷtən, an ancestral Tsleil-Waututh settlement in the Inlet, over thousands of years before European contact (1792 CE).

Indigenous sex-selective salmon harvesting demonstrates pre-contact marine resource management in Burrard Inlet, British Columbia, Canada.

To gain insight into pre-contact Coast Salish fishing practices, we used new palaeogenetic analytical techniques to assign sex identifications to salmonid bones from four archaeological sites in Burrard Inlet (Tsleil-Waut), British Columbia, Canada, dating between about 2300-1000 BP (ca. 400 BCE-CE 1200). Our results indicate that male chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) were preferentially targeted at two of the four sampled archaeological sites.

Genomic and Secondary Metabolite Analyses of Streptomyces sp. 2AW Provide Insight into the Evolution of the Cycloheximide Pathway.

The dearth of new antibiotics in the face of widespread antimicrobial resistance makes developing innovative strategies for discovering new antibiotics critical for the future management of infectious disease. Understanding the genetics and evolution of antibiotic producers will help guide the discovery and bioengineering of novel antibiotics. We discovered an isolate in Alaskan boreal forest soil that had broad antimicrobial activity.

Xyolide, a bioactive nonenolide from an Amazonian endophytic fungus, .

Endophytes isolated from tropical plants represent a largely untapped reservoir of bioactive secondary metabolites. We screened a library of fungal endophyte extracts for inhibition of the plant pathogen, , and purified an active compound using bioassay-guided fractionation. A new nonenolide, ()-4--succinyl-7,8-dihydroxy-9-heptyl-nonen-9-olide, was isolated and named xyolide.

Replication of biosynthetic reactions enables efficient synthesis of A-factor, a γ-butyrolactone autoinducer from Streptomyces griseus.

We report a concise synthesis of A-factor, the prototypical γ-butyrolactone signalling compound of Streptomyces bacteria. In analogy to enzymatic reactions in A-factor biosynthesis, our synthesis features a tandem esterification-Knoevenagel condensation yielding a 2-acyl butenolide and a surprising, chemoselective conjugate reduction of this α,β-unsaturated carbonyl compound using sodium cyanoborohydride.

What drives the evolution of hunter-gatherer subsistence technology? A reanalysis of the risk hypothesis with data from the Pacific Northwest.

Recent studies have suggested that the decisions that hunter-gatherers make about the diversity and complexity of their subsistence toolkits are strongly affected by risk of resource failure. However, the risk proxies and samples employed in these studies are potentially problematic. With this in mind, we retested the risk hypothesis with data from hunter-gatherer populations who lived in the northwest coast and plateau regions of the Pacific Northwest during the early contact period.

Efficient synthesis of a peculiar vicinal diamine semiochemical from Streptomyces natalensis.

The pimaricin-inducing (PI) factor, produced by Streptomyces natalensis is a proposed pheromone with a peculiar vicinal diamine structure. The first synthesis of this molecule is reported. It features oxidative dimerization of an aci-nitro anion derived from tris(hydroxymethyl)nitromethane and disproportionation catalyst-facilitated hydrogenation of the resulting vicinal tertiary dinitro compound.