Seeing the fields through the weeds: introducing the WeedEco R package for comparing past and present arable farming systems using functional weed ecology.

Unlabelled: The functional ecology of arable weeds provides a way of comparing present-day and past farming regimes. This paper presents the R package WeedEco, an open-source resource which allows users to compare their archaeobotanical dataset against three previously published arable weed models to understand fertility, disturbance or a combination of both. The package provides functions for data organisation, classification and visualisation, allowing users to enter raw archaeobotanical data, obtain trait values from the functional trait dataset, conduct discriminant analysis and plot the results against the relevant present-day model.

A new functional ecological model reveals the nature of early plant management in southwest Asia.

The protracted domestication model posits that wild cereals in southwest Asia were cultivated over millennia before the appearance of domesticated cereals in the archaeological record. These 'pre-domestication cultivation' activities are widely understood as entailing annual cycles of soil tillage and sowing and are expected to select for domestic traits such as non-shattering ears. However, the reconstruction of these practices is mostly based on indirect evidence and speculation, raising the question of whether pre-domestication cultivation created arable environments that would select for domestic traits.

Phase II Study of Ponatinib in Advanced Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors: Efficacy, Safety, and Impact of Liquid Biopsy and Other Biomarkers.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate ponatinib for advanced gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST).

Patients And Methods: This single-arm phase II trial enrolled patients with metastatic and/or unresectable GIST with failure of prior tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) treatment into two cohorts based on presence or absence of KIT exon 11 (ex11) primary mutations. Patients initially received ponatinib 45 mg once daily.

Seed size, number and strategies in annual plants: a comparative functional analysis and synthesis.

Background And Aims: Plants depend fundamentally on establishment from seed. However, protocols in trait-based ecology currently estimate seed size but not seed number. This can be rectified.

Trait-based plant ecology a flawed tool in climate studies? The leaf traits of wild olive that pattern with climate are not those routinely measured.

Climate-related studies have generally focussed upon physiologically well-defined 'mechanistic' traits rather than 'functional' ones relating indirectly to resource capture. Nevertheless, field responses to climate are likely to typically include both 'mechanistic' specialization to climatic extremes and 'functional' strategies that optimize resource acquisition during less climatically-severe periods. Here, this hypothesis was tested.

Trade-offs between seed and leaf size (seed-phytomer-leaf theory): functional glue linking regenerative with life history strategies … and taxonomy with ecology?

Background And Aims: While the 'worldwide leaf economics spectrum' (Wright IJ, Reich PB, Westoby M, et al. 2004. The worldwide leaf economics spectrum.

An evolutionary perspective on leaf economics: phylogenetics of leaf mass per area in vascular plants.

In plant leaves, resource use follows a trade-off between rapid resource capture and conservative storage. This "worldwide leaf economics spectrum" consists of a suite of intercorrelated leaf traits, among which leaf mass per area, LMA, is one of the most fundamental as it indicates the cost of leaf construction and light-interception borne by plants. We conducted a broad-scale analysis of the evolutionary history of LMA across a large dataset of 5401 vascular plant species.

Gene expression patterns unveil a new level of molecular heterogeneity in colorectal cancer.

The recognition that colorectal cancer (CRC) is a heterogeneous disease in terms of clinical behaviour and response to therapy translates into an urgent need for robust molecular disease subclassifiers that can explain this heterogeneity beyond current parameters (MSI, KRAS, BRAF). Attempts to fill this gap are emerging. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TGCA) reported two main CRC groups, based on the incidence and spectrum of mutated genes, and another paper reported an EMT expression signature defined subgroup.

Long-term resistance to simulated climate change in an infertile grassland.

Climate shifts over this century are widely expected to alter the structure and functioning of temperate plant communities. However, long-term climate experiments in natural vegetation are rare and largely confined to systems with the capacity for rapid compositional change. In unproductive, grazed grassland at Buxton in northern England (U.

Specific leaf area and dry matter content estimate thickness in laminar leaves.

Background And Aims: Leaf thickness plays an important role in leaf and plant functioning, and relates to a species' strategy of resource acquisition and use. As such, it has been widely used for screening purposes in crop science and community ecology. However, since its measurement is not straightforward, a number of estimates have been proposed.