Publications by authors named "M J Ridout"

In agriculture, horticulture and plantation forestry, Bacillus species are the most commonly applied antagonists and biopesticides, targeting plant pathogens and insect pests, respectively. Bacillus isolates are also used as bacterial plant biostimulants, or BPBs. Such useful isolates of Bacillus are typically sourced from soil.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores how muscle contraction speed is affected by body size in mammals, finding that larger species have slower muscle contractions due to specific changes in myosin isoforms.
  • Researchers analyzed 798 myosin II isoform sequences and found a correlation between body mass and variations in the motor domain of key myosin isoforms in adults.
  • A specific modification of β-myosin was tested by altering human β-myosin to resemble rat β-myosin, resulting in significantly faster contraction and ADP release, suggesting that myosin adaptations help larger mammals achieve slower contraction rates and heart rates.
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Plants harbor a diverse community of microbes, whose interactions with their host and each other can influence plant health and fitness. While microbiota in plant vegetative tissues has been extensively studied, less is known about members of the seed microbiota. We used culture-based surveys to identify bacteria and fungi found in the seeds of the model tree, , collected from different sites.

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The conventional definition of endophytes is that they do not cause disease, whereas pathogens do. Complicating this convention, however, is the poorly explored phenomenon that some microbes are endophytes in some plants but pathogens in others. Black cottonwood or poplar () and wheat () are common wild and crop plants, respectively, in the Pacific Northwest USA.

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Background: Accurate prognostication is essential in caring for palliative patients. Various prognostication tools have been validated in many settings in the past few years. Biomarkers of inflammation (albumin and C-reactive protein) are combined to calculate the modified Glasgow prognostic score (mGPS), which has been found to be a simple prognostic tool in this population.

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