Plant Seeds Commonly Host Bacillus spp., Potential Antagonists of Phytopathogens.

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.

Culturable Seed Microbiota of .

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.

Leaf Endophytes of Act as Pathogens of Neighboring Plant Species.

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.

Modified Glasgow Prognostic Score (mGPS) for Prognostication of Adult Oncology Patients With Palliative Intent in a Regional Victorian Hospital, Australia.

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.

Isolation, Characterization, and Pathogenicity of Two Pathovars from Seeds.

is a ubiquitous plant pathogen, infecting both woody and herbaceous plants and resulting in devastating agricultural crop losses. Characterized by a remarkable specificity for plant hosts, pathovars utilize a number of virulence factors including the type III secretion system and effector proteins to elicit disease in a particular host species. Here, two strains were isolated from diseased seeds.

Structural stability of liposome-stabilized oil-in-water pickering emulsions and their fate during in vitro digestion.

Most current research on food-relevant Pickering emulsions has been conducted using inorganic or food-compatible organic particles as emulsifiers. A key challenge is maintaining a favourable structure while being able to resist displacement or destabilisation by surfactants and controlling transport of substrates during digestion. Liposome stabilised emulsions have demonstrated some potential for being smart, responsive delivery systems for poorly available bioactives and drugs.

Effects of Antagonists on Mycotoxins of Seedborne spp. in Sweet Corn.

species coexist as toxigenic, systemic pathogens in sweet corn seed production in southwestern Idaho, USA. We hypothesized that fungal antagonists of seedborne would differentially alter production of mycotoxins directly and/or systemically. We challenged the complex by in vitro antagonism trials and in situ silk and seed inoculations with fungal antagonists.

Sydowia polyspora is both a Foliar Endophyte and a Preemergent Seed Pathogen in Pinus ponderosa.

Poor seedling performance and reduced seed emergence are often ascribed to known pathogens that cause low seedling recruitment and poor seed emergence in forest nurseries and regeneration plantings. On the other hand, foliar endophytes are often overlooked as a source of poor emergence or tree seedling disease. Here, we show that an endophytic fungus common to the foliar microbiome of Pinus ponderosa acts as a cryptic pathogen in delaying emergence.

Fish Oil Emulsions Stabilized with Caseinate Glycated by Dextran: Physicochemical Stability and Gastrointestinal Fate.

Incorporation of fish oil containing ω-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) into functional foods remains challenging. In this study, caseinate and glycoconjugates (CD6, CD40, CD70, CD100) of caseinate to dextrans of different molecular weights (D6, D40, D70, D100 kDa) were used to stabilize fish oil emulsions, and the impact on physicochemical stability and gastrointestinal fate was investigated. The glycoconjugate of CD6 exhibited significantly higher conjugation efficiency, lower surface hydrophobicity ( H0), and lower surface activity than other glycoconjugates.

Prognosis prediction with two calculations of Palliative Prognostic Index: further prospective validation in hospice cancer patients with multicentre study.

Objectives: In palliative care settings, predicting prognosis is important for patients and clinicians. The Palliative Prognostic Index (PPI), a prognostic tool calculated using clinical indices alone has been validated within cancer population. This study was to further test the discriminatory ability of the PPI (ie, its ability to determine whether a subject will live more or less than a certain amount of time) in a larger sample but with a palliative care context and to compare predictions at two different points in time.

The power of monitoring: optimizing survey designs to detect occupancy changes in a rare amphibian population.

Biodiversity conservation requires reliable species assessments and rigorously designed surveys. However, determining the survey effort required to reliably detect population change can be challenging for rare, cryptic and elusive species. We used a tropical bromeliad-dwelling frog as a model system to explore a cost-effective sampling design that optimizes the chances of detecting a population decline.

3-Dimensional Facial Analysis-Facing Precision Public Health.

Precision public health is a new field driven by technological advances that enable more precise descriptions and analyses of individuals and population groups, with a view to improving the overall health of populations. This promises to lead to more precise clinical and public health practices, across the continuum of prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment. A phenotype is the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of a genotype with the environment.

Efficient occupancy model-fitting for extensive citizen-science data.

Appropriate large-scale citizen-science data present important new opportunities for biodiversity modelling, due in part to the wide spatial coverage of information. Recently proposed occupancy modelling approaches naturally incorporate random effects in order to account for annual variation in the composition of sites surveyed. In turn this leads to Bayesian analysis and model fitting, which are typically extremely time consuming.

Bionanocomposite films based on polysaccharides from banana peels.

Pectin and cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) isolated from banana peels were used to prepare films. The effects of a reinforcing phase (CNCs) and a crosslinker (citric acid, CA) on properties of pectin films were studied. Glycerol-plasticized films were prepared by casting, with different CNC contents (0-10wt%), with or without CA.

Fungal endophytes: modifiers of plant disease.

Many recent studies have demonstrated that non-pathogenic fungi within plant microbiomes, i.e., endophytes ("endo" = within, "phyte" = plant), can significantly modify the expression of host plant disease.

Accuracy of prognosis prediction by PPI in hospice inpatients with cancer: a multi-centre prospective study.

The Palliative Prognostic Index (PPI) is a prognostication tool for palliative care patients based on clinical indices developed in Japan and further validated by one study in the UK. The aim of this study was to test its prediction accuracy in a large inpatient hospice sample. The admitting doctor in three inpatient hospices calculated the PPI score on admission.

Temperature- and pH-Dependent Shattering: Insoluble Fatty Ammonium Phosphate Films at Water-Oil Interfaces.

We study the films formed by tetradecylamine (TDA) at the water-dodecane interface in the presence of hydrogen phosphate ions. Using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), interfacial shear rheology, confocal fluorescence microscopy, cryo-scanning electron microscopy (cryo-SEM), and small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), we find that between pH 5 and 8 tetradecylammonium cations bind to hydrogen phosphate anions to form needle-shaped crystallites of tetradecylammonium hydrogen phosphate (TAHP). These crystallites self-assemble into films with a range of morphologies; below pH 7, they form brittle, continuous sheets, and at pH 8, they form lace-like networks that deform plastically under shear.

Interaction of transglutaminase with adsorbed and spread films of β-casein and к-casein.

Enzymes can be used to enable a specific and controlled approach for structural modifications of protein networks in food technology. Enzymatically induced cross-links between proteins in the continuous phase and/or at interfaces result in better stabilisation and enhanced material properties in foams and emulsions. In this work the interfacial properties of β-casein and к-casein films were investigated with a special focus on the mechanism of transglutaminase (TG) induced cross-linking at the air/water interface.

Effect of substituent pattern and molecular weight of cellulose ethers on interactions with different bile salts.

Some known mechanisms proposed for the reduction of blood cholesterol by dietary fibre are: binding with bile salts in the duodenum and prevention of lipid absorption, which can be partially related with the bile salt binding. In order to gain new insights into the mechanisms of the binding of dietary fibre to bile salts, the goal of this work is to study the main interactions between cellulose derivatives and two types of bile salts. Commercial cellulose ethers: methyl (MC), hydroxypropyl (HPC) and hydroxypropylmethyl cellulose (HPMC), have been chosen as dietary fibre due to their highly functional properties important in manufactured food products.

Computational aspects of N-mixture models.

The N-mixture model is widely used to estimate the abundance of a population in the presence of unknown detection probability from only a set of counts subject to spatial and temporal replication (Royle, 2004, Biometrics 60, 105-115). We explain and exploit the equivalence of N-mixture and multivariate Poisson and negative-binomial models, which provides powerful new approaches for fitting these models. We show that particularly when detection probability and the number of sampling occasions are small, infinite estimates of abundance can arise.

The adsorption-desorption behaviour and structure function relationships of bile salts.

The digestion of dietary components in the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract is a complex, dynamic, inherently heterogeneous process. A key aspect of the digestion of lipid in the GI tract is the combined action of bile salts, lipase and colipase in hydrolysing and solubilising dispersed lipid. The bile salts are a mixture of steroid acid conjugates with surfactant properties.

Accuracy of prognosis prediction by PPI in hospice inpatients with cancer: a multi-centre prospective study.

The Palliative Prognostic Index (PPI) is a prognostication tool for palliative care patients based on clinical indices developed in Japan and further validated by one study in the UK. The aim of this study was to test its prediction accuracy in a large inpatient hospice sample. The admitting doctor in three inpatient hospices calculated the PPI score on admission.

Structural characterisation of parotid and whole mouth salivary pellicles adsorbed onto DPI and QCMD hydroxyapatite sensors.

In this study we investigated the differences in the properties of pellicles formed from stimulated parotid saliva (PS), which contains little or no mucin; and stimulated whole mouth saliva (WMS), which contains mainly two types of mucin: MUC5B and MUC7. By contacting WMS and PS with quartz-crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) and dual polarisation interferometer (DPI) hydroxyapatite (the main component of enamel) coated sensors, we observed the formation and structure of the respective salivary pellicles. As this was the first time that DPI hydroxyapatite sensors have been used to measure salivary pellicle adsorption; the techniques combined allowed us to measure the hydrated mass, dry mass, thickness and viscoelastic properties of the pellicle; but also to record the density of the PS and WMS formed pellicles.