Paddy fields located in water storage zones could take over the wetland plant community.

Land use change could affect not only local species richness but also community assemblies. Essentially, the possible patterns of plant community assemblies are nonrandom species loss (nestedness) and species turnover. Plant community assemblies in human-mediated land use have a combination of both nestedness and turnover.

Stochastic tunneling in the colonization of mutualistic organisms: primary succession by mycorrhizal plants.

In mutualism under spatial structure, asynchrony between the dispersions of the interacting species can be a key determinant of their dynamics. We focused on the plant-mycorrhizal fungi system to theoretically analyze the colonization process by calculating the probability of colony establishment under environmental fluctuation. This can be considered a joint process of two sub-processes before and after the association between the host plant and the mycorrhizal fungi in a novel habitat.

Three cases of malignant melanoma arising on burn scars.

It is well known that up to 2% of chronic burn scar lesions can transform into malignant tumors. Most of them are squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and, more occasionally, basal cell carcinoma (BCC). The incidence of malignant melanoma (MM) is extremely low.

CD56: a useful marker for diagnosing Merkel cell carcinoma.

Background: Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) of the skin is an aggressive but rare malignant neuroendocrine tumor. For its pathological diagnosis, we use a panel of immunohistochemical markers, such as cytokeratin 20 (CK 20), epithelial membrane antigen (EMA), chromogranin A, neuron specific enolase (NSE), synaptophysin, and Leu7 (CD57) to demonstrate its epithelial and neuroendocrine features. CD56, or neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM), has been demonstrated recently as the tumor marker of the pulmonary neuroendocrine cell system.