Breeding species for resistance to disease in the Iberian Peninsula.

Alders are widely distributed riparian trees in Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. Recently, a strong reduction of alder stands has been detected in Europe due to infection by species (Stramenopila kingdom). This infection causes a disease known as alder dieback, characterized by leaf yellowing, dieback of branches, increased fruit production, and bark necrosis in the collar and basal part of the stem.

Rationale and design of the PHYSICALFAV trial: a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effect of preoperative isometric exercise on vascular calibre and maturation of autologous arteriovenous fistulas.

Background: A good vascular access (VA) is vital for haemodialysis (HD) patients. HD with an autologous arteriovenous fistula (AVF) is associated with higher survival, lower health care costs and fewer complications. Although a distal forearm AVF is the best option, not all patients are good candidates for this approach and the primary failure rate ranges from 20% to 50%.

Inter-genotypic differences in drought tolerance of maritime pine are modified by elevated [CO2].

Background And Aims: Despite the importance of growth [CO 2 ] and water availability for tree growth and survival, little information is available on how the interplay of these two factors can shape intraspecific patterns of functional variation in tree species, particularly for conifers. The main objective of the study was to test whether the range of realized drought tolerance within the species can be affected by elevated [CO 2 ].

Methods: Intraspecific variability in leaf gas exchange, growth rate and other leaf functional traits were studied in clones of maritime pine.

Spanish norms for completion of restricted length word stems.

This study presents a normative database of Spanish restricted length word stems that provides useful information for the selection of stimuli in memory experiments with Word Stem Completion (WSC) tasks. The database includes indices relative to stems (total baseline completion, priming baseline completion, priming, number of completions, ratio between given and deleted letters, and syllabic structure), and indices relative to characteristics of the words used to obtain the stems (frequency, familiarity, number of meanings, length, number of syllables, arousal, and valence). A WSC task was performed by 515 participants to calculate priming and baseline indices.

The Effects of Linguistic Context on Word Recognition in Noise by Elderly Listeners Using Spanish Sentence Lists (SSL).

This study evaluated the effects of the linguistic context on the recognition of words in noise in older listeners using the Spanish Sentence Lists. These sentences were developed based on the approach of the SPIN test for the English language, which contains high and low predictability (HP and LP) sentences. In addition, the relative contribution of peripheral hearing sensitivity, measured by pure-tone hearing thresholds (PTA), to the performance on both types of sentences was assessed in a regression analysis.

Novel conserved segments are associated with differential expression patterns for Pinaceae dehydrins.

Dehydrins are thought to play an essential role in the response, acclimation and tolerance to different abiotic stresses, such as cold and drought. These proteins have been classified into five groups according to the presence of conserved and repeated motifs in their amino acid sequence. Due to their putative functions in the response to stress, dehydrins have been often used as candidate genes in studies on population variability and local adaptation to environmental conditions.

EuroPineDB: a high-coverage web database for maritime pine transcriptome.

Background: Pinus pinaster is an economically and ecologically important species that is becoming a woody gymnosperm model. Its enormous genome size makes whole-genome sequencing approaches are hard to apply. Therefore, the expressed portion of the genome has to be characterised and the results and annotations have to be stored in dedicated databases.

Test of Spanish sentences to measure speech intelligibility in noise conditions.

This article describes the development of a test for measuring the intelligibility of speech in noise for the Spanish language, similar to the test developed by Kalikow, Stevens, and Elliot (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 5, 1337-1360, 1977) for the English language. The test consists of six forms, each comprising 25 high-predictability (HP) sentences and 25 low-predictability (LP) sentences. The sentences were used in a perceptual task to assess their intelligibility in babble noise across three different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions in a sample of 474 normal-hearing listeners.

Lists of Spanish sentences with equivalent predictability, phonetic content, length, and frequency of the last word.

This paper presents a pool of Spanish sentences designed for use in cognitive research and speech processing in circumstances in which the effects of context are relevant. These lists of sentences are divided into six lists of 25 equivalent high-predictability sentences and six lists of 25 low-predictability sentences according to the extent to which the last word can be predicted by the preceding context. These lists were also equivalent in phonetic content, length and frequency of the last word.

Speech recognition and working memory capacity in young-elderly listeners: effects of hearing sensitivity.

Young normal-hearing listeners and young-elderly listeners between 55 and 65 years of age, ranging from near-normal hearing to moderate hearing loss, were compared using different speech recognition tasks (consonant recognition in quiet and in noise, and time-compressed sentences) and working memory tasks (serial word recall and digit ordering). The results showed that the group of young-elderly listeners performed worse on both the speech recognition and working memory tasks than the young listeners. However, when pure-tone audiometric thresholds were used as a covariate variable, the significant differences between groups disappeared.

Influence of articulation rate on two memory tasks in young and older adults.

This study investigated the relation between phonological loop functioning and age. Phonological loop is a time-based subsystem of the Working Memory Model of Baddeley and Wilson, which uses rehearsal of information as an active process to avoid phonological decay. Performance differences were examined between young and older adults in two speech-based memory tasks, such as the immediate serial recall of words and the Digit Ordering Task.

"Contrasting patterns of selection at Pinus pinaster Ait. Drought stress candidate genes as revealed by genetic differentiation analyses".

The importance of natural selection for shaping adaptive trait differentiation among natural populations of allogamous tree species has long been recognized. Determining the molecular basis of local adaptation remains largely unresolved, and the respective roles of selection and demography in shaping population structure are actively debated. Using a multilocus scan that aims to detect outliers from simulated neutral expectations, we analyzed patterns of nucleotide diversity and genetic differentiation at 11 polymorphic candidate genes for drought stress tolerance in phenotypically contrasted Pinus pinaster Ait.

[Difficulties understanding compressed speech in elderly listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss].

Objective: In this work we evaluated the difficulties in understanding rapid speech (normal, fast and very fast rates) in elderly listeners with and without hearing loss (presbycusis and moderate hearing loss). Rapid speech is common in daily communication, yet few studies have been conducted to assess this problem in Spanish-speaking listeners, as has been done for English speakers.

Material And Method: We compared the recognition of sentences presented at normal, fast, and very fast speech rates in 3 groups of listeners.

Phylogeography: English elm is a 2,000-year-old Roman clone.

The outbreak of Dutch elm disease in the 1970s ravaged European elm populations, killing more than 25 million trees in Britain alone; the greatest impact was on Ulmus procera, otherwise known as the English elm. Here we use molecular and historical information to show that this elm derives from a single clone that the Romans transported from Italy to the Iberian peninsula, and from there to Britain, for the purpose of supporting and training vines. Its highly efficient vegetative reproduction and its inability to set seeds have preserved this clone unaltered for 2,000 years as the core of the English elm population--and the preponderance of this susceptible variety may have favoured a rapid spread of the disease.

Randomized comparison of 6-mm straight grafts versus 6- to 8-mm tapered grafts for brachial-axillary dialysis access.

Objective: This report presents the results of a prospective randomized study that compared 2 grafts of different diameter: 6 mm, and 8 mm tapered to 6 mm at the arterial site, placed in the upper arm for hemodialysis in a selected population of patients younger than 71 years without diabetes.

Methods: Seventy consecutive patients younger than 71 years without diabetes who required an upper arm graft between January 1997 and January 2002 and without previous access in the same limb were randomly allocated to receive either a 6-mm graft or 6- to 8-mm graft. Graft flow was measured every 3 months with the Doppler dilution technique.

Acoustic analysis of pathological voices compressed with MPEG system.

The MPEG-1 Layer 3 compression schema of audio signal, commonly known as mp3, has caused a great impact in recent years as it has reached high compression rates while conserving a high sound quality. Music and speech samples compressed at high bitrates are perceptually indistinguishable from the original samples, but very little was known about how compression acoustically affects the voice signal. A previous work with normal voices showed a high fidelity at high-bitrate compressions both in voice parameters and the amplitude-frequency spectrum.