Publications by authors named "W A McDowell"

Riverine NO and N fluxes, key components of the global nitrogen budget, are known to be influenced by river size (often represented by average river width), yet the specific mechanisms behind these effects remain unclear. This study examined how environmental and microbial factors influenced sediment NO and N fluxes across rivers with varying widths (2.8 to 2,000 m) in China.

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Unlabelled: Climate and atmospheric deposition interact with watershed properties to drive dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in lakes. Because drivers of DOC concentration are inter-related and interact, it is challenging to assign a single dominant driver to changes in lake DOC concentration across spatiotemporal scales. Leveraging forty years of data across sixteen lakes, we used structural equation modeling to show that the impact of climate, as moderated by watershed characteristics, has become more dominant in recent decades, superseding the influence of sulfate deposition that was observed in the 1980s.

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Article Synopsis
  • Soils act as major storage for mercury, a harmful pollutant accumulating from human activities and eventually deposited on land.
  • Using fallout radionuclide chronometry, researchers measured how quickly mercury builds up in various soil types and found that most soils effectively retain it.
  • The study suggests that only certain coniferous soils may release significant amounts of mercury back into the atmosphere, challenging existing models that predict high re-emission rates from soil.
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Target-based approaches have traditionally been used in the search for new anti-infective molecules. Target selection process, a critical step in Drug Discovery, identifies targets that are essential to establish or maintain the infection, tractable to be susceptible for inhibition, selective towards their human ortholog and amenable for large scale purification and high throughput screening. The work presented herein validates the Plasmodium falciparum mRNA 5' triphosphatase (PfPRT1), the first enzymatic step to cap parasite nuclear mRNAs, as a candidate target for the development of new antimalarial compounds.

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The forests of central Europe have undergone remarkable transitions in the past 40 years as air quality has improved dramatically. Retrospective analysis of Norway spruce (Picea abies) tree rings in the Czech Republic shows that air pollution (e.g.

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