Applying ecosystem services for pre-market environmental risk assessments of regulated stressors.

Ecosystem services (ES) are the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. Investigating the environment through an ES framework has gained wide acceptance in the international scientific community and is applied by policymakers to protect biodiversity and safeguard the sustainability of ecosystems. This approach can enhance the ecological and societal relevance of pre-market/prospective environmental risk assessments (ERAs) of regulated stressors by: (1) informing the derivation of operational protection goals; (2) enabling the integration of environmental and human health risk assessments; (3) facilitating horizontal integration of policies and regulations; (4) leading to more comprehensive and consistent environmental protection; (5) articulating the utility of, and trade-offs involved in, environmental decisions; and (6) enhancing the transparency of risk assessment results and the decisions based upon them.

Matrotrophic viviparity constrains microbiome acquisition during gestation in a live-bearing cockroach, .

The vertical transmission of microbes from mother to offspring is critical to the survival, development, and health of animals. Invertebrate systems offer unique opportunities to conduct studies on microbiome-development-reproduction dynamics since reproductive modes ranging from oviparity to multiple types of viviparity are found in these animals. One such invertebrate is the live-bearing cockroach, .

Phenotypic selection on ponderosa pine seed and seedling traits in the field under three experimentally manipulated drought treatments.

Drought-related selection during seedling emergence and early development may play a strong role in adaptation. Yet this process is poorly understood and particularly so in relation to ongoing climate change. To evaluate drought-induced differences in selection during early life stages, a total of 50 maternal families sampled from three climatically disparate ponderosa pine ( Doug.

Response of CD4+ T cells from myasthenic patients and healthy subjects of biosynthetic and synthetic sequences of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor.

We investigated the suitability of pools of overlapping synthetic peptides spanning the complete alpha 1 subunit sequence of the human muscle acetylcholine receptor (AChR) (alpha 1 pool) or the extracellular domain (residues 1-218, alpha 11-218 pool), and of biosynthetic alpha 1 constructs from E. coli, as stimulants of human CD4+ cells from myasthenia gravis (MG) patients and healthy subjects. A construct corresponding to residues alpha 11-209 was obtained as solubilized inclusion bodies (ib alpha 11-209), or purified by SDS gel electrophoresis (pur alpha 11-209).

Sequence of lamprey vitellogenin. Implications for the lipovitellin crystal structure.

The amino acid sequence of lamprey vitellogenin has been predicted from the nucleotide sequence of cloned cDNA. The sites of proteolytic cleavage that produce the lipovitellin complex from the vitellogenin have been located by comparing the N-terminal sequences of two lamprey lipovitellin polypeptides with the predicted sequence. These results also confirm that the vitellogenin sequence derived here corresponds to the lipovitellin complex for which the crystal structure has been solved previously.