Acidic pH promotes lipopolysaccharide modification and alters colonization in a bacteria-animal mutualism.

Environmental pH can be an important cue for symbiotic bacteria as they colonize their eukaryotic hosts. Using the model mutualism between the marine bacterium Vibrio fischeri and the Hawaiian bobtail squid, we characterized the bacterial transcriptional response to acidic pH experienced during the shift from planktonic to host-associated lifestyles. We found several genes involved in outer membrane structure were differentially expressed based on pH, indicating alterations in membrane physiology as V.

Resolving the depth zonation paradox in reef-building corals.

Changes in abundance across a natural environmental gradient provide important insights into a species' realized ecological niche. In reef-building corals, a species' niche is often defined using its depth range. However, most reef-building coral species occur over a broad depth range, a fact that is incompatible with the strong zonation found in coral assemblages across depth.

Crystal structure of hy-droxy scandium nitrate chloride.

Each Sc ion in the title salt, di-μ-hydroxido-bis-[tri-aqua-(nitrato-κ ,')scandium(III)] dichloride, [Sc(NO)(OH)(HO)]Cl, is coordinated by a nitrate anion, two hydroxide ions and three water mol-ecules to generate a distorted penta-gonal-bipyramidal ScO coordination polyhedron. The complete {[(NO)(μ-OH)Sc(HO)]} ion is generated by crystallographic inversion symmetry. The nitrate anion binds in a bidentate fashion whereas the hydroxide ions are bridged between two Sc centers.

Comparative Metagenomics Reveals Enhanced Nutrient Cycling Potential after 2 Years of Biochar Amendment in a Tropical Oxisol.

The complex structural and functional responses of agricultural soil microbial communities to the addition of carbonaceous compounds such as biochar remain poorly understood. This severely limits the predictive ability for both the potential enhancement of soil fertility and greenhouse gas mitigation. In this study, we utilized shotgun metagenomics in order to decipher changes in the microbial community in soil microcosms after 14 days of incubation at 23°C, which contained soils from biochar-amended and control plots cultivated with Napier grass.

Motivating landowners to recruit neighbors for private land conservation.

Encouraging motivated landowners to not only engage in conservation action on their own property but also to recruit others may enhance effectiveness of conservation on private lands. Landowners may only engage in such recruitment if they believe their neighbors care about the conservation issue, will positively respond to their conservation efforts, and are likely to take action for the conservation cause. We designed a series of microinterventions that can be added to community meetings to change these beliefs to encourage landowner engagement in recruitment of others.

Effectiveness of Online vs In-Person Care for Adults With Psoriasis: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Innovative, online models of specialty-care delivery are critical to improving patient access and outcomes.

Objective: To determine whether an online, collaborative connected-health model results in equivalent clinical improvements in psoriasis compared with in-person care.

Design, Setting, And Participants: The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Psoriasis Teledermatology Trial is a 12-month, pragmatic, randomized clinical equivalency trial to evaluate the effect of an online model for psoriasis compared with in-person care.

Relationships Between Adipose Mitochondrial Function, Serum Adiponectin, and Insulin Resistance in Persons With HIV After 96 Weeks of Antiretroviral Therapy.

Objective: Some antiretroviral therapy (ART) and HIV itself confer metabolic risk, perhaps through altered mitochondrial function and adipokines. In AIDS Clinical Trials Group study A5224s, adipose mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) levels decreased on ART, and electron transport chain complex I (CI) and complex IV (CIV) activity decreased. Another study found decreased serum adiponectin on ART with mtDNA mutation m.

Disparities of population exposed to flood hazards in the United States.

This study integrates publicly available datasets to provide a county-based assessment of socio-economic disparities of population exposure to flood hazards in the United States. Statistical analyses were applied to reveal the national trends and local deviations from the trends. Results show that approximately 21.

Remote tropical island colonization does not preclude symbiotic specialists: new evidence of mycorrhizal specificity across the geographic distribution of the Hawaiian endemic orchid Anoectochilus sandvicensis.

Background And Aims: For symbiotic organisms, their colonization and spread across remote oceanic islands should favour generalists. Plants that form obligate symbiotic associations with microbes dominate island ecosystems, but the relationship between island inhabitance and symbiotic specificity is unclear, especially in the tropics. To fill this gap, we examined the mycorrhizal specificity of the Hawaiian endemic orchid Anoectochilus sandvicensis across multiple populations encompassing its entire geographic distribution.

Support for a clade of Placozoa and Cnidaria in genes with minimal compositional bias.

The phylogenetic placement of the morphologically simple placozoans is crucial to understanding the evolution of complex animal traits. Here, we examine the influence of adding new genomes from placozoans to a large dataset designed to study the deepest splits in the animal phylogeny. Using site-heterogeneous substitution models, we show that it is possible to obtain strong support, in both amino acid and reduced-alphabet matrices, for either a sister-group relationship between Cnidaria and Placozoa, or for Cnidaria and Bilateria as seen in most published work to date, depending on the orthologues selected to construct the matrix.

Achieving a multi-strain symbiosis: strain behavior and infection dynamics.

Strain diversity, while now recognized as a key driver underlying partner dynamics in symbioses, is usually difficult to experimentally manipulate and image in hosts with complex microbiota. To address this problem, we have used the luminous marine bacterium Vibrio fischeri, which establishes a symbiosis within the crypts of the nascent light organ of the squid Euprymna scolopes. Competition assays in newly hatched juvenile squid have shown that symbiotic V.

Persistent Interactions with Bacterial Symbionts Direct Mature-Host Cell Morphology and Gene Expression in the Squid-Vibrio Symbiosis.

In horizontally transmitted symbioses, structural, biochemical, and molecular features both facilitate host colonization by specific symbionts and mediate their persistent carriage. In the association between the squid and its luminous bacterial partner Vibrio fischeri, the symbionts interact with two epithelial fields; they interact (i) transiently with the superficial ciliated field that potentiates colonization and regresses within days of colonization and (ii) persistently with the cells that line the internal crypts, whose ultrastructure changes in response to the symbionts. Development of the association creates conditions that promote the symbiotic partner over the lifetime of the host.

Nutritional Assessment and Intervention to Prevent and Treat Malnutrition for Fall Risk Reduction in Elderly Populations.

The aging US population is increasing, and it is estimated that adults older than 65 years will make up 20% of the population by 2029 and the proportion of individuals in the United States older than 65 years will outnumber individuals younger than 18 years. In older adults, accidental falls are the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries. Prevalence of chronic conditions such as sarcopenia and frailty contribute to the increased risk for fall observed in this population.

Synthesis, Characterization, and Nanomaterials Generated from 6,6'-(((2-Hydroxyethyl)azanediyl)bis(methylene))bis(2,4-di- tert-butylphenol) Modified Group 4 Metal Alkoxides.

The impact on the morphology nanoceramic materials generated from group 4 metal alkoxides ([M(OR)]) and the same precursors modified by 6,6'-(((2-hydroxyethyl)azanediyl)bis(methylene))bis(2,4-di- tert-butylphenol) (referred to as H-AM-DBP (1)) was explored. The products isolated from the 1:1 stoichiometric reaction of a series of [M(OR)] where M = Ti, Zr, or Hf; OR = OCH(CH)(OPr ); OC(CH)(OBu ); OCHC(CH)(ONep) with H-AM-DBP proved, by single crystal X-ray diffraction, to be [(ONep)Ti( k( O,O',O'',N)-AM-DBP)] (2), [(OR)M(μ( O)- k( O',O'',N)-AM-DBP)] [M = Zr: OR = OPr , 3·tol; OBu , 4·tol; ONep, 5·tol; M = Hf: OR = OBu , 6·tol; ONep, 7·tol]. The product from each system led to a tetradentate AM-DBP ligand and retention of a parent alkoxide ligand.

Academic Response to Storm-Related Natural Disasters-Lessons Learned.

On 30 October 2017, selected faculty and administrators from Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) grantee institutions gathered to share first-hand accounts of the devastating impact of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, which had interrupted academic activities, including research, education, and training in Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas. The presenters reviewed emergency response measures taken by their institutions to maintain community health care access and delivery, the storm-related impact on clinical and research infrastructure, and strategies to retain locally grown clinical expertise and translational science research talent in the aftermath of natural disasters. A longer-term perspective was provided through a comparative review of lessons learned by one New Orleans-based institution (now more than a decade post-storm) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Entrapped biomass for removal of organics and total nitrogen from anaerobic reactor effluents.

Anaerobic processes have been applied to treat low-strength domestic wastewaters with significant energy saving. However, anaerobic process effluents must be further removed of residual organics and total nitrogen before discharge. Reported here are an aerobic entrapped bio-technology (EBT) system and an EBT coupled with activated sludge (EBT + AS) system being tested as a post-anaerobic treatment.

Synthesis and Characterization of Tris(trimethylsilyl)siloxide Derivatives of Early Transition Metal Alkoxides That Thermally Convert to Varied Ceramic-Silica Architecture Materials.

In an effort to generate single-source precursors for the production of metal-siloxide (MSiO ) materials, the tris(trimethylsilyl)silanol (H-SST or H-OSi(SiMe) (1) ligand was reacted with a series of group 4 and 5 metal alkoxides. The group 4 products were crystallographically characterized as [Ti(SST)(OR)] (OR = OPr (2), OBu (3), ONep (4)); [Ti(SST)(OBu )] (5); [Zr(SST)(OBu )(py)] (6); [Zr(SST)(OR)] (OR = OBu (7), ONep, (8)); [Hf(SST)(OBu )] (9); and [Hf(SST)(ONep)(py) ] ( n = 1 (10), n = 2 (10a)) where OPr = OCH(CH), OBu = OC(CH), OBu = O(CH)CH, ONep = OCHC(CH), py = pyridine. The crystal structures revealed varied SST substitutions for: monomeric Ti species that adopted a tetrahedral ( T-4) geometry; monomeric Zr compounds with coordination that varied from T-4 to trigonal bipyramidal ( TBPY-5); and monomeric Hf complexes isolated in a TBPY-5 geometry.

Novel Common Genetic Susceptibility Loci for Colorectal Cancer.

Background: Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified 42 loci (P < 5 × 10-8) associated with risk of colorectal cancer (CRC). Expanded consortium efforts facilitating the discovery of additional susceptibility loci may capture unexplained familial risk.

Methods: We conducted a GWAS in European descent CRC cases and control subjects using a discovery-replication design, followed by examination of novel findings in a multiethnic sample (cumulative n = 163 315).

Cooking behaviors are related to household particulate matter exposure in children with asthma in the urban East Bay Area of Northern California.

Background: Asthma is a common childhood disease that leads to many missed days of school and parents' work. There are multiple environmental contributors to asthma symptoms and understanding the potential factors inside children's homes is crucial.

Methods: This is a dual cohort study measuring household particulate matter (PM2.

Public health education at China's higher education institutions: a time-series analysis from 1998 to 2012.

Background: Although China's modern education for public health was developing over the past 60 years, there is a lack of authoritative statistics and analyses on the nation's development of education for public health at higher education institutions (HEIs). Few quantitative studies on this topic have been published in domestic and international peer-reviewed journals. To address this knowledge gap, we aimed to use national data to quantitatively analyse the scale, structure, and changes of public health education in China's HEIs, and to compare the changes of public health education with those of other health science disciplines.

Rib fixation: Who, What, When?

Rib fractures are among the most common traumatic injury found in ∼20% of all patients who suffer thoracic trauma. The majority of these are a result of a blunt mechanism and are often associated with other traumatic injuries. The most common associated injury is lung contusion.

Employing hypothesis testing and data from multiple genomic compartments to resolve recalcitrant backbone nodes in Goodenia s.l. (Goodeniaceae).

Goodeniaceae is a primarily Australian flowering plant family with a complex taxonomy and evolutionary history. Previous phylogenetic analyses have successfully resolved the backbone topology of the largest clade in the family, Goodenia s.l.

On the relative motions of long-lived Pacific mantle plumes.

Mantle plumes upwelling beneath moving tectonic plates generate age-progressive chains of volcanos (hotspot chains) used to reconstruct plate motion. However, these hotspots appear to move relative to each other, implying that plumes are not laterally fixed. The lack of age constraints on long-lived, coeval hotspot chains hinders attempts to reconstruct plate motion and quantify relative plume motions.