ALBERT

Description: Although iron-catalysed oxidative damage is presumed to be a major mechanism of injury leading to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma in hemochromatosis, these events have been difficult to recapitulate in an animal model. In this study, we evaluated regulators of hepatocarcinogenesis in a rodent model of chronic iron overload. Sprague–Dawley rats were iron loaded with iron dextran over 6 months. Livers were harvested and analysed for markers of oxidative stress, as well as the following proteins: p53, murine double minute 2, the Shc proteins p66, p52, p46; β -catenin, CHOP, C/EBP α and Yes-associated protein. In this model, iron loading is associated with hepatocyte proliferation, and indices of oxidative damage are mildly increased in tandem with augmented antioxidant defenses. Alterations potentially favouring carcinogenesis included a modest but significant decrease in p53 levels and increases in p52, p46 and β -catenin levels compared with control livers. Countering these factors, the iron-loaded livers demonstrated a significant decrease in CHOP, which has recently been implicated in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma, as well as a reciprocal increase in C/EBP α and decrease in Yes-associated protein. Our results suggest that chronic iron overload elicits both tumour suppressive as well as tumour-promoting mechanisms in rodent liver. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Description: In areas where fire regimes and forest structure have been dramatically altered, there is increasing concern that contemporary fires have the potential to set forests on a positive feedback trajectory with successive reburns, one in which extensive stand-replacing fire could promote more stand-replacing fire. Our study utilized an extensive set of field plots established following four fires that occurred between 2000 and 2010 in the northern Sierra Nevada, California, USA that were subsequently reburned in 2012. The information obtained from these field plots allowed for a unique set of analyses investigating the effect of vegetation, fuels, topography, fire weather, and forest management on reburn severity. We also examined the influence of initial fire severity and time since initial fire on influential predictors of reburn severity. Our results suggest that high to moderate severity fire in the initial fires led to an increase in standing snags and shrub vegetation, which in combination with severe fire weather promoted high severity fire effects in the subsequent reburn. Although fire behavior is largely driven by weather, our study demonstrates that post-fire vegetation composition and structure are also important drivers of reburn severity. In the face of changing climatic regimes and increases in extreme fire weather, these results may provide managers with options to create more fire resilient ecosystems. In areas where frequent high severity fire is undesirable, management activities such as thinning, prescribed fire, or managed wildland fire can be used to moderate fire behavior not only prior to initial fires, but also before subsequent reburns. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Description: [1]  Apatite (AHe) and Zircon (ZHe) (U-Th)/He thermochronometric data from the southern Wassuk Range (WR) coupled with 40 Ar/ 39 Ar age data from the overlying tilted Tertiary section are used to constrain the thermal evolution of an extensional accommodation zone and tilt-domain boundary. AHe and ZHe data record two episodes of rapid cooling related to the tectonic exhumation of the WR fault block beginning at ~15 Ma and ~4 Ma. Extension was accommodated through fault-block rotation and variably tilted the southern WR to the west from ~60° -70° in the central WR to ~15° - 35° in the southernmost WR and Pine Grove Hills (PGH), and minimal tilting in the Anchorite Hills and along the Mina Deflection to the south. Middle Miocene geothermal gradient estimates record heating immediately prior to large-magnitude extension that was likely coeval with the extrusion of the Lincoln Flat andesite at ~14.8 Ma. Geothermal gradients increase from ~19° ± 4 ° C/km to ≥ 65° ± 20 ° C/km towards the Mina Deflection, suggesting that it was the focus of Middle Miocene arc magmatism in the upper crust. The decreasing thickness of tilt blocks towards the south resulted from a shallowing brittle/ductile transition zone. Post-magmatic Middle Miocene extension and fault-block advection were focused in the northern and central WR and coincidentally moderated the large lateral thermal gradient within the uppermost crust.

Description: The emergent properties of the collection of species in a natural community, such as diversity and the distribution of relative abundances, are influenced by both niche-based and neutral (stochastic) processes. This pluralistic view of the natural world reconciles theory with empirical observations better than does either a strictly niche- or neutrality-based perspective. Even so, rules (or rules-of-thumb) that govern the relative contributions that niche-based and stochastic processes make as communities assemble remain only vaguely formulated and incompletely tested. For example, the translation of non-random (non-neutral) ecological processes – that differentially sort among species within a community – into species-compositional patterns may occur more influentially within some demographic subsets of organisms than within others. In other words, the relative contributions of niche vs. neutral processes may vary among age-, size-, or stage-classes. For example, non-random patterns of mortality that occur among seedlings in a rainforest, or among newly-settled juveniles in communities of sessile marine communities, could be more influential than non-random mortality during later stages in determining overall community diversity. We propose two alternative, mutually compatible, hypotheses to account for different levels of influence from mortality among life-cycle stages towards producing non-random patterns in organismal communities. The Turnover Model simply posits that those demographic classes characterized by faster rates of turnover contribute greater influence in the short-term as sufficient mortality gives rise to non-random changes to the community, as well as over the longer-term as multiple individuals of a given fast-turnover demographic class transition into later classes compared to each individual that ratchets from a slow-turnover starting class into a later class. The Turnover Model should apply to most communities of organisms. The Niche Model, which posits that niche-based processes are more influential in some demographic classes relative to others, may alternatively or additionally apply to communities. We also propose several alternative mechanisms, especially relevant to forest trees, that could cause dynamics consistent with the Niche Model. These mechanisms depend on differences among demographic classes in the extent of demographic variation that individual organisms experience through their trait values or neighborhood conditions. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Description: Author(s): Adam C. Durst, Kyle E. Castoria, and R. N. Bhatt The interactions between acceptors in semiconductors are often treated in qualitatively the same manner as those between donors. Acceptor wave functions are taken to be approximately hydrogenic and the standard hydrogen molecule Heitler-London model is used to describe acceptor-acceptor interactions... [Phys. Rev. B 96, 155208] Published Thu Oct 26, 2017

Description: Intraspecific variation in ecologically relevant traits is widespread. In generalist predators in particular, individual diet specialization is likely to have important consequences for food webs. Understanding individual diet specialization empirically requires the ability to quantify individual diet preferences accurately. Here we compare the currently used frequentist maximum likelihood approach which infers individual preferences using the observed prey proportions to Bayesian hierarchical models that instead estimate these proportions. Using simulated and empirical data, we find that the approach of using observed prey proportions consistently overestimates diet specialization relative to the Bayesian hierarchical approach when the number of prey observations per individual is low or the number of prey observations vary among individuals, two common features of empirical data. Furthermore, the Bayesian hierarchical approach permits the estimation of point estimates for both prey proportions and their variability within and among levels of organization (i.e. individuals, experimental treatments, populations), while also characterizing the uncertainty of these estimates in ways inaccessible to frequentist methods. The Bayesian hierarchical approach provides a useful framework for improving the quantification and understanding of intraspecific variation in diet specialization studies. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.