Background The development and dispersal of seeds as well as their transition to seedlings represent perhaps the most critical stages of a plant's life cycle. The endophytic and epiphytic microbial ...interactions that take place in, on, and around seeds during these stages of the plant's life cycle may have profound impacts on plant ecology, health, and productivity. While our understanding of the seed microbiota has lagged far behind that of the rhizosphere and phyllosphere, many advances are now being made. Scope This review explores the microbial associations with seeds through various stages of the plant life cycle, beginning with the earliest stages of seed development on the parent plant and continuing through the development and establishment of seedlings in soil. This review represents a broad synthesis of the ecological and agricultural literature focused on seed-microbe interactions as a means of better understanding how these interactions may ultimately influence plant ecology, health, and productivity in both natural and agricultural systems. Our current understanding of seed-microbe associations will be discussed, with an emphasis on recent findings that specifically highlight the emerging contemporary understanding of how seed-microbe associations may ultimately impact plant health and productivity. Conclusions The diversity and dynamics of seed microbiomes represent the culmination of complex interactions with microbes throughout the plant life cycle. The richness and dynamics of seed microbiomes is revealing exciting new opportunities for research into plant-microbe interactions. Often neglected in plant microbiome studies, the renaissance of inquiry into seed microbiomes is offering exciting new insights into how the diversity and dynamics of the seed microbiome with plant and soil microbiomes as well as the microbiomes of dispersers and pollinators. It is clear that the interactions taking place in and around seeds indeed have significant impacts on plant health and productivity in both agricultural and natural ecosystems.
•Emotionality and affect-related psychopathology increase in adolescence.•Managing emotions is a key task of adolescence related to brain and pubertal changes.•Neural changes in social-cognitive ...processes relate to affective behavior.•Many features of social experiences shape neural bases of cognition and affect.•Ecologically-valid fMRI tasks probe neural substrates of social-emotional experience.
Adolescents are commonly portrayed as highly emotional, with their behaviors often hijacked by their emotions. Research on the neural substrates of adolescent affective behavior is beginning to paint a more nuanced picture of how neurodevelopmental changes in brain function influence affective behavior, and how these influences are modulated by external factors in the environment. Recent neurodevelopmental models suggest that the brain is designed to promote emotion regulation, learning, and affiliation across development, and that affective behavior reciprocally interacts with age-specific social demands and different social contexts. In this review, we discuss current findings on neurobiological mechanisms of adolescents’ affective behavior and highlight individual differences in and social-contextual influences on adolescents’ emotionality. Neurobiological mechanisms of affective processes related to anxiety and depression are also discussed as examples. As the field progresses, it will be critical to test new hypotheses generated from the foundational empirical and conceptual work and to focus on identifying more precisely how and when neural networks change in ways that promote or thwart adaptive affective behavior during adolescence.
•We expand our adolescent re-orientation model to include other developmental periods.•We review neuroimaging literature on social information processing.•We combine human and animal based approaches ...to social behavior.
Social development has been the focus of a great deal of neuroscience based research over the past decade. In this review, we focus on providing a framework for understanding how changes in facets of social development may correspond with changes in brain function. We argue that (1) distinct phases of social behavior emerge based on whether the organizing social force is the mother, peer play, peer integration, or romantic intimacy; (2) each phase is marked by a high degree of affect-driven motivation that elicits a distinct response in subcortical structures; (3) activity generated by these structures interacts with circuits in prefrontal cortex that guide executive functions, and occipital and temporal lobe circuits, which generate specific sensory and perceptual social representations. We propose that the direction, magnitude and duration of interaction among these affective, executive, and perceptual systems may relate to distinct sensitive periods across development that contribute to establishing long-term patterns of brain function and behavior.
Introduction Despite the long-held belief that reproductive and disseminative organs of plants are sterile, it is now well established that seeds host diverse microbial assemblages (Hardoim et al. ...2015; Truyens et al. 2015). Some of these associated microorganisms contribute to plant health, plant growth, and seed survival while others are detrimental (Barret et al. 2016; Saikkonen et al. 2016). Seeds can facilitate the dispersal of microorganisms, providing for early colonization of a new plant generation. Although seeds are an important means of supporting microbial growth and dispersal, relatively little is known about the ecology of seed-associated microorganisms (Saikkonen et al. 1998; Compant et al. 2010; Truyens et al. 2015; Brader et al. 2017) in comparison with root- and leaf-associated microorganisms (Mercado-Blanco and Lugtenberg 2014; Mercado-Blanco 2015; Vacher et al. 2016; Compant et al. 2016). In many instances, the composition and structure of the seed microbiota of various plants species have yet to be characterized. This includes the microorganisms living on the surface as well as the inner tissues of the seeds. Furthermore, a thorough understanding of the specific routes of seed transmission of microorganisms needs to be developed. Whereas seed transmission has been thought to occur through three main routes: the internal, floral and external pathways (Maude 1996), the relative importance of these pathways in determining the composition of the seed microbiota remains to be explored. Moreover, the impact of vertical (derived from the mother plant) and horizontal transmission (derived from air-borne or soil-borne microorganisms) in the assembly of seed microbial communities is unclear for some taxa. As much needs to be understood about seed-associated microbes, perhaps among the most important are resolving the relative roles of horizontal and vertical transmission in establishing the seed microbiota, which could lead to a better understanding of the plant holobiont, its microbiome and functioning, and the potential use of seed-associated microbes for improving agricultural productivity. This understanding could like lead to insights into the evolution of specific microbial taxa within seeds and the relative contributions of various selective forces in shaping the seed microbiota. The unraveling of these processes could provide important knowledge about how beneficial, commensal, and pathogenic fungal and bacterial microorganisms establish and maintain intimate associations with their seeds and contribute to the health of the next plant generation, improving our abilities to develop successful application strategies for microbial inoculants and their integration into sustainable crop production and protection. Since the nineteenth century, advances have been made in our understanding of plant-associated microorganisms. However, for seeds and their microbiota, there remain large gaps in our knowledge. Seed transmission of some microorganisms like Epichloids in grasses (Kauppinen et al. 2016; Saikkonen et al. 2016) or phytopathogenic fungi and bacteria (Li et al. 2017; Brader et al. 2017) have been relatively well studied. However, seed transmission of many plant-associated microorganisms remains unknown. The contributions in this Special Issue have served to greatly improve our understanding of the mechanisms of seed-microbe-soil interactions, the nature of the microbiota and functioning of the microbiome present within various seeds, the evolution of the seed microbiota, and the routes of microbial colonization. The studies include different beneficial and detrimental microorganisms as fungi and bacteria thriving as endophytes in different kinds of plants. They further describe ways in which specific native or non-native seed microorganisms may be utilized for improving seed and seedling survival and plant health and productivity
Modern liberal political philosophy is closely associated with post-1945 secularism. But Eric Nelson contends that the liberal tradition founded by John Rawls is an unwitting outgrowth of ancient ...theological debates about justice and evil. When we understand this, we can better untangle the knotted strands of liberal political thought.
The porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) spike (S) protein is the major target of neutralizing antibodies against PEDV. Here immunodominant neutralizing epitopes of PEDV were identified using a ...panel of S-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). Ten of eleven S-specific mAbs successfully neutralized PEDV infectivity in vitro. Notably, epitope mapping by peptide ELISAs revealed that nine of these mAbs recognized linear neutralizing epitopes located in the N-terminus of the S2 glycoprotein subunit (amino acids aa 744–759, 747–774 and/or 756–771). Additionally, one mAb recognized a neutralizing epitope located in the C-terminus of S2 (aa 1371–1377), while only one neutralizing mAb reacted against a region of the S1 glycoprotein subunit (aa 499–600). Notably, mAbs that recognized epitopes within the S2 subunit presented the highest neutralizing activity against PEDV. Together these results indicate that the S2 glycoprotein subunit contains major antigenic determinants and, perhaps, the immunodominant neutralizing epitopes of PEDV.
•A panel of PEDV S-specific neutralizing antibodies were developed and characterized.•S-specific neutralizing mAbs presented potent neutralizing activity against PEDV in vitro.•Epitope mapping revealed that most neutralizing mAbs target the N-terminus of the S2 protein subunit.•S2 subunit seems to contain immunodominant neutralizing epitopes of PEDV.
Moments of recognition are possible amid regimes of systematic misrecognition. Anarchic dao-archy is presupposed, as it is the open generative self-patterning of life itself, even as biopolitically ...realized forms of domination and oppression occlude it. Its unrestricted communication and exchange entails practices of emptying, forgetting, and unblocking fixations to release and attune individual, intersubjective, and interthingly life. A critical participatory Daoist ecopolitics would, therefore, promote seeing oneself as situated relational individuals bound and potentially responsive to networks of life and seeing how social-political involvement is a constitutive element in partaking in and nourishing existence.
•Vocal emotion recognition (ER) is an important component of social competence.•Vocal ER follows a protracted developmental trajectory extending into adolescence.•Few studies investigate the neural ...maturation of emotional prosody processing.•Research is needed to map relevant neural growth to increased vocal ER.
Emotions are implicitly expressed in both facial expressions and prosodic components of vocal communication. The ability to recognize nonverbal cues of emotion is an important feature of social competence that matures gradually across childhood and adolescence. Compared to the extensive knowledge about the development of emotion recognition (ER) from facial displays of emotion, relatively little is known about the maturation of this ability in the auditory domain. The current review provides an overview of knowledge about the development of vocal emotion recognition from behavioural studies, and neural mechanisms that might contribute to this maturational process. Youth are thought to reach adult-like vocal ER ability in early or late adolescence. At a neural level, several structural and functional changes occur in the adolescent brain that may impact the representation of emotional information. However, there is a paucity of developmental neuroimaging work directly examining neural prosody processing in youth. We speculate that brain areas relevant to vocal perception in adults may undergo age-related changes that map onto increased vocal ER capacity.
This paper excavates the practice-oriented background and therapeutic significance of emptiness in the Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao. Buddhist emptiness unravels ...experiential and linguistic reification through meditation and argumentation. The historical contexts and uses of the word indicate that it is primarily a practical diagnostic and therapeutic concept. Emptiness does not lead to further views or truths but, akin to yet distinct from Ajñāna and Pyrrhonian skepticism, the suspension of assertion. This sense of emptiness as a practice can be traced in the intercultural transmission of Madhyamaka from Nāgārjuna, its paradigmatic philosopher, to Sengzhao 僧肇, its first pivotal indigenous Chinese representative.
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