Parent‐offspring recognition is usually crucial for survival of young. In mammals, olfaction often only permits identification at short range, and vocalizations are important at longer distances. ...Following and hiding antipredator strategies found in newborn mammals may also affect parental recognition mechanisms. We investigated mother‐offspring recognition in fallow deer, an ungulate hider species. We analyzed the structure of adult female and fawn contact calls to determine whether they are individually distinctive and tested for mother‐offspring recognition. Only females (and not fawns) have individualized vocalizations, with the fundamental frequency as the most distinctive parameter. Playback experiments showed that fawns can distinguish the calls of their mothers from those of other females, but mothers could not discriminate their own and alien fawn calls. Thus, the vocal identification process is unidirectional. In followers, mother‐offspring acoustic recognition is mutual, and therefore the different antipredator strategies of newborn mammals may have shaped the modalities of parent‐offspring acoustic recognition.
Intercontinental trade has led to multiple introductions of invasive pest species at a global scale. Molecular analyses of the structure of populations support the understanding of ecological ...strategies and evolutionary patterns that promote successful biological invasions. The oriental fruit moth, Grapholita (=Cydia) molesta, is a cosmopolitan and economically destructive pest of stone and pome fruits, expanding its distribution range concomitantly with global climate warming. We used ten newly developed polymorphic microsatellite markers to examine the genetic structure of G. molesta populations in an agricultural ecosystem in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. Larvae collected in eight sampling sites were assigned to a mosaic of five populations with significant intra-regional structure. Inferred measures of gene flow within populations implicated both active dispersal, and passive dispersal associated with accidental anthropogenic displacements. Small effective population sizes, coupled with high inbreeding levels, highlighted the effect of orchard management practices on the observed patterns of genetic variation within the sampling sites. Isolation by distance did not appear to play a major role at the spatial scale considered. Our results provide new insights into the population genetics and dynamics of an invasive pest species at a regional scale.
The ability of a sufficient number of individuals to disperse is crucial for long-term survival of populations. However, dispersal is often energetically costly, and thus is expected to trade-off ...against other life-history traits. In insect pest species, the occurrence of individuals with high flight activity challenges management practices. We performed artificial selection on flight activity and measured correlated responses to selection in the oriental fruit moth, Grapholita (= Cydia) molesta, a widely distributed and expanding lepidopteran pest of fruit crops. Both sexes rapidly responded to the imposed regime of divergent selection, indicating an adaptive potential of flight activity in this species. Upward-selected moths died sooner than downward-selected ones, providing evidence for a cost of flight activity to adult survival, reputedly associated with enhanced metabolic rates. Oppositely-selected females had similar total reproductive output, disproving a trade-off between dispersal and reproduction, although females with higher flight activity laid their eggs sooner. The ratio of body weight to forewing surface (forewing loading) did not significantly differ between selected lines. The present study contributes to the understanding of dispersal evolution, and also provides new insights into life-history theory as well as important baseline data for the improvement of pest management practices.
Intra-graft infiltrating cells apoptosis was evaluated in 20 consecutive kidney-pancreas transplanted (KP) patients without kidney rejection. Two fine-needle aspirated biopsy (FNAB) and two ...peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBL) samples were obtained 14 days after transplantation. Immunosuppression was based on anti-Thymoglobulins (ATG) induction for 7 days and cyclosporine/mofetil mycophenolate as maintenance therapy. Ten matched healthy subjects were chosen as controls for PBL. Lymphocyte phenotypes and activation markers, apoptotic rate and lymphocyte expression of pro/anti-apoptotic molecules were analysed by flow cytometry analysis (FACS). Lymphocyte phenotypes and activation markers: higher levels of CD8 and CD4DR were evident in the graft (p < 0.05) than in PBL, CD3CD25 in PBL were higher in transplanted patients than in controls. Apoptotic rate and lymphocyte expression of pro- and anti-apoptotic molecules: a higher expression of annexin V, together with reduced lymphocytes CD95L, iNOs and Bcl-2 expression (PBL = 97.7+/-1.1% vs FNAB = 81.9+/-15.1%; p < 0.05) were evident in the graft than in PBL. In KP patients intra-graft apoptosis and reduced anti-apoptotic molecules were evident after ATG induction.
Stagonospora nodorum is a major necrotrophic fungal pathogen of wheat (Triticum aestivum) and a member of the Dothideomycetes, a large fungal taxon that includes many important plant pathogens ...affecting all major crop plant families. Here, we report the acquisition and initial analysis of a draft genome sequence for this fungus. The assembly comprises 37,164,227 bp of nuclear DNA contained in 107 scaffolds. The circular mitochondrial genome comprises 49,761 bp encoding 46 genes, including four that are intron encoded. The nuclear genome assembly contains 26 classes of repetitive DNA, comprising 4.5% of the genome. Some of the repeats show evidence of repeat-induced point mutations consistent with a frequent sexual cycle. ESTs and gene prediction models support a minimum of 10,762 nuclear genes. Extensive orthology was found between the polyketide synthase family in S. nodorum and Cochliobolus heterostrophus, suggesting an ancient origin and conserved functions for these genes. A striking feature of the gene catalog was the large number of genes predicted to encode secreted proteins; the majority has no meaningful similarity to any other known genes. It is likely that genes for host-specific toxins, in addition to ToxA, will be found among this group. ESTs obtained from axenic mycelium grown on oleate (chosen to mimic early infection) and late-stage lesions sporulating on wheat leaves were obtained. Statistical analysis shows that transcripts encoding proteins involved in protein synthesis and in the production of extracellular proteases, cellulases, and xylanases predominate in the infection library. This suggests that the fungus is dependant on the degradation of wheat macromolecular constituents to provide the carbon skeletons and energy for the synthesis of proteins and other components destined for the developing pycnidiospores.
Children do not seem to drive transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). We isolated culture-competent virus in vitro from 12 (52%) of 23 SARS-CoV-2-infected ...children; the youngest was 7 days old. Our findings show that symptomatic neonates, children, and teenagers shed infectious SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that transmission from them is plausible.
Objective
To develop a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically segment an axial CT image of the pelvis for body composition measures. We hypothesized that a deep CNN approach would ...achieve high accuracy when compared to manual segmentations as the reference standard.
Materials and methods
We manually segmented 200 axial CT images at the supra-acetabular level in 200 subjects, labeling background, subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT), muscle, inter-muscular adipose tissue (IMAT), bone, and miscellaneous intra-pelvic content. The dataset was randomly divided into training (180/200) and test (20/200) datasets. Data augmentation was utilized to enlarge the training dataset and all images underwent preprocessing with histogram equalization. Our model was trained for 50 epochs using the U-Net architecture with batch size of 8, learning rate of 0.0001, Adadelta optimizer and a dropout of 0.20. The Dice (F1) score was used to assess similarity between the manual segmentations and the CNN predicted segmentations.
Results
The CNN model with data augmentation of
N
= 3000 achieved accurate segmentation of body composition for all classes. The Dice scores were as follows: background (1.00), miscellaneous intra-pelvic content (0.98), SAT (0.97), muscle (0.95), IMAT (0.91), and bone (0.92). Mean time to automatically segment one CT image was 0.07 s (GPU) and 2.51 s (CPU).
Conclusions
Our CNN-based model enables accurate automated segmentation of multiple tissues on pelvic CT images, with promising implications for body composition studies.
PDF
