Suchergebnisse

BACKGROUND: Current World Health Organization recommendations for the management of malaria include the need for a parasitological confirmation prior to triggering appropriate treatment. The use of rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for malaria has contributed to a better infection recognition and a more targeted treatment. Nevertheless, low-density infections and parasites that fail to produce HRP2 can cause false-negative RDT results. Microscopy has traditionally been the methodology most commonly used to quantify malaria and characterize the infecting species, but the wider use of this technique remains challenging, as it requires trained personnel and processing capacity. OBJECTIVE: In this study, the feasibility of an on-line system for remote malaria species identification and differentiation has been investigated by crowdsourcing the analysis of digitalized infected thin blood smears by non-expert observers using a mobile app. METHODS: An on-line videogame in which players learned how to differentiate the young trophozoite stage of the five Plasmodium species has been designed. Images were digitalized with a smartphone camera adapted to the ocular of a conventional light microscope. Images from infected red blood cells were cropped and puzzled into an on-line game. During the game, players had to decide the malaria species (Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium malariae, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale, Plasmodium knowlesi) of the infected cells that were shown in the screen. After 2 months, each player's decisions were analysed individually and collectively. RESULTS: On-line volunteers playing the game made more than 500,000 assessments for species differentiation. Statistically, when the choice of several players was combined (n > 25), they were able to significantly discriminate Plasmodium species, reaching a level of accuracy of 99% for all species combinations, except for P. knowlesi (80%). Non-expert decisions on which Plasmodium species was shown in the screen were made in less than 3 s. CONCLUSION: These findings show that it is possible to train malaria-naïve non-experts to identify and differentiate malaria species in digitalized thin blood samples. Although the accuracy of a single player is not perfect, the combination of the responses of multiple casual gamers can achieve an accuracy that is within the range of the diagnostic accuracy made by a trained microscopist. ; M.L. held a postdoctoral Fellowship of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FPDI-2013-16409) and holds a grant from the Spanish Society of Hematology and Hemotherapy. This work was supported by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (COOP-XVII-02), Spain's Science, Innovation & Universities Ministry (TEC2015-66978-R), Madrid Regional Government (TOPUS S2013/MIT-3024), the CDTI NEOTEC SNEO-20171197 grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, the European Regional Development Funds, Amazon Web Services, Fundación Renta Corporación and Ashoka. ISGlobal is a member of the CERCA Programme, Generalitat de Catalunya. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. ; Sí

There is a growing recognition that application of mechanistic approaches to understand cross-species shared molecular targets and pathway conservation in the context of hazard characterization, provide significant opportunities in risk assessment (RA) for both human health and environmental safety. Specifically, it has been recognized that a more comprehensive and reliable understanding of similarities and differences in biological pathways across a variety of species will better enable cross-species extrapolation of potential adverse toxicological effects. Ultimately, this would also advance the generation and use of mechanistic data for both human health and environmental RA. A workshop brought together representatives from industry, academia and government to discuss how to improve the use of existing data, and to generate new NAMs data to derive better mechanistic understanding between humans and environmentally-relevant species, ultimately resulting in holistic chemical safety decisions. Thanks to a thorough dialogue among all participants, key challenges, current gaps and research needs were identified, and potential solutions proposed. This discussion highlighted the common objective to progress toward more predictive, mechanistically based, data-driven and animal-free chemical safety assessments. Overall, the participants recognized that there is no single approach which would provide all the answers for bridging the gap between mechanism-based human health and environmental RA, but acknowledged we now have the incentive, tools and data availability to address this concept, maximizing the potential for improvements in both human health and environmental RA.

A main objective of ethnobotany is to document traditional knowledge about plants before it disappears. However, little is known about the coverage of past ethnobotanical studies and thus about how well the existing literature covers the overall traditional knowledge of different human groups. To bridge this gap, we investigated ethnobotanical data-collecting efforts across four countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), three ecoregions (Amazon, Andes, Chocó), and several human groups (including Amerindians, mestizos, and Afro-Americans). We used palms (Arecaceae) as our model group because of their usefulness and pervasiveness in the ethnobotanical literature. We carried out a large number of field interviews (n = 2201) to determine the coverage and quality of palm ethnobotanical data in the existing ethnobotanical literature (n = 255) published over the past 60 years. In our fieldwork in 68 communities, we collected 87,886 use reports and documented 2262 different palm uses and 140 useful palm species. We demonstrate that traditional knowledge on palm uses is vastly under-documented across ecoregions, countries, and human groups. We suggest that the use of standardized data-collecting protocols in wide-ranging ethnobotanical fieldwork is a promising approach for filling critical information gaps. Our work contributes to the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and emphasizes the need for signatory nations to the Convention on Biological Diversity to respond to these information gaps. Given our findings, we hope to stimulate the formulation of clear plans to systematically document ethnobotanical knowledge in northwestern South America and elsewhere before it vanishes ; This study was funded by the European Union, 7th Framework Programme (contract no. 212631), the Russel E. Train Education for Nature Program of the WWF (to NPZ), the Anne S. Chatham fellowship of the Garden Club of America (to NPZ), and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid travel grants programme (to RCL)

Bovine tuberculosis remains a global problem. An intracutaneous test with tuberculin is the main method for determining the status of herds, which poses special requirements for the activity and specificity. The basis of cotemporal tuberculins are antigens of tuberculosis mycobacteria easily secreted to the liquid synthetic medium during growth, but a range of antigens with a low secretion index are in composition of tuberculins in small quantities. The purpose of the research is to obtain weakly secreted antigens from a production waste – autoclaved bacterial mass of production strain of tuberculosis mycobacteria (MTB) using ultrasound and nonionic detergent, to study the diagnostic properties of tuberculosis with 30-50% of such antigens. It has been determined that autoclaved bacterial mass of industrial MBT strain, which is a waste of tuberculin production, can be an additional source of tuberculoproteins, which are low-secreting (LS) MBT antigens, which in an equivalent dose are about 30% more active compared to standard tuberculin based on easily secreted antigens and is not inferior in terms of species specificity. Whereas, up to 50% of purified LS of tuberculoproteins from the bacterial mass can be included in tuberculin composition. The obtained preparation is not reactogenic, in an equivalent dose it does not differ in terms of activity from the international standard for PPD of tuberculin, but surpasses it in terms of species specificity. It has been shown that in herds with an undetermined tuberculosis status, 2.2 times more cows respond to tuberculins with 30-50% of purified LS tuberculoproteins compared to standard preparations based on easily secreted antigens of tuberculosis mycobacterium. Profound studies of reacting cows using methods for detecting the genome of tuberculosis mycobacterium and bacteriological markers of tuberculosis infection have confirmed the presence of latent tuberculosis infection in cow body. The inclusion of up to 50% of tuberculoproteins from the bacterial mass in tuberculin increases the diagnostic properties of the target product and significantly reduces its price cost.

open ; 5 ; si ; Funding text: We thank Dr. N.C. Manoukis (USDA) and an anonymous reviewer for constructive suggestions that improved the manuscript. Dr. Donald Thomas (USDA) was an invaluable source of information on Mexican fruit fly. We continue to be grateful to the international network of developers who maintain and continue to improve the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS, https://www.grass.osgeo.org) GIS software, and make it available to the scientific community. We thank Bridget Thrasher from the Climate Analytics Group (http://www.climateanalyticsgroup.org) for help in obtaining the NASA climate model weather data. The climate scenario for the USA and Mexico are from the NEX-GDDP dataset, prepared by the Climate Analytics Group and NASA Ames Research Center using the NASA Earth Exchange, and distributed by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS). The climate scenario for the Euro-Mediterranean region was developed and provided by the Laboratorio Modellistica Climatica e Impatti at ENEA, Rome, Italy. The study was supported by the Center for the Analysis of Sustainable Agricultural Systems Global (CASAS Global, http://www.casasglobal.org/), by Agenzia nazionale per le nuove tecnologie, l'energia e lo sviluppo economico sostenibile (ENEA), Rome, Italy, and by the project MED-GOLD funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 776467. Clips of the tropical fruit flies in the figures are from photographs by Jack Kelly Clark provided courtesy of the University of California Statewide IPM Program. ; Tropical fruit flies are considered among the most economically important invasive species detected in temperate areas of the United States and the European Union. Detections often trigger quarantine and eradication programs that are conducted without a holistic understanding of the threat posed. Weather-driven physiologically-based demographic models are used to estimate the geographic range, relative abundance, and threat posed by ...

Zoonotic disease surveillance is typically triggered after animal pathogens have already infected humans. Are there ways to identify high-risk viruses before they emerge in humans? If so, then how and where can identifications be made and by what methods? These were the fundamental questions driving a workshop to examine the future of predictive surveillance for viruses that might jump from animals to infect humans. Virologists, ecologists and computational biologists from academia, federal government and non-governmental organizations discussed opportunities as well as obstacles to the prediction of species jumps using genetic and ecological data from viruses and their hosts, vectors and reservoirs. This workshop marked an important first step towards envisioning both scientific and organizational frameworks for this future capability. Canine parvoviruses as well as seasonal H3N2 and pandemic H1N1 influenza viruses are discussed as exemplars that suggest what to look for in anticipating species jumps. To answer the question of where to look, prospects for discovering emerging viruses among wildlife, bats, rodents, arthropod vectors and occupationally exposed humans are discussed. Finally, opportunities and obstacles are identified and accompanied by suggestions for how to look for species jumps. Taken together, these findings constitute the beginnings of a conceptual framework for achieving a virus surveillance capability that could predict future species jumps.

There is a growing recognition that application of mechanistic approaches to understand cross-species shared molecular targets and pathway conservation in the context of hazard characterization, provide significant opportunities in risk assessment (RA) for both human health and environmental safety. Specifically, it has been recognized that a more comprehensive and reliable understanding of similarities and differences in biological pathways across a variety of species will better enable cross-species extrapolation of potential adverse toxicological effects. Ultimately, this would also advance the generation and use of mechanistic data for both human health and environmental RA. A workshop brought together representatives from industry, academia and government to discuss how to improve the use of existing data, and to generate new NAMs data to derive better mechanistic understanding between humans and environmentally-relevant species, ultimately resulting in holistic chemical safety decisions. Thanks to a thorough dialogue among all participants, key challenges, current gaps and research needs were identified, and potential solutions proposed. This discussion highlighted the common objective to progress toward more predictive, mechanistically based, data-driven and animal-free chemical safety assessments. Overall, the participants recognized that there is no single approach which would provide all the answers for bridging the gap between mechanism-based human health and environmental RA, but acknowledged we now have the incentive, tools and data availability to address this concept, maximizing the potential for improvements in both human health and environmental RA.

The transaction specificity of assets yields dependence, and hence transaction costs in case of opportunism and bounded rationality. However, this dependence need not be symmetric between buyer and supplier, and there may be dependence without transaction specific assets. There are many forms of speci ficity, yielding different patterns of more or less symmetric dependence. These different forms of specificity are analyzed in terms of a formal, generalized rela tion of specificity. The implications for dependence are discussed.

The evolutionary importance of hybridization and introgression has long been debated1. Hybrids are usually rare and unfit, but even infrequent hybridization can aid adaptation by transferring beneficial traits between species. Here we use genomic tools to investigate introgression in Heliconius, a rapidly radiating genus of neotropical butterflies widely used in studies of ecology, behaviour, mimicry and speciation2,3,4,5. We sequenced the genome of Heliconius melpomene and compared it with other taxa to investigate chromosomal evolution in Lepidoptera and gene flow among multiple Heliconius species and races. Among 12,669 predicted genes, biologically important expansions of families of chemosensory and Hox genes are particularly noteworthy. Chromosomal organization has remained broadly conserved since the Cretaceous period, when butterflies split from the Bombyx (silkmoth) lineage. Using genomic resequencing, we show hybrid exchange of genes between three co-mimics, Heliconius melpomene, Heliconius timareta and Heliconius elevatus, especially at two genomic regions that control mimicry pattern. We infer that closely related Heliconius species exchange protective colour-pattern genes promiscuously, implying that hybridization has an important role in adaptive radiation. ; We thank the governments of Colombia, Peru and Panama for permission to collect the butterflies. Sequencing was funded by contributions from consortium members. We thank M. Abanto for assistance in raising the inbred line. Individual laboratories were funded by the Leverhulme Trust (C.D.J.), the John Fell Fund and Christ Church College, Oxford (L. C. F.), The Royal Society (M.J., C.D.J.), the NSF (W.O.M., M. R. K., R. D. R., S. M., A. D. B.), the NIH (M. R. K., S. L. S., J.A.Y.), the CNRS (M.J.), the ERC (M.J., P. W. H. H.), the Banco de la Republica and COLCIENCAS (M. L.) and the BBSRC (J.M., C.D.J., M.L.B. and R.H.f.-C.). (Leverhulme Trust; John Fell Fund; Christ Church College, Oxford; Royal Society; NSF; NIH; CNRS; ERC; Banco de la ...

Climate change poses a significant threat to global biodiversity, but freshwater fishes have been largely ignored in climate change assessments. Here, we assess threats of future flow and water temperature extremes to ~11,500 riverine fish species. In a 3.2 °C warmer world (no further emission cuts after current governments' pledges for 2030), 36% of the species have over half of their present-day geographic range exposed to climatic extremes beyond current levels. Threats are largest in tropical and sub-arid regions and increases in maximum water temperature are more threatening than changes in flow extremes. In comparison, 9% of the species are projected to have more than half of their present-day geographic range threatened in a 2 °C warmer world, which further reduces to 4% of the species if warming is limited to 1.5 °C. Our results highlight the need to intensify (inter)national commitments to limit global warming if freshwater biodiversity is to be safeguarded.