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Photosynthetic capacity of senescent leaves for a subtropical broadleaf deciduous tree species Liquidambar formosana Hance
Get PDFOpen Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Photosynthetic capacity and leaf life span generally determine how much carbon a plant assimilates during the growing season. Leaves of deciduous tree species start senescence in late season, but whether the senescent leaves still retain capacity of carbon assimilation remains a question. In this study, we investigated leaf phenology and photosynthesis of a subtropical broadleaf deciduous tree species Liquidambar formosana Hance in the central southern continental China. The results show that L. formosana has extended leaf senescence (more than 2 months) with a substantial number of red leaves persisting on the tree. Leaf photosynthetic capacity decreases over season, but the senescent red leaves still maintain relatively high photosynthetic capacity at 42%, 66% and 66% of the mature leaves for net photosynthesis rate, apparent quantum yield, and quantum yield at the light compensation point, respectively. These results indicate that L. formosana may still contribute to carbon sink during leaf senescence
Never say die: death euphemisms, misunderstandings and their implications for practice
No full textThis document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in International Journal of Palliative Nursing, copyright © MA Healthcare, after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see http://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/ijpn.2017.23.7.324.BACKGROUND: A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on death and dying was conducted to open the dialogue around death and dying. In one activity, participants were asked to engage with language and to think of alternative words (or euphemisms) that are used to describe death.
AIM: To reflect from a nursing perspective how language enables and sometimes disguises important messages and conversations.
METHODS: Four hundred and seventy one participants provided 3053 euphemisms.
FINDINGS: Euphemisms were varied, with many providing commentary on their purpose and use.
DISCUSSION: As a society we have become quite creative in the use of euphemisms, but need to be mindful of misunderstandings and misinterpretations which can cause embarrassment and distress in clinical situations.
CONCLUSION: This paper describes some of the euphemisms that were provided, examining why they are used and how their use can be easily misconstrued in daily life and in clinical practice
A pragmatic, phase III, multisite, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-arm, dose increment randomised trial of regular, low-dose extended-release morphine for chronic breathlessness: Breathlessness, Exertion And Morphine Sulfate (BEAMS) study protocol
Get PDFThis is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Introduction Chronic breathlessness is highly prevalent and distressing to patients and families. No medication is registered for its symptomatic reduction. The strongest evidence is for regular, low-dose, extended- release (ER) oral morphine. A recent large phase III study suggests the subgroup most likely to benefit have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and modified Medical Research Council breathlessness scores of 3 or 4. This protocol is for an adequately powered, parallel-arm, placebo-controlled, multisite, factorial, block-randomised study evaluating regular ER morphine for chronic breathlessness in people with COPD.
Methods and analysis The primary question is what effect regular ER morphine has on worst breathlessness, measured daily on a 0–10 numerical rating scale. Uniquely, the coprimary outcome will use a FitBit to measure habitual physical activity. Secondary questions include safety and, whether upward titration after initial benefit delivers greater net symptom reduction. Substudies include longitudinal driving simulation, sleep, caregiver, health economic and pharmacogenetic studies. Seventeen centres will recruit 171 participants from respiratory and palliative care. The study has five phases including three randomisation phases to increasing doses of ER morphine. All participants will receive placebo or active laxatives as appropriate. Appropriate statistical analysis of primary and secondary outcomes will be used.
Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval has been obtained. Results of the study will be submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals, findings presented at relevant conferences and potentially used to inform registration of ER morphine for chronic breathlessness.
Trial registration number NCT02720822; Pre-results
A genome-wide transcriptome map of pistachio (Pistacia vera L.) provides novel insights into salinity-related genes and marker discovery
Get PDFThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background: Pistachio (Pistacia vera L.) is one of the most important commercial nut crops worldwide. It is a salt-tolerant and long-lived tree, with the largest cultivation area in Iran. Climate change and subsequent increased soil salt content have adversely affected the pistachio yield in recent years. However, the lack of genomic/global transcriptomic sequences on P. vera impedes comprehensive researches at the molecular level. Hence, whole transcriptome sequencing is required to gain insight into functional genes and pathways in response to salt stress.
Results: RNA sequencing of a pooled sample representing 24 different tissues of two pistachio cultivars with contrasting salinity tolerance under control and salt treatment by Illumina Hiseq 2000 platform resulted in 368,953,262 clean 100 bp paired-ends reads (90 Gb). Following creating several assemblies and assessing their quality from multiple perspectives, we found that using the annotation-based metrics together with the length-based parameters allows an improved assessment of the transcriptome assembly quality, compared to the solely use of the length-based parameters. The generated assembly by Trinity was adopted for functional annotation and subsequent analyses. In total, 29,119 contigs annotated against all of five public databases, including NR, UniProt, TAIR10, KOG and InterProScan. Among 279 KEGG pathways supported by our assembly, we further examined the pathways involved in the plant hormone biosynthesis and signaling as well as those to be contributed to secondary metabolite biosynthesis due to their importance under salinity stress. In total, 11,337 SSRs were also identified, which the most abundant being dinucleotide repeats. Besides, 13,097 transcripts as candidate stress-responsive genes were identified. Expression of some of these genes experimentally validated through quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) that further confirmed the accuracy of the assembly. From this analysis, the contrasting expression pattern of NCED3 and SOS1 genes were observed between salt-sensitive and salt-tolerant cultivars.
Conclusion: This study, as the first report on the whole transcriptome survey of P. vera, provides important resources and paves the way for functional and comparative genomic studies on this major tree to discover the salinity tolerance-related markers and stress response mechanisms for breeding of new pistachio cultivars with more salinity tolerance
Divided we fall: clinicians and academic psychiatrists need to stand together
Get PDFCopyright © 2017 The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. Reprinted by permission of SAGE PublicationsObjective:
Psychiatry faces urgent problems requiring united action. These problems affect academic psychiatrists in the universities, and clinicians in publicly funded mental health services. Academic units are isolated and endangered, finding it difficult to recruit. They could benefit from closer relationships with public mental health services, in terms of recruitment, shared teaching and clinical research. However, mental health services are preoccupied with their own problems, particularly in relation to acute clinical demand. How can we stand together to improve academic units and clinical psychiatry?
Conclusions:
Clinicians and academic psychiatrists can stand together on important matters, but it takes initiatives from local leaders to overcome the structural barriers between health services and the universities. An example is given of united action by clinicians and academic psychiatrists to address a crisis within a state mental health system. First, psychiatrists undertook independent health services research that compared the state system with those in other Australian and international jurisdictions. The comparative data was used to generate solutions, which were presented at every level from ministerial offices through to service managers. Finally, psychiatrists took up joint academic and clinical leadership roles in the university and the mental health system. This united research-led approach turned around the crisis in the state mental health syste
The development of seaweed-derived bioactive compounds for use as prebiotics and nutraceuticals using enzyme technologies
Get PDFThis manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
This author accepted manuscript is made available following 12 month embargo from date of publication (Oct 2017) in accordance with the publisher’s archiving policyBackground
Seaweeds are a large and diverse group of photosynthetic macro-algae found across the world's oceans. There is a growing recognition that they are important sources of bioactive compounds with a variety of biological activities that could potentially contribute to functional food and nutraceutical industries.
Scope and approach
The complex structure and distinctive components of seaweed cell walls, which differ significantly from terrestrial plants, presents a major challenge for the effective extraction of bioactive compounds from inside the cells. Enzyme technologies have been used to improve the extraction, hydrolysis, and structure modification efficiently with a high degree of environmental sustainability. This review critically analyses the advances, challenges, and future directions in applying enzyme technologies to improve the extraction and processing of bioactive compounds from seaweeds and their potential applications in functional foods and nutraceuticals.
Key findings and conclusions
Different enzymatic processes have been demonstrated to (1) assist the extraction by breaking down the seaweed cell walls, and (2) degrade or hydrolyse macromolecules including polysaccharides and proteins. These enzymatic processes improve the yield and recovery of bioactive compounds and enhance their biological properties with regard to prebiotic, antioxidant, ACE inhibitory, anti-inflammatory, and antiviral effects. Seaweed-derived bioactive compounds from these processes present significant new opportunities in developing novel food applications. The current food regulations and safety requirements for seaweeds and their products are addressed for commercial product development
Review of Gender, Madness and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature: Australian Psychoses by Laura Deane
Get PDFReview of Gender, Madness and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature: Australian Psychoses by Laura Dean
Complete Poetry and Translations, Transnational Literature, November 2017
No full textAll poetry and translations from Transnational Literature, November 2017, in one file for ease of printing and downloadin