Significant impact of modified atmosphere with CO2 and N2 on developmental stages of Cadra cautella (Walker)

The translocation and deposition of photosynthates in forage species is of great importance to forage quality. Sustained production of perennial forage species is influenced by the quantity of photosynthate deposited in storage organs. Phenological development is generally accompanied by changes in physiological characteristics which would ultimately influence carbon assimilation, translocation, and deposition. The objective of this study was to quantify 14C assimilation, translocation, and deposition in little bluestem (Andropogon scoparius Michx.) tillers during two stages of morphological development. Little bluestem tillers at two differing stages of phenological development were subjected to an atmosphere containing 14CO2 for 4 hours. Treated tillers were harvested at arbitrary time intervals over a 24‐hour period and samples of each morphological structure were analyzed. Most of the 14C activity was confined to the ethanol extract and residue fraction. No activity was detected in the water extracts or starch fractions at either stage of development. Results indicated that the general pathway for 14C incorporation was similar at both stages of tiller development. However, approximately twice as much activity was found in the culm bases and roots of tillers before culm elongation as in those of tillers whose culms had elongated 24 hours after treatment. The noticeable difference was attributed to the inclusion of actively elongating upper culms that accumulated much of the 14C activity in the latter stage of development. Sucrose was the only carbohydrate containing activity in the culm bases, which indicates that it is the form in which 14C is translocated from leaves to roots.

Plant growth, the increase of organ dimensions over time, and development, the change in plant structure, are often studied as two separate processes. However, there is structural and functional evidence that these two processes are strongly related. The aim of this study was to investigate the co-ordination between growth and development using mango trees, which have well-defined developmental stages. Developmental stages, determined in an expert way, and organ sizes, determined from objective measurements, were collected during the vegetative growth and flowering phases of two cultivars of mango, Mangifera indica. For a given cultivar and growth unit type (either vegetative or flowering), a multistage model based on absolute growth rate sequences deduced from the measurements was first built, and then growth stages deduced from the model were compared with developmental stages. Strong matches were obtained between growth stages and developmental stages, leading to a consistent definition of integrative developmental growth stages. The growth stages highlighted growth asynchronisms between two topologically connected organs, namely the vegetative axis and its leaves. Integrative developmental growth stages emphasize that developmental stages are closely related to organ growth rates. The results are discussed in terms of the possible physiological processes underlying these stages, including plant hydraulics, biomechanics and carbohydrate partitioning.

Clinical care of children and research investigations focused on children are dependent upon well-developed and child-sensitive measurement tools. However, measurement protocols involving children continue to challenge clinicians and researchers. A major reason for this problem is the paucity of reliable and valid measurement instruments that can be efficiently and effectively used with children. Conducting measurements with children is often difficult because the cognitive, emotional, social, psychological, and physiological characteristics and skills of children are different at the various stages of child development. In most instances, these differences indicate that the same measurement instrument or approach cannot be used successfully with children of all ages. Therefore, a measurement instrument that may work quite well for an 8-year-old child might be quite inappropriate for a 2-year-old or a child who is 12 years old. For investigators who seek to study children across developmental stages or compare children at various stages of development, this is a major challenge because few instruments exist that can reliably and validty measure children on a variable across the various ages and stages of development. Usually, a different measurement tool is required for children at each stage of development, and scores often do not have equitable meaning across the various stages. Hence, appropriate comparisons of children across developmental stages are difficult. Generally, the younger the child the more difficult it is to measure psychosocial variables. This is the case because most psychosocial variables require verbal communication by the person who is the target of such measurements. Clearly, young children are often not verbally capable of effectively communicating their emotional or social perceptions; and neither do they typically have the level of comprehension and reading and writing ability to respond to questionnaires or interviews. Conducting psychosocial measurements with infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and young school-age children is particularly challenging because self-report is a common approach to collecting data on psychosocial variables. Self-report is of no use with infants, of questionable usefulness with toddlers, and of limited usefulness with preschoolers and young school-age children. Because self-report approaches need to be tailored to the cognitive and social skills of the child, this means that interviews may be useful with children who are verbal but who do not have reading ability. Interview schedules would need to take into account the child's age and stage of development in regard to level of comprehension, typical style of communicating, and language ability. Therefore, even when children can communicate verbally, cognitive and social skills vary across stages of development, which may make it inappropriate to use the same interview schedule or questionnaire across age groups or even across older developmental stages. Whether an instrument developed for children can be effectively used across developmental stages depends upon the nature of the concept that is the focus of measurement and the approach to the measurement employed. In general, concepts that are more concrete, that are experienced similarly across developmental stages, and that are amenable to observation are more likely to be measurable with the same instrument across developmental stages. Concepts that are more abstract, that may be perceived differently at the various stages of development, and that require verbal reports are less amenable to being measured with the same instrument across developmental stages. Concrete concepts tend to be simpler and easier to quantify. They are typically more likely to be observable or require a simple response. The observational approach to measurement is usually effective for use with persons who are verbal and nonverbal. Therefore, this approach can be employed across developmental stages, particularly for younger age groups. …

Sobre quatro tornárias do Atlântico e do Mediterrâneo

Studies were conducted to evaluate the susceptibility of avian ovarian granulosa cells to apoptosis when incubated in vitro and to relate this relative susceptibility to both the stage of follicle development from which granulosa cells were collected (atresia-prone vs. -resistant) and to the expression of a gene previously linked to the regulation of cell viability, bcl-xlong. Granulosa cells from slow growing, prehierarchal (4- to 8-mm diameter; atresia-prone) follicles were found to undergo rapid and progressively extensive apoptosis after incubation in defined medium for 6-24 h (P < 0.05 vs. unincubated controls). By contrast, cells from the largest preovulatory (F1) follicle, as well as from follicles most recently recruited into the follicle hierarchy (9- to 12-mm diameter), showed significantly less low molecular wt labeling at 6 h of incubation (P < 0.05 vs. 4- to 8-mm follicles). Furthermore, the amount of low molecular wt labeling did not significantly increase in cells from either stage of follicle development at 12 or 24 h of incubation (P < 0.05 vs. 6 h incubation). This biochemical indication of ongoing apoptosis in prehierarchal follicle granulosa cells was confirmed by an increased incidence of pyknotic nuclei detected by morphological analysis. Thus, increased susceptibility to apoptosis in incubated prehierarchal follicle granulosa cells is correlated with the high rate of follicle atresia that is known to occur at this stage of development in vivo. Recombinant human FSH (100 mIU) and transforming growth factor-alpha (3.3 nM) partially suppressed apoptosis in prehierarchal follicle granulosa cells after 6 h of incubation (by 46-57%; P < 0.05 vs. control), as did the cAMP analog, 8-Br-cAMP (1 mM; by 59%; P < 0.05). A single form of the bcl-2-related gene, bcl-x, was detected in hen ovarian tissues; this transcript corresponded to bcl-xlong, the death-suppressing form of bcl-x. The highest levels of bcl-xlong messenger RNA were found in granulosa tissue from preovulatory follicles, with significantly lower levels detected in prehierarchal follicle granulosa tissue (P < 0.05). Elevated expression of bcl-xlong in preovulatory follicles was correlated to increased resistance to the process of apoptosis, in vitro, and the virtual absence of follicle atresia at this stage of development, in vivo. We conclude that there is a direct relationship between the inherent susceptibility of avian granulosa cells to apoptosis and the high rate of follicle atresia in follicles not yet selected into the preovulatory hierarchy. Moreover, our results are consistent with the proposal that the expression of death-suppressing genes, including bcl-xlong, is capable of rendering cells resistant to the process of apoptosis. The findings reported herein provide the foundation for a novel model with which to further elucidate molecular mechanisms related not only to the initiation of follicle atresia, but also events associated with the process of follicle selection.

The traditional literature on the role of intellectual property rights (IPR) in innovation highlights the strength of IPR protection in the context of the tradeoff between innovation and diffusion. More recent literature analyzes the role of diverse forms of IPR in promoting innovation and growth and delves into not only regular patents but also utility models (or petite patents) and trademarks. Using firm‐level IPR (patents, designs and trademarks) data from Korea, we further extend this new strand of literature to explore the role of designs at different stages of development. The data spans five decades and can be divided into three subperiods that represent different stages of economic development. We find that design‐intensive sectors tend to be more export oriented. Further, firms’ sales growth is significantly associated with the design intensity of firms. Such association is found only during the later stages of economic development in Korea. Taken together with earlier studies, our findings imply that different forms of IPR, in particular designs, matter differently for innovation and firm performance at different stages of development. Designs are not that important in the early stages of development when economic growth relies on the mass production of low‐cost goods by low‐wage workers. The importance of design rises with economic development at later stages when product differentiation becomes critical. A unique and smart appearance increases value in the eye of the customer value and, thus, could help firms’ sales performance.

In many developing countries, there are protected areas with very strong natural resources and tourism development potential but in a poor conservation condition. Many of these areas are at pre or early stages of tourism development. These protected areas face problems including shortages of financial resources and park staff, and difficulty in enforcing conservation laws. Strict conservation laws have limited local residents’ access to the natural resources and created problems such as increased poaching, habitat destruction and local people-park conflicts. This study adopts a case study approach, choosing two villages in rural Iran that are located near protected areas, one with no tourism and one at the early stage of tourism. Both these villages are experiencing challenges in striving for environmental protection and community development in a remote area of the country. There is a growing body of literature that recognises the importance of local resident attitudes and local people-park relationship roles in achieving both conservation goals and sustainable tourism development in and around protected areas. It is also suggested that incentives from tourism have a pivotal role in positively affecting local resident attitudes to the environment and consequently their behaviour. However, a challenge in the tourism literature is that most of the studies on local resident attitudes to the environment were conducted at a certain stage of development and their results cannot be applied to other stages. Although the literature indicates that tourism revenues improve local resident attitudes towards the environment and conservation, with no study comparing attitudes before and after tourism development, it is unclear whether these positive attitudes are due to tourism benefits or whether the local resident attitudes were positive even before tourism development. It is also widely discussed and hypothesised in the tourism literature that people with positive environmental attitudes are more likely to support environmental conservation activities. Local resident attitudes towards conservation have generally been studied as a single variable in the tourism literature. Importantly the environmental literature suggests that local resident attitudes towards environmental conservation and their attitudes towards protected area management might be different and a distinction has been made in studying these attitudes as separate variables. Consequently, this study aims to investigate the differences between local resident attitudes towards the environment, protected area management (PAM) and tourism at two early stages of tourism development by comparing attitudes in a community that has no prior experience of tourism and a community at an early stage of tourism development. This involved developing six ii hypotheses to assess the association between the three variables within and across a non-tourism setting and a setting with some tourism development in the two case study villages. A survey instrument was designed to measure local residents’ socio-demographic information, attitudes towards the environment, attitudes towards protected area management, and attitudes towards tourism. Information on the cases study villages was also gathered via interviews, observations and secondary data. Analyses of the survey data revealed that, in contrast to the literature, there were no significant differences in attitudes toward the environment between the two settings. Importantly, there were statistically significant differences between attitudes towards protected area management in the two settings. Based on the survey and the other qualitative data collected, it seems that tourism was successful in providing alternative sources of income for local residents and in reducing their dependence on natural resources and resulted in fewer local people-park conflicts and more positive attitudes towards protected area management. However, observation in the village with tourism showed that these positive environmental attitudes did not translate into environmental behaviour, as local residents were engaged in unsustainable environmental activities in the village. For the case study villages, tourism does appear to offer potential to improve both environmental protection and community development, but tourism development needs to proceed carefully and with awareness of the potential for other environmental problems to emerge if it is not well managed. This study has contributed to the tourism body of knowledge as the first study to focus on local resident attitudes at the pre-development stage and compare it with attitudes at the early stages of tourism development. It further made a distinction between attitudes towards the environment and attitudes towards protected area management which had not been previously addressed in tourism studies. Practical suggestions have been made for protected area mangers and tourism planners. Knowing local resident attitudes at the early stages of tourism development should assist in reducing local people-park conflicts, improving environmental conservation, and reducing negative tourism environmental impacts. To ensure tourism contributes to both environmental conservation and community development, there is a need for different management strategies such as education programs, zoning, and law enforcement in and around protected areas. To achieve these goals, all key stakeholders such as government bodies and local communities must be included in protected area planning and tourism development.

Hypocotyls are a commonly used model to study primary growth in plants, since post-germinative hypocotyls increase in size by cell elongation rather than cell division. Flax hypocotyls produce phloem fibres in bundles one to two cell layers thick, parallel to the protoxylem poles of the stele. Cell wall deposition within these cells occurs rapidly at a well-defined stage of development. The aim was to identify transcripts associated with distinct stages of hypocotyl and phloem fibre development. Stages of flax hypocotyl development were defined by analysing hypocotyl length in relation to fibre secondary wall deposition. Selected stages of development were used in microarray analyses to identify transcripts involved in the transition from elongation to secondary cell wall deposition in fibres. Expression of specific genes was confirmed by qRT-PCR and by enzymatic assays. Genes enriched in the elongation phase included transcripts related to cell-wall modification or primary-wall deposition. Transcripts specifically enriched at the transition between elongation and secondary wall deposition included beta-galactosidase and arabinogalactan proteins. Later stages of wall development showed an increase in secondary metabolism-related transcripts, chitinases and glycosyl hydrolases including KORRIGAN. Microarray analysis also identified groups of transcription factors enriched at one or more stages of fibre development. Subsequent analysis of a differentially expressed beta-galactosidase confirmed that the post-elongation increase in beta-galactosidase enzyme activity was localized to phloem fibres. Transcripts were identified associated with specific stages of hypocotyl development, in which phloem fibre cells were undergoing thickening of secondary walls. Temporal and spatial regulation of beta-galactosidase activity suggests a role for this enzyme in remodelling of flax bast fibre cell walls during secondary cell wall deposition.

The drought tolerance of Cabbage, Brassica oleracea var capitata (Oxylus) was investigated by subjecting the initial, development and mid growth stages to varying drought lengths of 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15 days in a 7 × 3 factorial experiment to determine the effect of each drought period at each growth stage on growth and yield. Data on number of opened leaves/plant, leaf area index (LAI), leaf chlorophyll content, head size and yield/ha were recorded due to drought effect at each growth stage. Analysis of variance at 5% probability level indicated that drought periods of 5–15 days at the initial stage significantly reduced number of leaves, LAI and head size. Significant reduction in chlorophyll content and yield were due to drought beyond 11 and 5 days respectively at the initial stage. Number of opened leaves increased significantly with increasing drought length at the development stage; critical at 11 days drought. Significant reductions in LAI at the development and mid stages were critical at 11 and 9 days respectively whilst chlorophyll content was significantly reduced at both the development and mid stages by all drought periods. Significant reduction in head size at the development and mid stages was critical at 7 days. Generally, the drought tolerance of cabbage increased from the initial to the mid-stage. To maintain economic yields of cabbage in the forest-savannah transition zone, the initial and development stages could tolerate drought stress up to 5 days whilst the mid stage could tolerate up to 7 days.

The changing cellular environments of hematopoiesis in human development in utero

Intercusp differences in enamel prism patterns in early and late stages of human tooth development

Concentrations of polyamines (PA) and the activities of the PA-synthesizing enzymes ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) and arginine decarboxylase (ADC) extracted from the mesocarp tissue of avocado (Persea americana Mill, cv ;Simmonds') fruits at different stages of development were compared with DNA content and the activities of 5'-methylthioadenosine (MTA) nucleosidase and 5-methylthioribose (MTR) kinase. Putrescine, spermidine, and spermine were at their peak concentrations during the early stages of fruit development (362, 201, and 165 nanomoles per gram fresh weight, respectively, at 15 days from full bloom), then declined to 30% or less at full maturity. Agmatine showed only a slight change in concentration throughout the fruit development. The activity of ODC, which was low during flowering (8 nmoles per milligram protein per hour), increased more than threefold during the first 2 months then declined at the later stages of fruit development, while ADC activity showed only a slight increase. DNA content followed a similar pattern of change as that of PA and ODC. The decline in DNA and ODC activity suggest a lack of correlation between cell proliferation and PA at the later stages of the avocado fruit development. It is also possible that any cell division which may take place during the latter stages of the fruit development is not sufficient to alter the pattern of PA biosynthesis. MTA nucleosidase and MTR kinase activities increased during the first 15 days of fruit development followed by a slight decline at 60 and 90 days from full bloom. At 120 days (1 month before full maturity) both MTA nucleosidase and MTR kinase activities increased significantly. During maximum ethylene synthesis, MTA nucleosidase and MTR kinase activities were approximately fivefold and eightfold, respectively, higher than during maximum PA synthesis. The data indicate that the MTA molecules produced during PA and ethylene synthesis are actively metabolized to MTR and MTR-1-P, the two intermediates involved in the regeneration of S-adenosylmethionine from MTA. The data also suggest that the PA and ethylene biosynthetic pathways are not actively competing for the same substrates at any given stage of the avocado fruit development and ripening.

Here, we describe that lysine-specific demethylase 1 (Lsd1/KDM1a), which demethylates histone H3 on Lys4 or Lys9 (H3K4/K9), is an indispensible epigenetic governor of hematopoietic differentiation. Integrative genomic analysis, combining global occupancy of Lsd1, genome-wide analysis of its substrates H3K4 monomethylation and dimethylation, and gene expression profiling, reveals that Lsd1 represses hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell (HSPC) gene expression programs during hematopoietic differentiation. We found that Lsd1 acts at transcription start sites, as well as enhancer regions. Loss of Lsd1 was associated with increased H3K4me1 and H3K4me2 methylation on HSPC genes and gene derepression. Failure to fully silence HSPC genes compromised differentiation of hematopoietic stem cells as well as mature blood cell lineages. Collectively, our data indicate that Lsd1-mediated concurrent repression of enhancer and promoter activity of stem and progenitor cell genes is a pivotal epigenetic mechanism required for proper hematopoietic maturation.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00633.001

Reviewed by: Isherwood's Fiction: The Self and Technique Brian Finney Lisa M. Schwerdt . Isherwood's Fiction: The Self and Technique. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 214 pp. $39.95. Lisa Schwerdt offers her reader a systematic—maybe an oversystematic—way of understanding Isherwood's development as a novelist. His fiction only succeeds, she argues, when it reflects his personal concerns, as it does best when employing the namesake narrator. Accordingly Isherwood's Fiction treats his entire ouevre as a bildungsroman which "records the growth of the individual as he confronts the self at various stages of development." Lisa Schwerdt tries to give these individual stages a more universal significance by showing how they conform to psychologist Erik Erikson's stages of ego development from childhood through old age. She concludes that only when Isherwood the artist writes about the progressive experience of Isherwood the man is the resultant book likely to be an artistic success with wide ranging appeal. It is far too simplistic to make such a claim without qualification. On one page Schwerdt claims that "once he overcomes his need to disguise and misdirect," (a fault he incurs by splitting himself between Edward and Eric in The Memorial) "and fully injects himself into the text, Isherwood's difficulties with intent and purpose vanish. . . ." On the next page she quotes Isherwood without seeming to notice that he is contradicting her: "To me 'Isherwood' was much more than my name; it was the code word for my identity as a writer. . . ." Exactly. A writer's work is not simply the product of his or her own experiences. We do not have to accept the extreme claims of poststructuralism to recognize that a book also derives from other books and texts, as well as from the social and historical conditions that prevailed at the time it was written. It is not surprising to find a corresponding confusion throughout between the (implied) author, narrator, and protagonist. The other difficulty that arises with Schwerdt's approach is her use of Erikson's stages of ego development. In order to make Isherwood's novels conform to Erikson's successive stages of development, she frequently distorts the true nature of particular books. Thus she argues that Goodbye to Berlin, unlike Mr Norris Changes Trains, shows Isherwood's "increasing awareness of contemporary events and his grasp of the individual's responsibility for them," which is equivalent to Erikson's adolescent stage of development. In fact, as Samuel Hynes has suggested, the earlier book is about the irruption of the public into the private world of characters like Mr Norris and the narrator. Further, the parallels between the novels and Erikson's stages suggest that Isherwood must have been a very late developer, as he only reaches Erikson's task of young adulthood with The World in the Evening when he was 49 years old. Even this disparity might have made for some interesting diagnoses, but Isherwood's late development in Eriksonian terms is never investigated. A pity. [End Page 613] Brian Finney University of Southern California Copyright © 1990 Purdue Research Foundation

This paper presents a comparison of stochastic and deterministic reserves estimation methods as related to the various stages of development of an oil or gas field, with emphasis on offshore environment. The current debate concerning stochastic and deterministic reserve estimates and definitions is framed with respect to the various stages of field development. Advances in technology in terms of three-dimensional seismic data and reservoir simulation appear to narrow the range of reserves estimates. Field examples are presented to compare stochastic and deterministic reserves estimates. Stochastic methods are preferable during exploration and pre-development, while both methods can be used in practice to support the decision to proceed with development. In the later stages of development, deterministic methods become more practical as other data become available. Advances in technology are leading to better deterministic estimates as well as stochastic estimates with narrower ranges. Practices in the industry vary from complete dedication to deterministic or stochastic to a choice of the method depending on the stage of development. This paper offers recommendations as to which reserves estimation technique is more suitable at specific stages of field development based on data scope and availability.