Inadequacies in public protected area networks dictates that private land will play an important role in the conservation of biodiversity in the coming decades. Household gardens are a key example of private lands that can serve as refuges for biodiversity, with birds as a popular flagship for garden biodiversity. Discussion has focused heavily on the species of plant a resident might select to attract birds to their garden. In this paper, we describe additional and important factors that should form part of this broader conversation on gardens for birds and biodiversity, with a specific aim of drawing attention to species that are at risk of localised extinctions in modern urban landscapes – urban adaptors. We present our commentary in two themes: (a) mitigating threats to birds in the urban environment and (b) enhancing the habitat value of the urban environment for a broader range of bird species. We provide a synthesis of the research of recent years that has explored the urban environment and its ability to support birds, but importantly, we extend on this by bringing together topics that have been somewhat lacking in the discussion to date. In a new approach to this conversation, this paper brings together key topics that can no longer be considered in isolation if we are to make significant conservation gains in the environments were most Australians now reside.

Continued methodological advances have enabled numerous statistical approaches for the analysis of summary statistics from genome-wide association studies. Genetic correlation analysis within specific regions enables a new strategy for identifying pleiotropy. Genomic regions with significant ‘local’ genetic correlations can be investigated further using state-of-the-art methodologies for statistical fine-mapping and variant colocalisation. We explored the utility of a genome-wide local genetic correlation analysis approach for identifying genetic overlaps between the candidate neuropsychiatric disorders, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and schizophrenia. The correlation analysis identified several associations between traits, the majority of which were loci in the human leukocyte antigen region. Colocalisation analysis suggested that disease-implicated variants in these loci often differ between traits and, in one locus, indicated a shared causal variant between ALS and AD. Our study identified candidate loci that might play a role in multiple neuropsychiatric diseases and suggested the role of distinct mechanisms across diseases despite shared loci. The fine-mapping and colocalisation analysis protocol designed for this study has been implemented in a flexible analysis pipeline that produces HTML reports and is available at: https://github.com/ThomasPSpargo/COLOC-reporter.

An increased risk of cardiometabolic disease accompanies persistent systemic inflammation. Yet, the innate and adaptive immune system features in persons who develop these conditions remain poorly defined. Doublets, or cell-cell complexes, are routinely eliminated from flow cytometric and other immune phenotyping analyses, which limits our understanding of their relationship to disease states. Using well-characterized clinical cohorts, including participants with controlled HIV as a model for chronic inflammation and increased immune cell interactions, we show that circulating CD14+ monocytes complexed to CD3+ T cells are dynamic, biologically relevant, and increased in individuals with diabetes after adjusting for confounding factors. The complexes form functional immune synapses with increased expression of proinflammatory cytokines and greater glucose utilization. Furthermore, in persons with HIV, the CD3+T-cell: CD14+monocyte complexes had more HIV copies compared to matched CD14+ monocytes or CD4+ T cells alone. Our results demonstrate that circulating CD3+T-cell:CD14+monocyte pairs represent dynamic cellular interactions that may contribute to inflammation and cardiometabolic disease pathogenesis and may originate or be maintained, in part, by chronic viral infections. These findings provide a foundation for future studies investigating mechanisms linking T cellmonocyte cell-cell complexes to developing immune-mediated diseases, including HIV and diabetes.

Studies investigating serial order in working memory have shown that participants from Western cultures are faster at responding to items presented at the beginning of a sequence using their left hand and faster at responding to items at the end with their right hand. This is known as the spatial positional association of response codes (SPoARC) effect. The SPoARC effect provides evidence that recently presented information is spatially organised in the cognitive system along a horizontal axis. This study investigated the flexibility of spatialisation by testing the effect that distance between items presented on a screen has on the magnitude of the SPoARC effect. It was hypothesised that by increasing the distance between items on a screen a larger SPoARC effect would be found. We used three conditions: central, narrow, and wide. In central, four random letters were presented sequentially at the centre of the screen, in narrow the letters were presented from left to right on the screen, wide was the same as narrow but the separation between the letters was larger. Participants consisted of 64 adults aged 18-55 years old. Participants were presented with four random letters, followed by single probe letter, participants had to indicate, by pressing a key on a normal keyboard, if the probe had been in the sequence. We analysed the data with multilevel modelling. We found evidence for the SPoARC effect in all three conditions. But no evidence that the effect varied between conditions.

Background and aimsMesorhizobium ciceri CC1192 is the commercial inoculant strain for Cicer arietinum (chickpea) cultivation in Australia, including in the Ord River Irrigation Area (ORIA), where C. arietinum cropping began in 1985. Mesorhizobium strains are known to gain the capacity to nodulate legumes through acquisition of symbiosis Integrative and Conjugative Elements (ICEs), leading to the evolution of novel rhizobia. Here, we assess the impact of symbiosis ICE transfer and compare the genomic diversity and symbiotic effectiveness of C. arietinum nodulating rhizobia from the ORIA.MethodsNodule isolates collected from field cultivated C. arietinum were genotyped by RAPD-PCR, and representative strains from each genotype were whole genome sequenced and symbiotically phenotyped in glasshouse conditions to assess N2 fixation effectiveness against CC1192.ResultsA total of 68 nodule isolates, all harbouring the CC1192 symbiosis ICE (ICEMcSym1192), were analysed, with 12 identified as the inoculant strain, and 56 novel strains clustering into ten genotypes. These novel genotypes dominated as nodule occupants across the majority of sites sampled. Nine of the ten representative strains were as effective at N2 fixation as CC1192, with WSM4904 the only ineffective strain. Core genome phylogeny showed the ten strains represent four novel Mesorhizobium genospecies. Novel strains WSM4904 and WSM4906 shared 98.7% sequence identity, yet exhibited very different symbiotic phenotypes.ConclusionsThe CC1192 symbiosis ICE has transferred to a wide diversity of Mesorhizobium spp. in the ORIA. These evolved strains are competitive against CC1192 at nodulating C. arietinum, and the majority are effective symbiotic N2 fixers.

AbstractLow fertility is a growing concern in modern societies. While economic and structural explanations of reproductive hindrances have been informative to some extent, they do not address the fundamental motives that underlie reproductive decisions and are inadequate to explain why East Asian countries, in particular, have such low fertility rates. The current paper advances a novel account of low fertility in modern contexts by describing how modern environments produce a mismatch between our evolved mechanisms and the inputs they were designed to process, leading to preoccupations with social status that get in the way of mating and reproductive outcomes. We also utilize developed East Asian countries as a case study to further highlight how culture may interact with modern features to produce ultralow fertility, sometimes to the extent that people may give up on parenthood or even mating altogether. Through our analysis, we integrate several lines of separate research, elucidate the fundamental dynamics that drive trade-offs between social status and reproductive effort, add to the growing literature on evolutionary mismatch, and provide an improved account of low fertility in modern contexts.