Diverse Life Forms Research Articles

Evolution of the Mechanisms of Virus–Cell Interactions

Viruses are the most numerous and genetically diverse form of life; they are able to interact with any cellular organism. The long-term coexistence of cellular organisms and parasitic viruses has contributed to the emergence and evolution of a variety of strategies to defend host cells from viral infection and of viral counterstrategies to avoid cellular defenses. This review focuses on the issue of the coevolution of systems of innate antiviral defense and adaptive viral mechanisms.

Opredmećenje kao otuđenje i kao praksa

In the most general terms, objectification is the activity of man by which he creates objects as exteriorized segments of himself, i. e. humanizes nature and so transforms lit into his own object world. The concept itself appeared and took shape in German classical philosophy from whence Marx borrowed it. Although the philosophers of German classical idealism, Fichte, Schelling and especially Hegel put objectification forward in their thought as a philosophic problem, they did not crystalize it as a specific concept with a separate meaning, but considered it as a process identical with exteriorization, or with alienation. On the other hand, Marx distinguishes objectification as praxis, production, the fundamental mode of man’s self-affirmation in the world, the quintessence of the human entity, from alienation as enforced, unfree wage labour in capitalistic socialproductive conditions. Through the »positive abolition of private property«, the revolutionary overcoming of class society and the establishment of an authentic human community, Marx belivies that man’s alienation will be overcome and only then will objectification be wholly affirmed as the free and universal production of diverse forms of human life.

Why We Humans Have Been Chronically Stalled For Millennia In Our Evolutionary Maturation: Tapping The Dormant Global Power Of ((Transpersonal Life))©

We know there is a chronic breakdown in real dialogue and human relations across and between widely diverse worlds, ideologies and forms of life. We can see over millennia the violent clash of worlds, religions and ideologies. But we also witness the amazing possibility of genuine communication and non-violent human relations across all sorts of borders. The author shares with us some amazing aspect of his life-long research about human evolution. KEYWORDS Transpersonal Life, global reason, transculturalism, mind, evolutionary maturation.

Life Writing “from Below” in Europe: Authors, Archives, Avenues, Arenas

Drawing on a large body of scholarship from the last forty years, this article offers an overview of the diverse forms of life writing “from below” (by authors from low down in a class or status hierarchy) in Europe since the early modern period (including autobiographies, diaries, letters, as well as transcripts of oral testimonies); and the varied and developing national traditions of collecting and archiving which have developed since the mid-twentieth century. It locates such writing within a field of force between an exteriority pole constituted by the state (or by organisations of civil society, or informal community pressures) which compel or otherwise elicit life writings from below, and an interiority pole of the impulse of someone hitherto excluded to narrate their life in some public sphere; and examines diverse ways (state compulsion or solicitation; citizen engagement, challenge or resistance) in which these pressures give rise to the production of texts. It identifies the roles of intermediaries within civil society (patrons, sponsors, commercial publishers, collaborators) as links between individual (potential) authors and the public sphere.

THE DIVERSITY OF STONY CORAL AND THE TENDENCY TO BLEACH BASED ON LIFEFORM IN THE TENGAH PATCH-REEF OF KARIMUNJAWA ISLANDS

Coral reefs, the habitat of tens of thousands of marine species, are an ecosystem with the highest biodiversity. Several threats, however, have impaired coral reefs. One having a potentially catastrophic effect is the increasing temperature of the ocean that leads to a coral bleaching event. This study aimed to determine the diversity of stony coral based on their lifeform, to assess the condition of reefs by measuring percent cover of live coral, and to determine the bleaching occurrence based on the stony coral lifeform in the Tengah patch-reef of Karimunjawa National (Marine) Park. The research was a visual survey with line intercept transects (LIT) used to collect data. The data were presented as percent cover of living coral and their lifeforms. The result showed the diversity of coral in the Tengah patch-reef was very high as indicated by the presence of all coral lifeforms in the study site. The most diverse lifeform was found at 10 m depth with 13 lifeforms, while the lowest lifeform was found at 3 m depth with ten lifeforms. The most extensive live coral cover was found at 3 m depth estimated around 73.71%, and the the lowest coverage was found at 10 m depth, no more than 50.42%. The bleaching event was found in Acropora branching and Acropora digitate at the 3 m depth

Global accumulation of circRNAs during aging in Caenorhabditis elegans

BackgroundCircular RNAs (CircRNAs) are a newly appreciated class of RNAs that lack free 5′ and 3′ ends, are expressed by the thousands in diverse forms of life, and are mostly of enigmatic function. Ostensibly due to their resistance to exonucleases, circRNAs are known to be exceptionally stable. Previous work in Drosophila and mice have shown that circRNAs increase during aging in neural tissues.ResultsHere, we examined the global profile of circRNAs in C. elegans during aging by performing ribo-depleted total RNA-seq from the fourth larval stage (L4) through 10-day old adults. Using stringent bioinformatic criteria and experimental validation, we annotated a high-confidence set of 1166 circRNAs, including 575 newly discovered circRNAs. These circRNAs were derived from 797 genes with diverse functions, including genes involved in the determination of lifespan. A massive accumulation of circRNAs during aging was uncovered. Many hundreds of circRNAs were significantly increased among the aging time-points and increases of select circRNAs by over 40-fold during aging were quantified by RT-qPCR. The expression of 459 circRNAs was determined to be distinct from the expression of linear RNAs from the same host genes, demonstrating host gene independence of circRNA age-accumulation.ConclusionsWe attribute the global scale of circRNA age-accumulation to the high composition of post-mitotic cells in adult C. elegans, coupled with the high resistance of circRNAs to decay. These findings suggest that the exceptional stability of circRNAs might explain age-accumulation trends observed from neural tissues of other organisms, which also have a high composition of post-mitotic cells. Given the suitability of C. elegans for aging research, it is now poised as an excellent model system to determine whether there are functional consequences of circRNA accumulation during aging.

Current status of aroid species diversity in Panama, including new records for the Country

Araceae (aroids) is a large and ancient monocot plant family, most notable for its impressive morphological diversity and high life-form diversity which also represents a group with great economic ...

The Myth of the Teaching-Research Nexus

The wild law judgment project is a recent exciting collaborative project involving the rewriting and writing of both existing and hypothetical judgments from a wild law or Earth-centred perspective. In this article, the author reflects upon the performative implications of judicial impersonation and writing and rewriting judgments wildly. The performative nature of the project makes it a valuable teaching resource, in that it thereby offers a different and arguably more powerful challenge to the anthropocentric bias in law than that contained in more conventional forms of academic critique. Drawing upon insights contributed by academics who have used rewritten feminist judgments in their teaching, the author explores the pedagogical value and possibilities in the collection of wild law judgments. In light of the dire existential crisis which currently confronts Earth and its diverse lifeforms, there is a solid argument for ensuring that such an ‘outsider pedagogy’ is effectively incorporated into the mainstream curriculum in law schools.

Ethnobotanical survey of plant species utilised as spices among the indigenous people of Bayelsa State, Nigeria

Plant species used as spices in Bayelsa State, Nigeria, were assessed in this study. A total of twenty four spicy plants were identified. This included a fungal species and twenty three plant species. These species were of diverse life forms (25% trees; 8% shrubs, 58% herbs and 4% grasses). The study also revealed that the spicy plants identified were heterogeneously distributed across the three senatorial zones of the State. Fruits/seeds were the most utilized parts of the indigenous spicy plants identified. 63% of the identified spicy plants were sourced from the wild and 38% were cultivated in the State. Parts of the plants utilized for spices were fruits, seeds, leaves, shoots, bulbs, rhizomes and in some cases the entire-part. Fruits and seeds dominated the parts used (46%), while rhizome and the entire-parts were the least utilized parts (4%) for spices in the study area. Most of the methods employed in harvesting the spicy plants were annihilative and inhibitory. Also environmental pollution among other factors threatens the existence of the spicy plants growing in the wild in the study area. In conclusion conservational strategies that will ensure sustainable use of the identified spicy plant species were proposed.

Diversity and survival of artificial lifeforms under sedimentation and random motion.

Cellular automata are often used to explore the numerous possible scenarios of what could have occurred at the origins of life and before, during the prebiotic ages, when very simple molecules started to assemble and organise into larger catalytic or informative structures, or to simulate ecosystems. Artificial self-maintained spatial structures emerge in cellular automata and are often used to represent molecules or living organisms. They converge generally towards homogeneous stationary soups of still-life creatures. It is hard for an observer to believe they are similar to living systems, in particular because nothing is moving anymore within such simulated environments after few computation steps, because they present isotropic spatial organisation, because the diversity of self-maintained morphologies is poor, and because when stationary states are reached the creatures are immortal. Natural living systems, on the contrary, are composed of a high diversity of creatures in interaction having limited lifetimes and generally present a certain anisotropy of their spatial organisation, in particular frontiers and interfaces. In the present work, we propose that the presence of directional weak fields such as gravity may counter-balance the excess of mixing and disorder caused by Brownian motion and favour the appearance of specific regions, i.e. different strata or environmental layers, in which physical-chemical conditions favour the emergence and the survival of self-maintained spatial structures including living systems. We test this hypothesis by way of numerical simulations of a very simplified ecosystem model. We use the well-known Game of Life to which we add rules simulating both sedimentation forces and thermal agitation. We show that this leads to more active (vitality and biodiversity) and robust (survival) dynamics. This effectively suggests that coupling such physical processes to reactive systems allows the separation of environments into different milieux and could constitute a simple mechanism to form ecosystem frontiers or elementary interfaces that would protect and favour the development of fragile auto-poietic systems.

Nectar-living yeasts of a tropical host plant community: diversity and effects on community-wide floral nectar traits.

We characterize the diversity of nectar-living yeasts of a tropical host plant community at different hierarchical sampling levels, measure the associations between yeasts and nectariferous plants, and measure the effect of yeasts on nectar traits. Using a series of hierarchically nested sampling units, we extracted nectar from an assemblage of host plants that were representative of the diversity of life forms, flower shapes, and pollinator types in the tropical area of Yucatan, Mexico. Yeasts were isolated from single nectar samples; their DNA was identified, the yeast cell density was estimated, and the sugar composition and concentration of nectar were quantified using HPLC. In contrast to previous studies from temperate regions, the diversity of nectar-living yeasts in the plant community was characterized by a relatively high number of equally common species with low dominance. Analyses predict highly diverse nectar yeast communities in a relatively narrow range of tropical vegetation, suggesting that the diversity of yeasts will increase as the number of sampling units increases at the level of the species, genera, and botanical families of the hosts. Significant associations between specific yeast species and host plants were also detected; the interaction between yeasts and host plants impacted the effect of yeast cell density on nectar sugars. This study provides an overall picture of the diversity of nectar-living yeasts in tropical host plants and suggests that the key factor that affects the community-wide patterns of nectar traits is not nectar chemistry, but rather the type of yeasts interacting with host plants.

Reassembling Documents of Life in the Archive

We usually perceive archives as the end of the active life of a document, a place where a document is deposited to be protected and preserved for the creation of future memories and histories. And yet archives are beginnings as much as they are ends: they give their documents a new life and particularly with the advent of digitisation, new and diverse forms of life; but they can also deprive their documents of a future life, by hiding them through mysterious cataloguing structures, complex classification practices or merely spatial arrangements. Apart from curators and archivists who create and organise archives, often hiding documents in them, researchers also create archival assemblages when they bring together documents from diverse archives and sources around the world. But researchers, like archivists, often hide the archival strategies or sources of their research, through their immersion in the power relations of knowledge production. In this paper I look at the creation of an archival assemblage from my research with documents of life written by French seamstresses, active in the feminist circles of the romantic socialist movements of the nineteenth century. What I argue is that as researchers we need to become more sensitive to the life of the documents of life we work with; simply put: we cannot engage with documents of life while ignoring the life of documents within the archive and beyond. This article was submitted to EJLW on January 16th 2016, and published on April 9th 2017

Artificial reefs as a reef restoration strategy in sediment‐affected environments: Insights from long‐term monitoring

AbstractArtificial reefs provide substrates that facilitate the rapid recruitment of marine biota such as corals and fish, and are commonly employed as coral restoration tools to assist recovery in degraded areas. While this strategy is successful in the immediate years post‐deployment, its contribution to restoration over longer time scales is less well understood.The biological communities on Reef Enhancement Units (REUs), which had been deployed for more than a decade on Singapore's sediment‐affected coral reefs, were surveyed.The diversity of sessile lifeforms on the REUs was significantly higher in 2014 (H′ = 1.03) than 2004 (H′ = 0.60). Hard corals and coralline algae contributed most to the temporal dissimilarity and turf algae remained the dominant lifeform category in both years.In 2014, hard corals and abiotic components contributed most to the spatial dissimilarity among the six REU plots that were surveyed. Shannon diversity values of these plots ranged from 0.74–1.3. Scleractinian cover ranged from 0.4–31.5% and differed significantly among the plots.The REUs also augmented ecosystem functioning at their respective plots. Colonies from 10 of the 30 scleractinian genera recorded were sexually mature, and a total of 119 sessile and mobile reef taxa utilized the REUs for food and habitat.The results demonstrate that artificial reefs can contribute to the development of biological communities and ecosystem functioning in degraded coral habitats over the long run, and underscore the need for long‐term monitoring to validate the effectiveness of reef restoration efforts.

Vegetation and climate histories between MIS 63 and 53 in the Early Pleistocene in central Japan based on plant macrofossil evidences

Among the Early Pleistocene fluvial sediments in Japan that yield plant macrofossils, the Uonuma Group in the Niigata sedimentary basin provides the most continuous profile without any conspicuous hiatuses and is therefore suitable for high-resolution reconstructions of environmental and vegetation histories based on tephro- and magneto-stratigraphy. Based on the species composition of plant macrofossil assemblages, along with previously reported results on sedimentary environments and pollen records, we performed a reconstruction of changes in paleovegetation and paleotemperatures between MIS 63 and 53. Macrofossil assemblages identified from 33 samples include 89 arboreal and 88 herbaceous taxa in total, of which 9 taxa are extinct from Japan. Assemblages from the peat deposits in fluvial backmarshes during glacial stages are composed mainly of wetland herbaceous plants, whereas those from the sandy channel-fill deposits are characterized by a higher diversity in life forms and habitat preferences. During the interval from MIS 63 to 53, paleotemperatures fluctuated between a coldest-month mean temperature of −4.6 °C and −0.9 °C and between a mean annual temperature of 6.6 °C and 11.0 °C, which is within the present range for cool-temperate, deciduous broad-leaved forests in Japan. MIS 60 was the coldest of the glacial stages with temperatures nearly equivalent to those during the last glacial maximum. Major plant extinctions in and around MIS 60 were not recorded in the sedimentary basin in response to the temperature decline. The relatively indistinct floral changes in and around MIS 60 are attributed to easier recovery of flora by migration from glacial refugia in the southern basins after termination of the glacial stage. Interglacial temperatures during MIS 57, 55, and 53 were higher than during MIS 63, 61, and 59. The presence of a maritime environment during the interglacial periods between MIS 57 and 53 may have resulted from a greater extent of marine transgression and heat provided by the Tsushima Warm Current flowing into the Sea of Japan after MIS 59.

How do birds respond to the vegetation of a desert wetland in two contrasting seasons?

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to assess how bird communities are grouped in vegetation types between the breeding and non-breeding seasons in two consecutive years as well as the relationship between bird species' distribution and the main plant communities, all in a desert wetland in northern Mexico. We used transects to determine the bird species' abundances and the height and cover of vegetation to obtain three main variables: foliage height diversity, life form diversity, and total foliage density. Cluster analyses using the bird species' relative abundances grouped similar vegetation types, regardless of the geographic distance between them, during the breeding season but not in the non-reproductive season. This result suggests that birds occupy the various habitats in a random way during the non-reproductive season. Most of the bird species were closely related to the vegetation volume and foliage height diversity in both seasons, while the diversity of plant growth forms was of little impo...

Effect of micro-landforms on forest vegetation differentiation and life-form diversity in the Chichibu Mountains, Kanto District, Japan

Effect of micro-landforms on forest vegetation differentiation and life-form diversity in the Chichibu Mountains, Kanto District, Japan

Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium ed. by Veena Das and Clara Han

Reviewed by: Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium ed. by Veena Das and Clara Han Susan Reynolds Whyte Veena Das and Clara Han, eds. Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium. Oakland: University of California, 2016. xiv + 876 pp. Ill. $175.00 (978-0-520-27841-7). This is a big book in several senses. Running to nearly nine hundred pages, it is hefty (1.675 kg) and weighty in subject matter, as the title suggests. With an introduction and forty-four chapters grouped in five sections, it covers the spectrum from conception to death and after, in settings around the world. The contributors are mostly anthropologists, with a sprinkling of medical historians, sociologists, and economists. Approaches tend toward phenomenology and philosophical considerations, but they are varied and include studies of interventions, regulation, and demographic trends. The volume opens with a substantial essay by the editors—not an introduction to the chapters, but a concept note, a kind of epilogue turned prologue, written after they had read the contributions. It warns against the bounding of notions of life within the subfields of medical anthropology and science and technology studies, which tend to emphasize biological life and its innovations at the expense of the broader concerns of classical anthropology and philosophy. The editors argue instead for tracing the ways in which biology and older social forms are mutually embedded, in order to understand how newness emerges. They discuss this mutual absorption of the natural and social within several areas of research: biosecurity, biopower, and biolegitimacy in relation to colonial orders; the politics of recognition around disabling biological conditions; and the production of scientific knowledge in searches for cures. Moving on to a discussion of individuality, they first remark its neglect in the work on local biologies, and then devote the last half of the concept note to the treatment of individuality and forms of life in the work of Georges Canguilhem and Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. This concern with individuals and diverse forms of life is marked in most of the contributions to the compendium, many of which build around detailed cases of persons in particular social situations. Each section of the compendium is preceded by a brief introduction to the chapters contained therein, showing how they “take forward the ways that life and death are folded together in the lives of individuals and communities” (p. 1). It is [End Page 827] a credit to the editors that the sections cohere as well as they do and that there is a clear logic to their ordering. The first one, “Natality, Sexuality, Reproduction,” contains seven chapters spanning adoption in Mexico (Anaid Citlalli Reyes-Kipp), miscarriages in a Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon (Sylvain Perdigon), and the symbolism of pregnancy among transgender hijras in Orissa (Vaibhav Saria). In various ways, these contributions discuss technology, new and old, and ways of dealing with the dangers in all forms of reproduction. The second section, “Medical, Legal, and Pharmaceutical Spaces,” comprises ten chapters on topics from waiting in British National Health System facilities (Sophie Day) to pharmaceutical politics in Nepal (Ian Harper and Nabin Rawal) to right-to-health litigation in Brazil (João Biehl).Together they relate affliction and recovery to social institutions and considerations of justice. In the third section, “Healing: Religious and Secular Bodies,” seven chapters deal with attempts to reconstitute life and bodies, ranging widely from assumptions about the self in immunology (A. David Napier) to the irony of a Turkish healer through whom the voice of Atatürk, the modern secularist, spoke (Christopher Dole). They consider individual lives in relation to social milieu, and the ways that healing concerns the mutual containment of life and death. The ten chapters of the fourth section, “Precarious Lives,” present such diverse topics as Palestinian wives’ experiences of loss (Lotte Buch Segal), disability activism and valuation in the United States (Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp), and self-immolation in Tibet (Vincanne Adams). In considering precariousness, they deal with questions of belonging and fraught claims to a “we.” The final section, “Death and Dying,” not only has geographical reach, from post-genocide Cambodia (Anne Yvonne Guillou) to youth and cemeteries...

Cultivating Kids by Mark Dworkin & Melissa YoungGaining Ground by Elaine Velazquez and Barbara Bernstein

Book and Film Reviews 133 Film Reviews Cultivating Kids A film by Mark Dworkin & Melissa Young Distributed by Bullfrog Films; www.movingimages.org Gaining Ground A film by Elaine Velazquez and Barbara Bernstein Available from: www.mediaprojectonline.org/gaining-ground School gardens have become an increasingly widespread innovation in schools across the United States since the 1990s, spurred on in part by the work of chef Alice Waters from Chez Panisse in San Francisco. Waters was instrumental in the creation of a widely known garden at the Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley. In conjunction with Fritjof Capra’s Center for Ecoliteracy, efforts there led to an initiative in California to make gardens a common feature in schools throughout the state; from there the school garden movement has become a national if not international phenomenon. Gardens provide students with the opportunity to do things with their hands that result in both beauty and things to eat. Gardens can serve as a site for service learning and nature studies, and increasingly, they are being used as a tool for teaching STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math). Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young’s new film, Cultivating Kids, describes a successful school garden project at the South Whidbey Elementary and Middle Schools north of Seattle and can serve as a powerful introduction to the benefits of gardens as an educational resource—as useful and as meaningful as a library or computer lab. What is especially helpful in the film is its description of ways the garden is linked to the formal curriculum. In an early scene, students are shown measuring different vegetables and recording air temperature. The teacher differentiates between metric and English/American systems and asks which is most commonly used in science. Later teachers describe how first-graders use the garden to learn about life cycles; second-graders, soil composition and its significance; third-graders, the diversity of life forms; fourth-graders, plant structure; and fifth-graders, ecosystems and habitats. The advantage of exploring these issues and concepts in the garden is that the abstract becomes felt and real, and learning is often fun, something that is abundantly evident in the film. Second-graders, for example, plant potatoes in the spring, and then as thirdgraders , pull the tuber-laden plants up in the fall to prepare, serve, and eat at a schoolwide harvest festival they share with their families. Third-graders study about “magic beans” and hide out in a bean-covered tipi where they observe the extraordinary growth that can emerge from a handful of seeds. And as they get older, students work with teachers skilled in science to collect data, observe what is happening in the garden, analyze things, and discern aspects of the natural world that might otherwise elude them without these experiences. From a practical Book and Film Reviews 134 standpoint, they also learn how to maintain worm bins, compost food and plant wastes, and run an irrigation system. By the time they finish elementary school, they possess enough experience and knowledge to grow and prepare their own food. As important, they have sampled enough vegetables to be willing to eat what they pull or pick from their garden. All of this is portrayed in less than 25 minutes, making the film a very usable resource for education courses or workshops where people want to learn more how they might use a garden at their own school. Around three decades ago, Joseph Kiefer and other food and hunger activists in Vermont started a program called Common Roots aimed at addressing hunger in their home state by teaching rural as well as urban kids how to feed themselves, enjoy learning, and bring their communities together through a variety of celebrations and service activities. Cultivating Kids demonstrates how this vision has matured and spread. More than anything, what comes across from scene to scene is the joy and energy that accompany learning that has growth and nourishment at its center. At the South Whidbey Elementary and Middle Schools, STEM is good to eat. Gaining Ground, a new feature-length film, is also filled with the joy and passion of farmers and food activists dedicated to remaking our...

From ice-binding proteins to bio-inspired antifreeze materials.

Ice-binding proteins (IBP) facilitate survival under extreme conditions in diverse life forms. IBPs in polar fishes block further growth of internalized environmental ice and inhibit ice recrystallization of accumulated internal crystals. Algae use IBPs to structure ice, while ice adhesion is critical for the Antarctic bacterium Marinomonas primoryensis. Successful translation of this natural cryoprotective ability into man-made materials holds great promise but is still in its infancy. This review covers recent advances in the field of ice-binding proteins and their synthetic analogues, highlighting fundamental insights into IBP functioning as a foundation for the knowledge-based development of cheap, bio-inspired mimics through scalable production routes. Recent advances in the utilisation of IBPs and their analogues to e.g. improve cryopreservation, ice-templating strategies, gas hydrate inhibition and other technologies are presented.

Positive and strongly relaxed purifying selection drive the evolution of repeats in proteins.

Protein repeats are considered hotspots of protein evolution, associated with acquisition of new functions and novel phenotypic traits, including disease. Paradoxically, however, repeats are often strongly conserved through long spans of evolution. To resolve this conundrum, it is necessary to directly compare paralogous (horizontal) evolution of repeats within proteins with their orthologous (vertical) evolution through speciation. Here we develop a rigorous methodology to identify highly periodic repeats with significant sequence similarity, for which evolutionary rates and selection (dN/dS) can be estimated, and systematically characterize their evolution. We show that horizontal evolution of repeats is markedly accelerated compared with their divergence from orthologues in closely related species. This observation is universal across the diversity of life forms and implies a biphasic evolutionary regime whereby new copies experience rapid functional divergence under combined effects of strongly relaxed purifying selection and positive selection, followed by fixation and conservation of each individual repeat.