How FACs-producing generalist and specialist herbivores regulate their FACs-hydrolyzing enzyme L-ACY-1 to balance FACs' beneficial vs. detrimental effects remains unknown. To address this question, we compared L-ACY-1 expression in Helicoverpa armigera and Helicoverpa assulta, a pair of closely related sibling species differing mainly in their host range, by the same sets of hostplants, protein to digestible carbohydrate (P:C) ratios, or allelochemical. L-ACY-1 expression remained low/unchanged in H. armigera, but was induced by hot pepper fruits and repressed by cotton bolls in H. assulta. The representative allelochemicals of the tested hostplants significantly (capsaicin) or insignificantly (gossypol and nicotine) induced L-ACY-1 expression in H. armigera, but insignificantly inhibited (capsaicin and gossypol) or induced (nicotine) it in H. assulta. L-ACY-1 expression remained low/unaltered on balanced (P50:C50 and P53:C47) or protein-biased diets and induced on carbohydrate-biased diets in H. armigera, but was at the highest level on balanced diets and reduced on either protein-or carbohydrate-biased diets in H. assulta. Furthermore, L-ACY-1 expression was significantly higher in H. assulta than in H. armigera for most of feeding treatments. Such expressional divergences suggest that FACs are utilized mainly for removal of excessive nitrogen in generalists but for nitrogen assimilation in specialists.

Insufficient sleep is a global public health problem resulting in catastrophic accidents, increased mortality, and hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity. Yet the effect of sleep deprivation (SD) on decision making and performance is often underestimated by fatigued individuals and is only beginning to be understood by scientists. The deleterious impact of SD is frequently attributed to lapses in vigilant attention, but this account fails to explain many SD-related problems, such as loss of situational awareness and perseveration. Using a laboratory study protocol, we show that SD individuals can maintain information in the focus of attention and anticipate likely correct responses, but their use of such a top-down attentional strategy is less effective at preventing errors caused by competing responses. Moreover, when the task environment requires flexibility, performance under SD suffers dramatically. The impairment in flexible shifting of attentional control we observed is distinct from lapses in vigilant attention, as corroborated by the specificity of the influence of a genetic biomarker, the dopaminergic polymorphism DRD2 C957T. Reduced effectiveness of top-down attentional control under SD, especially when conditions require flexibility, helps to explain maladaptive performance that is not readily explained by lapses in vigilant attention.

Anesthesia blocks consciousness and memory while sparing non-conscious brain activities. While the exact mechanisms of anesthetic action are unknown, the Meyer-Overton correlation provides a link between anesthetic potency and solubility in a lipid-like, non-polar medium. Anesthetic action is also related to an anesthetic's hydrophobicity, permanent dipole, and polarizability, and is accepted to occur in lipid-like, non-polar regions within brain proteins. Generally the protein target for anesthetics is assumed to be neuronal membrane receptors and ion channels, however new evidence points to critical effects on intra-neuronal microtubules, a target of interest due to their potential role in post-operative cognitive dysfunction (POCD). Here we use binding site predictions on tubulin, the protein subunit of microtubules, with molecular docking simulations, quantum chemistry calculations, and theoretical modeling of collective dipole interactions in tubulin to investigate the effect of a group of gases including anesthetics, non-anesthetics, and anesthetic/convulsants on tubulin dynamics. We found that these gases alter collective terahertz dipole oscillations in a manner that is correlated with their anesthetic potency. Understanding anesthetic action may help reveal brain mechanisms underlying consciousness, and minimize POCD in the choice and development of anesthetics used during surgeries for patients suffering from neurodegenerative conditions with compromised cytoskeletal microtubules.

Significant progress in characterization of nanoparticles and biomolecules was enabled by the development of advanced imaging equipment with extreme spatial-resolution and sensitivity. To perform some of these analyses outside of well-resourced laboratories, it is necessary to create robust and cost-effective alternatives to existing high-end laboratory-bound imaging and sensing equipment. Towards this aim, we have designed a holographic on-chip microscope operating at an ultraviolet illumination wavelength (UV) of 266 nm. The increased forward scattering from nanoscale objects at this short wavelength has enabled us to detect individual sub-30 nm nanoparticles over a large field-of- view of > 16 mm(2) using an on-chip imaging platform, where the sample is placed at <= 0.5 mm away from the active area of an opto-electronic sensor-array, without any lenses in between. The strong absorption of this UV wavelength by biomolecules including nucleic acids and proteins has further enabled high-contrast imaging of nanoscopic aggregates of biomolecules, e.g., of enzyme Cu/Zn-superoxide dismutase, abnormal aggregation of which is linked to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-a fatal neurodegenerative disease. This UV-based wide-field computational imaging platform could be valuable for numerous applications in biomedical sciences and environmental monitoring, including disease diagnostics, viral load measurements as well as air-and water-quality assessment.

Drylands represent the planet's largest terrestrial biome and evidence suggests these landscapes have large potential for creating feedbacks to future climate. Recent studies also indicate that dryland ecosystems are responding markedly to climate change. Biological soil crusts (biocrusts). soil surface communities of lichens, mosses, and/or cyanobacteria. comprise up to 70% of dryland cover and help govern fundamental ecosystem functions, including soil stabilization and carbon uptake. Drylands are expected to experience significant changes in temperature and precipitation regimes, and such alterations may impact biocrust communities by promoting rapid mortality of foundational species. In turn, biocrust community shifts affect land surface cover and roughness-changes that can dramatically alter albedo. We tested this hypothesis in a full-factorial warming (+ 4 degrees C above ambient) and altered precipitation (increased frequency of 1.2 mm monsoon-type watering events) experiment on the Colorado Plateau, USA. We quantified changes in shortwave albedo via multi-angle, solar-reflectance measurements. Warming and watering treatments each led to large increases in albedo (> 30%). This increase was driven by biophysical factors related to treatment effects on cyanobacteria cover and soil surface roughness following treatment-induced moss and lichen mortality. A rise in dryland surface albedo may represent a previously unidentified feedback to future climate.

The role of magmatic processes as a significant mechanism for the generation of voluminous silicic crust and the development of Cordilleran plateaus remains a lingering question in part because of the inherent difficulty in quantifying plutonic volumes. Despite this difficulty, a growing body of independently measured plutonic-to-volcanic ratios suggests the volume of plutonic material in the crust related to Cordilleran magmatic systems is much larger than is previously expected. To better examine the role of crustal magmatic processes and its relationship to erupted material in Cordilleran systems, we present a continuous high-resolution crustal seismic velocity model for an similar to 800 km section of the active South American Cordillera (Puna Plateau). Although the plutonic-to-volcanic ratios we estimate vary along the length of the Puna Plateau, all ratios are larger than those previously reported (similar to 30: 1 compared to 5: 1) implying that a significant volume of intermediate to silicic plutonic material is generated in the crust of the central South American Cordillera. Furthermore, as Cordilleran-type margins have been common since the onset of modern plate tectonics, our findings suggest that similar processes may have played a significant role in generating and/or modifying large volumes of continental crust, as observed in the continents today.

The transversal profile of beams can always be defined as a superposition of orthogonal fields, such as optical eigenmodes. Here, we describe a generic method to separate the individual components in a laser beam and map each mode onto its designated detector with low crosstalk. We demonstrate this with the decomposition into Laguerre-Gaussian beams and introduce a distribution over the integer numbers corresponding to the discrete orbital and radial momentum components of the light field. The method is based on determining an eigenmask filter transforming the incident optical eigenmodes to position eigenmodes enabling the detection of the state of the light field using single detectors while minimizing cross talk with respect to the set of filter masks considered.

Confocal fluorescence microscopy is often used in brain imaging experiments, however conventional confocal microscopes are limited in their field of view, working distance, and speed for high resolution imaging. We report here the development of a novel high resolution, high speed, long working distance, and large field of view confocal fluorescence microscope ((HL2)-L-2-CFM) with the capability of multiregion and multifocal imaging. To demonstrate the concept, a 0.5 numerical aperture (NA) confocal fluorescence microscope is prototyped with a 3 mm x 3 mm field of view and 12 mm working distance, an array of 9 beams is scanned over the field of view in 9 different regions to speed up the acquisition time by a factor of 9. We test this custom designed confocal fluorescence microscope for future use with brain clarification methods to image large volumes of the brain at subcellular resolution. This multiregion and multi-spot imaging method can be used in other imaging modalities, such as multiphoton microscopes, and the field of view can be extended well beyond 12 mm x 12 mm.

Animal model of cigarette smoke (CS) -induced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the primary testing methodology for drug therapies and studies on pathogenic mechanisms of disease. However, researchers have rarely run simultaneous or side-by-side tests of whole-body and nose-only CS exposure in building their mouse models of COPD. We compared and evaluated these two different methods of CS exposure, plus airway Lipopolysaccharides (LPS) inhalation, in building our COPD mouse model. Compared with the control group, CS exposed mice showed significant increased inspiratory resistance, functional residual capacity, right ventricular hypertrophy index, and total cell count in BALF. Moreover, histological staining exhibited goblet cell hyperplasia, lung inflammation, thickening of smooth muscle layer on bronchia, and lung angiogenesis in both methods of CS exposure. Our data indicated that a viable mouse model of COPD can be established by combining the results from wholebody CS exposure, nose-only CS exposure, and airway LPS inhalation testing. However, in our study, we also found that, given the same amount of particulate intake, changes in right ventricular pressure and intimal thickening of pulmonary small artery are a little more serious in nose-only CS exposure method than changes in the whole-body CS exposure method.

Endocytic processes are critical for cellular entry of several viruses; however, the role of endocytosis in cellular trafficking of viruses beyond virus entry is only partially understood. Here, we utilized two laboratory strains (AD169 and Towne) of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), which are known to use cell membrane fusion rather than endocytosis to enter fibroblasts, in order to study a post-entry role of endocytosis in HCMV life cycle. Upon pharmacological inhibition of dynamin-2 or clathrin terminal domain (TD) ligand association, these strains entered the cells successfully based on the expression of immediate early viral protein. However, both the inhibitors significantly reduced the growth rates and final virus yields of viruses without inhibiting the expression of early to late viral proteins. Clathrin accumulated in the cytoplasmic virus assembly compartment (vAC) of infected cells co-localizing with virus tegument protein pp150 and the formation of vAC was compromised upon endocytic inhibition. Transmission electron micrographs (TEM) of infected cells treated with endocytosis inhibitors showed intact nuclear stages of nucleocapsid assembly but the cytoplasmic virus maturation was greatly compromised. Thus, the data presented here implicate endocytic pathways in HCMV maturation and egress.