Dall Barbee (rockghana46)

Global warming has an adverse impact on agriculture and food security is in doldrums around the world. A sharp increase in the temperature of earth is expected and may lead to ~ 1.8-4 °C rise in average earth temperature by the year 2100. Thus, heat stress is a critical factor for plant growth development and crop yield. Chickpea, which is an important leguminous crop and rich source of proteins is also a heat sensitive crop but high temperature exceeding 35 °C inhibit its productivity. Climate-smart agriculture seems to be a plausible approach to minimize the drastic effect of climate change on plant's adaptation. This may help in better selection of tolerant cultivars of chickpea that can be used in breeding programmes for heat stress tolerance in chickpea. Also the biotechnological approaches using candidate genes expressed in transgenics plants may play pivotal role in the production of climate resilient chickpea plants. Some preliminary findings using CAP2, Galactinol synthase genes, proteomic approaches, RNA seq data, stay green traits and -OMICS in general, have proved to be promising. A close collaboration between agronomists, plant physiologists, geneticists, biotechnologists is the pressing need and must be envisioned in order to address heat stress tolerance in chickpea under the prevailing climatic conditions and continuously increasing temperature. In the context of global heat stress and climate change, adaptation and mitigation are the keywords for employing transdisciplinary methodologies with respect to plant growth, development and agronomy.BACKGROUND Despite growing interest in coronary microvascular disease (CMVD), there is a dearth of mechanistic understanding. Mouse models offer opportunities to understand molecular processes in CMVD. We have sought to develop quantitative mouse imaging to assess coronary microvascular function. METHODS We used 99mTc-sestamibi to measure myocardial blood flow in mice with MILabs U-SPECT+ system. We determined recovery and crosstalk coefficients, the influx rate constant from blood to myocardium (K1), and, using microsphere perfusion, constraints on the extraction fraction curve. We used 99mTc and stannous pyrophosphate for red blood cell imaging to measure intramyocardial blood volume (IMBV) as an alternate measure of microvascular function. RESULTS The recovery coefficients for myocardial tissue (RT) and left ventricular arterial blood (RA) were 0.81 ± 0.16 and 1.07 ± 0.12, respectively. The assumption RT = 1 - FBV (fraction blood volume) does not hold in mice. Using a complete mixing matrix to fit a one-compartment model, we measured K1 of 0.57 ± 0.08 min-1. Constraints on the extraction fraction curve for 99mTc-sestamibi in mice for best-fit Renkin-Crone parameters were α = 0.99 and β = 0.39. Additionally, we found that wild-type mice increase their IMBV by 22.9 ± 3.3% under hyperemic conditions. CONCLUSIONS We have developed a framework for measuring K1 and change in IMBV in mice, demonstrating non-invasive µSPECT-based quantitative imaging of mouse microvascular function.Learning and imitating a complex motor action requires to visually follow complex movements, but conscious perception seems too slow for such tasks. Recent findings suggest that visual perception has a higher temporal resolution at an unconscious than at a conscious level. Here we investigate whether high-temporal resolution in visual perception relies on prediction mechanisms and attention shifts based on recently experienced sequences of visual information. To that aim we explore sequential effects during four different simultaneity/asynchrony discrimination tasks. Two stimuli are displayed on each trial with varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA). selleck compound Subjects decide whether the stimuli are simultaneous or asynchronous and give manual responses. The main finding is an advantage for different-order over same-order trials, when subjects decided that stimuli ha