Although exotic plants comprise a substantial portion of floristic biodiversity, their contributions to community and ecosystem processes are not well understood. We manipulated plant species richness in old-field communities to compare the impacts of native vs. exotic species on plant biomass, seed production, and arthropod community structure. Plants within diverse communities, regardless of ...

The crystal structure of the myotoxic, cell-penetrating, basic polypeptide crotamine isolated from the venom of Crotalus durissus terrificus has been determined by single-wavelength anomalous dispersion techniques and refined at 1.7 Å resolution. The structure reveals distinct cationic and hydrophobic surface regions that are located on opposite sides of the molecule. This surface-charge distri...

The impact of invasive herbivore species may be lower in more diverse plant communities due to mechanisms of associational resistance. According to the "resource concentration hypothesis" the amount and accessibility of host plants is reduced in diverse plant communities, thus limiting the exploitation of resources by consumers. In addition, the "natural enemy hypothesis" suggests that richer p...

Many river rehabilitation projects have been criticized for failing to meet their goals or being insufficiently monitored. There is, therefore, an urgent need develop robust approaches assessing treatment efficacy and thus guide the increasing investment in rehabilitation. Instream biotopes (formerly called ‘functional habitats’ ‘mesohabitats’ by different authors) macroinvertebrate assemblages...

purpose : to evaluate indications, risk factors and outcome of repeat penetrating keratoplasty (pkp) at a tertiary referral eye care center methods : in this retrospective study, medical chart of patients who underwent repeat pkp at labbafinejad medical center between january 2004 and december 2009 were reviewed. results : a total of 1,859 corneal transplantations were performed on 1,624 eyes d...

Shared Workspaces are getting more and more popular in helping people collaborate. However, it’s difficult for user to search information across different Shared Workspaces since they are currently islands that are not interlinked. Based on semantic web technologies, SIOC provide ontology and tools to interlink online communities. By using SIOC to develop an explorer for Shared Workspaces, we m...

This paper describes how we extended the SIOC ontology to take into account particular aspects of wikis in order to enable integration capabilities between various wiki systems. In particular, we will overview the proposed extensions and detail a webservice providing SIOC data from any MediaWiki instance, as well as related query examples that show how different wikis, designed as independant d...