Alphaviruses are enveloped, insect-borne viruses, which contains a positive-sense RNA genome. The protein capsid is surrounded by a lipid membrane, which is penetrated by glycoprotein spikes. The structure of the Sindbis virus (SINV) (the type virus) core protein (SCP) was previously determined and found to have a chymotrypsin-like structure. SCP is a serine proteinase which cleaves itself from...

Vegetation can play a major role in the hydrologic ecosystem service tradeoffs resulting from land use change: by affecting the volume of rain water that reaches the ground surface, vegetation affects water supply. But because canopy interception of rainfall is affected in complex and competing ways by forest structure and ambient weather conditions, both of which vary at small and large scales...

Identifying factors that influence variation in light availability within forested ecosystems represents an important component in our understanding of the complex determinants of tree seedling regeneration. We assessed the influence of forest structure and canopy tree architecture on spatial heterogeneity of understory light availability in three old-growth and three second-growth forests in l...

Forest fragmentation arising from modern forestry practices has dramatically increased the amount of edge habitat relative to interior habitat. Edge habitats have unique microenvironments that have the potential to profoundly impact forest communities. In this study, we characterized the forest composition and structure of edge and interior plots within a second growth big leaf maple-Douglas fi...

Little is known about the demographic consequences of fragmentation for plant populations. By assessing the population structure of a common herb ( Heliconia acuminata ) in an experimentally fragmented landscape in the central Amazon, we tested the predictions that fragmentation could reduce population density, alter population structure, and reduce reproductive effort. Population density in co...

Leo Breiman’s Random Forest ensemble learning procedure is applied to the problem of Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) modeling for pharmaceutical molecules. This entails using a quantitative description of a compound’s molecular structure to predict that compound’s biological activity as measured in an in vitro assay. Without any parameter tuning, the performance of Random Fo...

A central parameter to the terrestrial carbon budget is forest biomass which represents a proxy for carbon. Despite its crucial role in the terrestrial carbon budget, forest biomass is poorly quantified across most parts of the planet due to the great difficulties in measuring biomass on the ground and consistently aggregating measurements across scales. Today’s information is largely based on ...