As geographic range estimates for the IUCN Red List guide conservation actions, accuracy and ecological realism are crucial. IUCN's extent of occurrence (EOO) is general region including species' range, while area occupancy (AOO) subset EOO occupied by species. Data-poor species with incomplete sampling present particular difficulties, but distribution models (SDMs) can be used to predict suita...

Platelet-activating factor acetylhydrolase (PLA2G7) is a potent pro- and anti-inflammatory molecule that has been implicated in multiple inflammatory disease processes, including cardiovascular disease. The goal of this study was to investigate the genetic effects of PLA2G7 on coronary artery disease (CAD) risk in two large, independent datasets with CAD. Using a haplotype tagging (ht) approach...

Vesubia jugorum (Simon, 1881) (Araneae: Lycosidae) is a large-sized wolf spider that occurs in alpine rocky areas above 2,000 m altitude. The species is stenoendemic, with a limited number of populations documented in the literature from the Maritime Alps (Italy, France). Due to the climate change, the current observed extent of occurrence (EEO 4,412 km ) and the area of occupancy (AOO 835 km )...

Background Island biodiversity is under considerable pressure due to the ongoing threats of invasive alien species, land use change or climate change. The few remnants of Azorean native forests harbour a unique set of endemic beetles, some of them possibly already extinct or under severe long term threat due to the small areas of the remaining habitats or climatic changes. In this contribution ...

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining relationship between age onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie (phonological short-term memory and statistical learning), performance an auditory grammaticality judgment test (GJT). Participants were 71 Polish-English long-term bilinguals with a wide rang...

BACKGROUND Multidisciplinary care of prostate cancer is increasingly offered in specialised cancer centres. It requires the optimisation of medical and operational processes and the integration of the different medical and non-medical stakeholders. OBJECTIVE To develop a standardised operational process assessment tool basing on the capability maturity model integration (CMMI) able to impleme...

Although formaldehyde (FA) is known to be a major allergen responsible for allergic contact dermatitis, there are conflicting reports regarding correlation between FA exposure and interleukin (IL-4) expression. To investigate whether allergic responses including IL-4 expression were induced by repeated dermal exposure to low dose FA, alterations in the luciferase signal and allergic phenotypes ...

This paper presents the plant-wide model Biological Nutrient Removal Model No. 2 (BNRM2). Since nitrite was not considered in the BNRM1, and this previous model also failed to accurately simulate the anaerobic digestion because precipitation processes were not considered, an extension of BNRM1 has been developed. This extension comprises all the components and processes required to simulate nit...

The Local Lymph Node Assay (LLNA) is now regarded as the worldwide standard. The analysis of accumulated LLNA data reveals that the animal strains and vehicles employed are likely to affect LLNA results. Here we show that an obvious strain difference in the local lymph node response was observed between DMSO-treated CBA/CaOlaHsd and CBA/CaHsdRcc mice. We also show that a vehicle difference in t...

The development of contact hypersensitivity (CHS) greatly depends on the allergenicity of the inducing agent. However, various cofactors are known to influence the outcome of the response as well. From this perspective, we have compared the effects of five different vehicles: acetone, ethanol, dimethyl formamide (DMF), dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), and a 4 to 1 mixture of acetone and olive oil (AO...