26 Janet Creaser, Department of Mechanical Engineering Evaluation of Minnesota’s

The ability to measure population health trends and improvements can be enhanced through collaborative efforts to describe existing knowledge and via shared development opportunities. This paper highlights a project undertaken in Alberta which has created an inventory of health status indicators in use in the province, and provides a framework for strategic progress in the development and use o...

INTRODUCTION Since adoption of the measles case-based surveillance system in Zimbabwe in 1998, data has been routinely collected at all levels of the health delivery system and sent to national level with little or no documented evidence of use to identify risky populations, monitor impact of interventions and measure progress towards achieving measles elimination. We analysed this data to dete...

The ability of plants to tolerate salts is determined by multiple biochemical pathways that facilitate retention and/or acquisition of water, protect chloroplast functions and maintain ion homeostasis. Essential pathways include those that lead to synthesis of osmotically active metabolites, specific proteins and certain free radical enzymes to control ion and water flux and support scavenging ...

The diversity of organisms and complexity of ecosystems prevent through inventory and monitoring of protected areas, yet sound databases are needed to manage ecosystems for long-term persistence. One strategy is therefore to focus monitoring on indicator organisms, but guidelines are lacking for selecting appropriate species or groups. This paper presents a simple protocol based on ordination t...

This work reports on the phenotypic and serological characterization of Vibrio anguillarum related (VAR) organisms isolated from diseased fish, shellfish, and from the environment in different geographical areas. Reference strains of V. a n g u ~ l l a r u m (serotypes 0 1 to 010) and V splendidus (biotype I ) were lncluded for comparison. On the basis of numerical taxonomy analysis the stralns...

RNA interference (RNAi) is an evolutionarily conserved, sequence-specific gene silencing pathway found in eukaryotes, in which 21-nucleotide, small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) guide destruction of a corresponding target mRNA. RNAi is a natural mechanism for both genome surveillance and gene regulation. Moreover, siRNAs can be transfected into cultured mammalian cells, causing the sequence-specifi...

Some of most used indicators in marine ecology are nucleic acid-derived indices. They can be divided by target levels in three groups: 1) at the organism level as ecophysiologic indicators, indicators such as RNA:DNA ratios, DNA:dry weight and RNA:protein, 2) at the population level, indicators such as growth rate, starvation incidence or fisheries impact indicators, and 3) at the community lev...