Bidens pilosa (B. pilosa) is well known in Taiwan as a traditional Chinese medicine. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability of both the ethanol (EtOH) and ethylacetate/ethanol (EA/EtOH) extracts from the whole B. pilosa plant, to protect normal human erythrocytes against oxidative damage in vitro. It was determined that the oxidative hemolysis and lipid/protein peroxidation of er...

The success of coral reefs is due to obligate mutualistic symbioses involving invertebrates and photosynthetic dinoflagellate symbionts belonging to the genus Symbiodinium. In the Caribbean, the vast majority of octocorals and other invertebrate hosts associate with Symbiodinium clade B, and more selectively, with a single lineage of this clade, Symbiodinium B1/B184. Although B1/B184 represents...

Five gradient concentrations (0.02, 0.04, 0.06, 0.08, and 0.10 g/mL) of leaching liquors from the roots, stems, and leaves of the invasive plant Bidens frondosa were used as conditioning fluid to examine its influence on seed germination conditions of the native plant Geum japonicum var. chinense in Huangshan. All leaching liquors of organs suppressed the seed germination of Geum japonicum var....

You may have heard of the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative led by former Vice President Joe Biden. It has brought together many people through a task force, blue ribbon panel, and many public forums to discuss how best "to dramatically accelerate efforts to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer - to achieve a decade's worth of progress in 5 years." This initiative was launched after the 2016 S...

The phyllostomid bat genus Vampyressa often has been allied with Uroderma, Chiroderma, Platyrrhinus, Vampyrodes, and Mesophylla. However, the relationships among the genera have proven difficult to resolve, and a number of studies have suggested that Vampyressa is not monophyletic. Mesophylla includes a single species, which some taxonomists have placed in Vampyressa and others in the more dist...

Common beggar’s-tick is an annual weed commonly found in citrus groves in Florida. A series of laboratory and greenhouse experiments were conducted to determine the germination response of common beggar’s-tick to various environmental factors that influence seed survival, germination, and dormancy. The results suggest that common beggar’stick germinated over a wide range of temperatures (15 to ...

The Oriental species of Apsilocera Bouček, 1956 (Hymenoptera: Pteromalidae) are revised and the limits of the genus are reevaluated. Bulolosa Bouček, 1990 and Kratinka Bouček, 1988 are treated as synonyms of Apsilocera, syn. n. Bulolosa bidens Bouček and Kratinka brevis Bouček are transferred to Apsilocera as A. bidens (Bouček) and A. brevis (Bouček) comb. n., respectively. Twelve new species (...

Bidens pilosa is used as an ethnical medicine for bacterial infection or immune modulation in Asia, America and Africa. Here, we employed n IFNpromoter-driven luciferase reporter construct and T cells to characterize immunomodulatory compounds from this plant based on a ioactivity-guided isolation principle. We found that PHA, a positive control, caused a six-fold increase in IFNpromoter activi...