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We developed a functional model for a shrub steppe vegetation of the eastern Monte Phytogeographical Province in Río Negro (Argentina) with six stable states and 12 transitions, based on the woody encroachment degree, characteristics of the herbaceous layer and the soil surface, and biological crust cover. Information was obtained from letters of naturalists and travelers along the region since the late eighteenth century, reports of old settlers, and our own research work. On the Monte, different functional groups can be distinguished. Our work focused on the three most conspicuous to analyze the dynamics of the system: shrubs, grasses and biological crust. The shrub layer is only affected by large-scale disturbances (fire, mechanical clearing) which maintain the balance between grasses and shrubs in the system. Mechanical clearing with soil removal also causes a decrease in grass cover and vegetation diversity. This layer, however, is most frequently affected by intensive and continuous grazing, which reduces the occurrence of fires and shifts the equilibrium toward the shrubs. All disturbances in general deteriorate the biological crust that covers the soil, which offers situations of facilitation for the regeneration of the herbaceous layer. Grazing and mechanical clearing reduce soil cover and promote the development of soil compaction, which reduce water infiltration and germination and/or seedling establishment, and this creates deteriorated states difficult to reverse. Those states can also be produced by tillage for agriculture and stubble grazing. Some of the transitions that we describe can be favored through grassland management strategies, in order to reach higher states of pastoral value and reverse deteriorating situations. 相似文献
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Sridharan Raghavan Jie Huang Catherine Tcheandjieu Jennifer E. Huffman Elizabeth Litkowski Chang Liu Yuk-Lam A. Ho Haley Hunter-Zinck Hongyu Zhao Eirini Marouli Kari E. North the VA Million Veteran Program Ethan Lange Leslie A. Lange Benjamin F. Voight J. Michael Gaziano Saiju Pyarajan Elizabeth R. Hauser Philip S. Tsao Peter W. F. Wilson Kyong-Mi Chang Kelly Cho Christopher J. ODonnell Yan V. Sun Themistocles L. Assimes 《PLoS genetics》2022,18(6)
BackgroundHeight has been associated with many clinical traits but whether such associations are causal versus secondary to confounding remains unclear in many cases. To systematically examine this question, we performed a Mendelian Randomization-Phenome-wide association study (MR-PheWAS) using clinical and genetic data from a national healthcare system biobank.Methods and findingsAnalyses were performed using data from the US Veterans Affairs (VA) Million Veteran Program in non-Hispanic White (EA, n = 222,300) and non-Hispanic Black (AA, n = 58,151) adults in the US. We estimated height genetic risk based on 3290 height-associated variants from a recent European-ancestry genome-wide meta-analysis. We compared associations of measured and genetically-predicted height with phenome-wide traits derived from the VA electronic health record, adjusting for age, sex, and genetic principal components. We found 345 clinical traits associated with measured height in EA and an additional 17 in AA. Of these, 127 were associated with genetically-predicted height at phenome-wide significance in EA and 2 in AA. These associations were largely independent from body mass index. We confirmed several previously described MR associations between height and cardiovascular disease traits such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, coronary heart disease (CHD), and atrial fibrillation, and further uncovered MR associations with venous circulatory disorders and peripheral neuropathy in the presence and absence of diabetes. As a number of traits associated with genetically-predicted height frequently co-occur with CHD, we evaluated effect modification by CHD status of genetically-predicted height associations with risk factors for and complications of CHD. We found modification of effects of MR associations by CHD status for atrial fibrillation/flutter but not for hypertension, hyperlipidemia, or venous circulatory disorders.ConclusionsWe conclude that height may be an unrecognized but biologically plausible risk factor for several common conditions in adults. However, more studies are needed to reliably exclude horizontal pleiotropy as a driving force behind at least some of the MR associations observed in this study. 相似文献
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Structure-function relationships of human C5a and C5aR 总被引:2,自引:0,他引:2
Huber-Lang MS Sarma JV McGuire SR Lu KT Padgaonkar VA Younkin EM Guo RF Weber CH Zuiderweg ER Zetoune FS Ward PA 《Journal of immunology (Baltimore, Md. : 1950)》2003,170(12):6115-6124
Using peptides that represent linear regions of the powerful complement activation product, C5a, or loops that connect the four alpha helices of C5a, we have defined the ability of these peptides to reduce binding of (125)I-C5a to human neutrophils, inhibit chemotactic responses of neutrophils to C5a, and reduce H(2)O(2) production in neutrophils stimulated with PMA. The data have defined likely sites of interaction of C5a with C5aR. The peptides had no functional activity per se on neutrophils and did not interfere with neutrophil responses to the unrelated chemotactic peptide, N-formyl-Met-Leu-Phe. Although previous data have suggested that there are two separate sites on C5a reactive with C5aR, the current data suggest that C5a interacts with C5aR in a manner that engages three discontinuous regions of C5a. 相似文献
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The changes in the levels of blood sugar and plasma cholesterol and the histology of the pancreatic islets were studied following hypophysectomy in the snake, Natrix piscator. Hypophysectomy in N. piscator produced a progressive decrease in glycemia and after 15 days, an aglycemic condition developed accompanied by slight degranulatory changes in the alpha cells of the pancreatic islet tissue. A significant decrease in the muscle glycogen concentration was also noticed 15 days after the operation. Atrophic changes were evident in the thyroid and adrenal glands of the operated animals. An extract of three pituitaries when injected in a normal snake did not produce any change in the blood sugar level. It is suggested that the absence of a diabetogenic action following injection of pituitary extract may be due to the opposing action of the endogenously produced insulin in the intact pancreas of the animal. 相似文献
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In general, optimal reaction norms in heterogeneous populations can be obtained only by iterative numerical procedures (McNamara,
1991; Kawecki and Stearns, 1993). We consider two particular, but biologically plausible and analytically tractable cases
of individual optimization to gain insight into the mechanisms which shape the optimal reaction norm of fecundity in relation
to an environmental variable or an individual trait. In the first case, we assume that the quality of the environment (e.g.
food abundance) or the quality of the individual (e.g. body size) is fixed during its entire life; it may also be a heritable
individual trait. In the second case, individual quality is assumed to change randomly such that the probability distribution
of quality in the next year is the same for the parent and for her offspring. For these two cases, we obtain analytical expressions
for the shape of the optimal reaction norm, which are heuristically interpretable in terms of underlying selective mechanisms.
It is shown that better quality may reduce the optimal fecundity. This outcome is particularly likely if better quality increases
a fecundity-independent factor of parental survival in a long-lived species with fixed quality.
This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. 相似文献
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Lactic dehydrogenase fromLactobacillus casei ATCC 7469 has been purified to homogeneity by a two-step affinity chromatography procedure which gave an yield of 35%. The
enzyme specifically catalysed the conversion of pyruvate to lactate. The enzyme was maximally active at pH 4.6, which was
shifted to 5.4 in the presence of fructose 1,6-biphosphate. The enzyme had a molecular weight of 70,800 with two identical
subunits, unlike the lactic dehydrogenase from other sources. Histidine and primary amino groups appeared to be involved in
catalysis. 相似文献
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