Have grass carp driven declines in macrophyte occurrence and diversity in the Vaal River,South Africa?

The Vaal River, South Africa, historically had a rich diversity of native submerged macrophytes with at least 13 species from 5 families recorded. Over the past 10 years there has been a noticeable reduction in the occurrence and diversity of submerged macrophytes in the river. It is possible that this is linked to the recent increase in the populations of invasive alien grass carp Ctenopharyngodon idella Cuvier & Valenciennes (Cyprinidae) in the river, where populations have been a concern since 2005. Grass carp invasions worldwide have been shown to have severe impacts on macrophyte biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. This fish is an aggressive feeder on submerged macrophytes, as well as being an ecosystem engineer that can change water and sediment chemistry.     

Periodontal therapy increases neutrophil extracellular trap degradation

In periodontitis, polymorphonuclear leucocytes (PMNs) are activated. They entrap and eliminate pathogens by releasing neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). Abnormal NET degradation is part of a pro-inflammatory status, affecting co-morbidities such as cardiovascular disease. We aimed to investigate the ex vivo NET degradation capacity of plasma from periodontitis patients compared to controls (part 1) and to quantify NET degradation before and after periodontal therapy (part 2). Fresh NETs were obtained by stimulating blood-derived PMNs with phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate. Plasma samples from untreated periodontitis patients and controls were incubated for 3 h onto freshly generated NETs (part 1). Similarly, for part 2, NET degradation was studied for 91 patients before and 3, 6 and 12 mo after non-surgical periodontal therapy with and without adjunctive systemic antibiotics. Finally, NET degradation was fluorospectrometrically quantified. NET degradation levels did not differ between periodontitis patients and controls, irrespective of subject-related background characteristics. NET degradation significantly increased from 65.6 ± 1.7% before periodontal treatment to 75.7 ± 1.2% at 3 mo post periodontal therapy, and this improvement was maintained at 6 and 12 mo, irrespective of systemic usage of antibiotics. Improved NET degradation after periodontitis treatment is another systemic biomarker reflecting a decreased pro-inflammatory status, which also contributes to an improved cardiovascular condition.     

Fast, sensitive discovery of conserved genome-wide motifs

Regulatory sites that control gene expression are essential to the proper functioning of cells, and identifying them is critical for modeling regulatory networks. We have developed Magma (Multiple Aligner of Genomic Multiple Alignments), a software tool for multiple species, multiple gene motif discovery. Magma identifies putative regulatory sites that are conserved across multiple species and occur near multiple genes throughout a reference genome. Magma takes as input multiple alignments that can include gaps. It uses efficient clustering methods that make it about 70 times faster than PhyloNet, a previous program for this task, with slightly greater sensitivity. We ran Magma on all non-coding DNA conserved between Caenorhabditis elegans and five additional species, about 70 Mbp in total, in <4 h. We obtained 2,309 motifs with lengths of 6-20 bp, each occurring at least 10 times throughout the genome, which collectively covered about 566 kbp of the genomes, approximately 0.8% of the input. Predicted sites occurred in all types of non-coding sequence but were especially enriched in the promoter regions. Comparisons to several experimental datasets show that Magma motifs correspond to a variety of known regulatory motifs.