Acevedogorman9239

Aluminum (Al) toxicity is a major abiotic stress that restricts crop production in acid soils. Plants have evolved internal and external mechanisms of tolerance, and among them it is well known that AtSTOP1 and OsART1 are key transcription factors involved in tolerance through regulation of multiple downstream genes. Here, we identified the closest homolog of these two proteins in barley, namely HvATF1, Al-tolerance Transcription Factor 1, and determined its potential function in Al stress. HvATF1 is expressed in the nucleus, and functions in transcriptional activation. The transcription of HvATF1 was found to be constitutive in different tissues, and was little affected by Al stress. Knockdown of HvATF1 by RNAi resulted in increased Al sensitivity. Transcriptomics analysis identified 64 differently expressed genes in the RNAi lines compared to the wild-type, and these were considered as candidate downstream genes regulated by HvATF1. This study provides insights into the different molecular mechanisms of Al tolerance in barley and other plants.

Sexual minority men (SMM) and transgender women (TW) are more likely to smoke cigarettes than heterosexual and cisgender peers, which may exacerbate existing disparities in mental and psychosocial health and substance use.

As few existing studies have examined the confluence of these factors, we sought to examine tobacco use in a diverse sample of SMM and TW and describe its relationship with other substance use and health.

Data were drawn from a study of syndemic conditions among SMM and TW, which included measures assessing tobacco use, substance use, and mental, psychosocial, and general health.

A majority of the racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample (n = 665) reported ever smoking a cigarette, and more than half of them were current smokers. Current smoking was associated with more frequent recent substance use and poorer mental, psychosocial, and general health. In multivariable analyses, current smoking was predicted by more frequent substance use and more severe anxiety, whening, other substance use, and mental health burden. We recommend a holistic approach to treating tobacco use in sexual and gender minority populations that addresses both substance use and the myriad psychosocial burdens that sexual and gender minority communities experience.

More than 1.2 million people in the United States are affected by inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Inflammatory bowel disease has a natural course characterized by alternating periods of remission and relapse. Currently, disease flares are unpredictable as they occur in a random way. Further, current testing methods and practices lack the ability for real-time tracking of flares. There exists no technology that can be utilized for continuous monitoring of biomarkers, as most of these rely on samples such as blood, feces, and testing methods by which continuous monitoring is not feasible. Cytokines play a key role in IBD; the development, recurrence, and exacerbation of the inflammatory process are orchestrated by their levels in time and space. Cytokines are also present in sweat. We hypothesize that demonstrating real-time continuous monitoring of interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and C-reactive protein (CRP) may help create an enabling technology to track inflammation in IBD patients and identify flare-ups and asseinflammatory marker detection in passively expressed eccrine sweat in a wearable form-factor that can be utilized toward better management of inflammatory bowel disease. This is a first step toward demonstrating a noninvasive enabling technology that can enable baseline tracking of an inflammatory response. Furthermore, this is the first study to report and quantify the presence of CRP in human eccrine sweat.Current computational models of visual salience accurately predict the distribution of fixations on isolated visual stimuli. It is not known, however, whether the global salience of a stimulus, that is, its effectiveness in the competition for attention with other stimuli, is a function of the local salience or an independent measure. Further, do task and familiarity with the competing images influence eye movements? Here, we investigated the direction of the first saccade to characterize and analyze the global visual salience of competing stimuli. Participants freely observed pairs of images while eye movements were recorded. The pairs balanced the combinations of new and already seen images, as well as task and task-free trials. Then, we trained a logistic regression model that accurately predicted the location-left or right image-of the first fixation for each stimulus pair, accounting too for the influence of task, familiarity, and lateral bias. The coefficients of the model provided a reliable measure of global salience, which we contrasted with two distinct local salience models, GBVS and Deep Gaze. The lack of correlation of the behavioral data with the former and the small correlation with the latter indicate that global salience cannot be explained by the feature-driven local salience of images. Further, the influence of task and familiarity was rather small, and we reproduced the previously reported left-sided bias. ABT-263 Summarized, we showed that natural stimuli have an intrinsic global salience related to the human initial gaze direction, independent of the local salience and little influenced by task and familiarity.A central question in vision is whether spatial attention is represented in an eye-centered (retinotopic) or world-centered (spatiotopic) reference-frame. Most previous studies on this question focused on how coordinates are modulated across saccades. In the present study, we investigated the reference-frame of attention across smooth pursuit eye-movements using a goal-directed saccade task. In two experiments, participants were asked to pursue a moving target while attending to one or two grating stimuli. On each trial, one stimulus was constant in its retinal position and the other was constant in its spatial position. Upon detection of a slight change in stimulus orientation, participants were asked to stop pursuing and perform a fast saccade toward the modified stimulus. In the focused attention condition, they attended one, predefined, stimulus, and in the divided attention condition they attended both. In Experiment 1 the angle of the orientation change marking the target event was constant across participants and conditions.