Sosagadegaard1000

Agent-based modeling (ABM) has become an established methodology in many areas of biology, ranging from the cellular to the ecological population and community levels. In plant science, two different scales have predominated in their use of ABM. One is the scale of populations and communities, through the modeling of collections of agents representing individual plants, interacting with each other and with the environment. The other is the scale of the individual plant, through the modeling, by functional-structural plant models (FSPMs), of agents representing plant building blocks, or metamers, to describe the development of plant architecture and functions within individual plants. The purpose of this review is to show key results and parallels in ABM for growth, mortality, carbon allocation, competition, and reproduction across the scales from the plant organ to populations and communities on a range of spatial scale to the whole landscape. Several areas of application of ABMs are reviewed, showing that some issues are addressed by both population-level ABMs and FSPMs. Continued increase in the relevance of ABM to environmental science and management will be helped by greater integration of ABMs across these two scales. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company 2020. This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US.BACKGROUND AND AIMS Plants have the potential to adjust the configuration of their hydraulic system to maintain its function across spatial and temporal gradients. Species with wide environmental niches provide an ideal framework to assess intra-specific xylem adjustments to contrasting climates. We aimed at assessing how xylem structure in the widespread species Nothofagus pumilio varies across combined gradients of temperature and moisture, and to which extent within-individual variation contributes to population responses across environmental gradients. METHODS We characterized xylem configuration in branches of N. pumilio trees at five sites across an 18° latitudinal gradient in the Chilean Andes, sampling at four elevations per site. We measured vessel area, vessel density and the degree of vessel grouping. We also obtained vessel diameter distributions and estimated the xylem-specific hydraulic conductivity. Xylem traits were studied in the last five growth rings to account for within-individual variatinvironmental changes. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company. Proteasome inhibitor All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com.BACKGROUND AND AIMS Mikania micrantha Kunth, a climbing perennial weed of the family Asteraceae, is native to Latin America and is highly invasive in the tropical belt of Asia, Oceania and Australia. This study was framed to investigate the population structure of M. micrantha at a large spatial scale in Asia and to identify how introduction history, evolutionary forces and landscape features influenced the genetic pattern of the species in this region. METHODS We assessed the genetic diversity and structure of 1052 individuals from 46 populations for 12 microsatellite loci. The spatial pattern of genetic variation was investigated by estimating the relationship between genetic distance and geographic, climatic and landscape resistances hypothesized to influence gene flow between populations. KEY RESULTS We found high genetic diversity of M. micrantha in this region, as compared with the genetic diversity parameters of other invasive species. The spatial and non-spatial clustering algorithms identified the prerm persistence of the population, thereby indicating the range expansion ability of the species. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com.OBJECTIVES To assess the admission prevalence of third-generation cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacterales (3GCREB) and to assess whether risk factors vary by β-lactamase genotype. METHODS Adult patients were recruited within 72 h of admission to general wards of six university hospitals in 2014 and 2015. Rectal swabs were screened for 3GCREB and isolates were analysed phenotypically and genotypically. Patients were questioned on potential risk factors. Multivariable analyses were performed to identify risk factors for 3GCREB colonization and for specific β-lactamases. RESULTS Of 8753 patients screened, 828 were 3GCREB positive (9.5%). Eight hundred and thirteen isolates were available for genotyping. CTX-M-15 was the most common ESBL (38.0%), followed by CTX-M-1 (22.5%), CTX-M-14 (8.7%), CTX-M-27 (7.5%) and SHV-ESBL (4.4%). AmpC was found in 11.9%. Interestingly, 18 Escherichia coli isolates were AmpC positive, 12 of which (67%) contained AmpC on a gene of plasmid origin [CMY (n = 10), DHA (n = 2)]. Risk fac please email journals.permissions@oup.com.BACKGROUND In the current obesogenic environment we often eat while electronic devices, such as smart phones, computers, or the television, distract us. Such "distracted eating" is associated with increased food intake and overweight. However, the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms of this phenomenon are unknown. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to elucidate these mechanisms by investigating whether distraction attenuates processing in the primary and secondary taste cortices, located in the insula and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), respectively. METHODS Forty-one healthy, normal-weight participants received fixed amounts of higher- and lower-sweetness isocaloric chocolate milk while performing a high- or low-distracting detection task during fMRI in 2 test sessions. Subsequently, we measured ad libitum food intake. RESULTS As expected, a primary taste cortex region in the right insula responded more to the sweeter drink (P less then 0.001, uncorrected). Distraction did not affect this insular sweetness response across the group, but did weaken sweetness-related connectivity of this region to a secondary taste region in the right OFC (P-family-wise error, cluster, small-volume corrected = 0.020). Moreover, individual differences in distraction-related attenuation of taste activation in the insula predicted increased subsequent ad libitum food intake after distraction (r = 0.36). CONCLUSIONS These results reveal a mechanism explaining how distraction during consumption attenuates neural taste processing. Moreover, our study shows that such distraction-induced decreases in neural taste processing contribute to individual differences in the susceptibility for overeating. Thus, being mindful about the taste of food during consumption could perhaps be part of successful prevention and treatment of overweight and obesity, which should be further tested in these target groups. This study was preregistered at the Open Science Framework as https//bit.ly/31RtDHZ. Copyright © The Author(s) 2020.