Fire blight, caused by Erwinia amylovora , continues to spread across apple-producing regions worldwide. Genomic analyses have revealed that most global isolates belong to the “Widely Prevalent” (WP) lineage, which underwent a bottleneck during its dissemination from North America to Eurasia. Within this lineage, a distinct cluster of strains from Kazakhstan, designated the Za clade, was identified previously. In this study, w...

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that incorporates its genetic material into the host’s chromosome. The resulting diseases and related conditions constitute a global health problem as there are no treatments to eliminate HIV from an infected individual. However, the potent, complex, and active antiretroviral therapy (ART) strategies have been able to successfully inhibit HIV replication in patients. Unfortuna...

Aim Plant functional traits can influence interaction outcomes between nurse and target plants through a “functional trait match”, which occurs when the traits of nurse plants ameliorate their environment, and target plants possess traits that allow them to benefit from this ameliorated environment. We investigated how the traits of putative nurse species affect interaction outcomes across global drylands and determined the fu...

Accurately predicting exposure of animals to climate change requires evaluating the effects of warming on the microclimates they occupy. Birds, like many other taxa, make extensive use of cool microsites in vegetation during hot weather. Taking advantage of recent advances in modelling tree canopy microclimates, we combined LiDAR-based individual tree canopy mapping and biophysical modelling to evaluate the current and future...

Here we study silicate inclusion-bearing diamonds from the Voorspoed Group II kimberlite (or carbonate-rich olivine lamproite—CROL) in the central Kaapvaal Craton. Based on major and trace elements, along with Sm–Nd isotope characteristics, the peridotitic garnet and clinopyroxene inclusions define three compositional groups that are contemporaneous with lithospheric refertilisation and re-healing related to 2.79–2.68 Ga Vente...

Tidal freshwater habitats in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta (Delta), USA, face multiple environmental stressors, including declining turbidity and invasion by submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV). We used a decade of monitoring data (2013–2023) in two tidal slough networks in the north Delta to (1) estimate trends in SAV, water clarity (Secchi depth), and abundance of pelagic, littoral, and benthic fish species; (2) iden...

Aims Common Juniper (Juniper communis) populations in western Europe are rapidly declining due to a lack of regeneration, which has been linked to nitrogen (N) deposition. However, the mechanisms by which N deposition affects juniper are not clear. Nitrogen deposition can lead to N eutrophication and soil acidification, which cause nutrient leaching and metal mobilisation with potential negative impacts on juniper regeneration...

Although more than 140 genes have been associated with non-syndromic hereditary hearing loss (HL), at least half of the cases remain unexplained in medical genetic testing. One reason is that pathogenic variants are located in ‘novel’ deafness genes. A variant prioritization approach was used to identify novel (candidate) genes for HL. Exome-wide sequencing data were assessed for subjects with presumed hereditary HL that remai...

TMPRSS3 -related hearing loss presents challenges in correlating genotypic variants with clinical phenotypes due to the small sample sizes of previous studies. We conducted a cross-sectional genomics study coupled with retrospective clinical phenotype analysis on 127 individuals. These individuals were from 16 academic medical centers across 6 countries. Key findings revealed 47 unique TMPRSS3 variants with significant differe...

The objective was to apply a population model to describe the time course and variability of serum creatinine (sCr) in (near)term neonates with moderate to severe encephalopathy during and after therapeutic hypothermia (TH). The data consisted of sCr observations up to 10 days of postnatal age in neonates who underwent TH during the first 3 days after birth. Available covariates were birth weight (BWT), gestational age (GA), s...

Fire blight caused by Erwinia amylovora reached Kazakhstan in 2008. Here, the disease poses a threat not only to agricultural production of apples and pears, but also to the forests of wild Malus sieversii , the progenitor of most domesticated apple varieties worldwide. In the period 2019–2021, the spread of fire blight in the growth area of wild apples was limited by the weather conditions. In 2022, late spring and early summ...

Biosecurity is essential to protect against the negative effects of non-native invasive species. As part of the government’s ‘Biosecurity 2025’ Initiative to enlist all New Zealanders as biosecurity risk managers, Tauranga Moana has been named the ‘biosecurity capital’ of New Zealand. The initiative will involve large-scale citizen science, for reporting and management of pest and disease threats. In this context we measured b...

Participatory approaches to science and decision making, including stakeholder engagement, are increasingly common for managing complex socio-ecological challenges in working landscapes. However, critical questions about stakeholder engagement in this space remain. These include normative, political, and ethical questions concerning who participates, who benefits and loses, what good can be accomplished, and for what, whom, an...