Description: This article discusses cardiac and metabolic physiology of early larval zebrafish (Danio rerio) reflecting parental swimming stamina. Abstract: Swimming stamina in adult fish is heritable, it is unknown if inherited traits that support enhanced swimming stamina in offspring appear only in juveniles and/or adults, or if these traits actually appear earlier in the morphologically quite different larvae. To answer this question, mature adult zebrafish (Danio rerio) were subjected to a swimming performance test that allowed separation into low swimming stamina or high swimming stamina groups. Adults were then bred within their own performance groups. Larval offspring from each of the two groups, designated high (L(HSD)) and low stamina-derived larvae (L(LSD)), were then reared at 27°C in aerated water (21% O(2)). Routine (f(H),r) and active (f(H),a) heart rate, and routine [Formula: see text] and active [Formula: see text] mass-specific oxygen consumption were recorded from 5 days post fertilization (dpf) through 21 dpf, and gross cost of transport and factorial aerobic metabolic scope were derived from [Formula: see text] measurements. Heart rate generally ranged between 150 and 225 bpm in both L(HSD) and L(LSD) populations. However, significant (P<0.05) differences existed between the L(LSD) and L(HSD) populations at 5 and 14 dpf in ...

Description: This report discusses the Comparative Assessment of Peer Review (CAPR) project outcomes. Public funding agencies are required to demonstrate accountability to their government funders (e.g., Congress) as well as to the public. Some agencies - including the US National Science Foundation (NSF) - have used broader societal impacts criteria as part of the review process of grant proposals in order to connect scientific research to societal needs. But these agencies have often encountered questions from scientists and engineers for how to integrate such demands for broader societal impacts into their research proposals. In an effort to help clarify the idea of broader impacts, in 2010 NSF and Congress proposed a list of national needs that NSF-funded research would be required to meet. But was this the best solution? This report discusses the authors' research.

Description: This article accompanies a poster presentation on contributing factors in judgement of fairness by monetary value. Given that the authors have developed for emotional response (Emotional-Gain Model) and a model for fairness (Fairness-Equity Model) that quantified emotional bias and fairness bias, the authors will use these models to reveal the hidden factors contributing to the emotional bias and fairness bias. Using the Ultimatum Game (UG) with human subjects to split a sum of money, the authors compare the responses between sharing $10 vs. $10 million.

Description: This article discusses a cytochrome P450 monooxygenase. Abstract: Background: Cytochrome P450 monooxygenases form a large superfamily of enzymes that catalyze diverse reactions. The P450su1 gene from the soil bacteria Streptomyces griseolus encodes CYP105A1 which acts on various substrates including sulfonylurea herbicides, vitamin D, coumarins, and based on the work presented here, brassinosteroids. P450su1 is used as a negative-selection marker in plants because CYP105A1 converts the relatively benign sulfonyl urea pro-herbicide R7402 into a highly phytotoxic product. Consistent with its use for negative selection, transgenic Arabidopsis plants were generated with P450su1 situated between recognition sequences for FLP recombinase from yeast to select for recombinase-mediated excision. However, unexpected and prominent developmental aberrations resembling those described for mutants defective in brassinosteroid signaling were observed in many of the lines. Results: The phenotypes of the most affected lines included severe stunting, leaf curling, darkened leaves characteristic of anthocyanin accumulation, delayed transition to flowering, low pollen and seed yields, and delayed senescence. Phenotype severity correlated with P450su1 transcript abundance, but not with transcript abundance of other experimental genes, strongly implicating CYP105A1 as responsible for the defects. Germination and seedling growth of transgenic and control lines in the presence and absence of 24-epibrassinolide indicated that CYP105A1 ...

Description: This article discusses the ecoresponsive genome of Daphnia pulex. Abstract: We describe the draft genome of the microcrustacean Daphnia pulex, which is only 200 megabases and contains at least 30,907 genes. The high gene count is a consequence of an elevated rate of gene duplication resulting in tandem gene clusters. More than a third of Daphnia's genes have no detectable homologs in any other available proteome, and the most amplified gene families are specific to the Daphnia lineage. The coexpansion of gene families interacting within metabolic pathways suggests that the maintenance of duplicated genes is not random, and the analysis of gene expression under different environmental conditions reveals that numerous paralogs acquire divergent expression patterns soon after duplication. Daphnia-specific genes, including many additional loci within sequenced regions that are otherwise devoid of annotations, are the most responsive genes to ecological challenges.