skip to main content

Title: Sieve-element differentiation and phloem sap contamination
Sieve elements (SEs) degrade selected organelles and cytoplasmic structures when they differentiate. According to classical investigations, only smooth ER, mitochondria, sieve element plastids, and, in most cases, P-proteins remain in mature SEs. More recent proteomics and immunohistochemical studies, however, suggested that additional components including a protein-synthesizing machinery and a fully developed actin cytoskeleton operate in mature SEs. These interpretations are at odds with conventional imaging studies. Here we discuss potential causes for these discrepancies, concluding that differentiating SEs may play a role by ‘contaminating’ phloem exudates.
Authors:
Award ID(s):
1656769
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10053372
Journal Name:
Current opinion in plant biology
Volume:
43
ISSN:
1879-0356
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Background:The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in theUnited States resulted in safety guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention (CDC) intended to curb the spread of the virus. Adolescents are poten-tially at risk for disregarding these guidelines due to their reduced psychosocial matu-rity compared with adults. The current study examined the relationship betweenadolescents' psychosocial maturity, perceived importance of the CDC guidelines andadherence to the CDC guidelines within some of the highest risk groups for contract-ing COVID-19 in a county particularly impacted by the pandemic (i.e., Hispanic andlow-SES youth in El Paso, Texas).Methods:Participants completed a phone interview with a research assistant regard-ing their thoughts and behaviours in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic.Adolescents (N=68) were 15.38 years old on average (SD=1.05,range=13, 17),predominantly male (60.3%) and nearly exclusively Hispanic/Latino (94.1%).Results:Results indicated that although more psychosocially mature adolescentsreported greater adherence to the CDC guidelines than less psychosocially matureadolescents, the association between psychosocial maturity and adherence was fullymediated by how important adolescents felt it was to follow the guidelines. Specifi-cally, greater perceived importance was associated with greater adherence to theguidelines.Conclusions:The current study found that more psychosocially mature adolescentsadhere to CDC's safety guidelines better than less psychosocially mature adolescentsbecause they are moremore »likely to view the guidelines as important. Information thatattempts to increase adolescent adherence to the guidelines should thereforeemphasize not only that following the guidelines is important, butwhyfollowing theguidelines is so important. Less psychosocially mature adolescents may benefit mostfrom interventions efforts and targeted messages regarding the importance offollowing the CDC's guidelines, as more psychosocially mature adolescents alreadyrecognize this importance.« less
  2. The socio-ecological systems (SESs) framework provides cross-disciplinary insight into complex environmental problems. Numerous studies have applied the SES framework to coastal and marine environments over the last two decades. We review and analyze 98 of those studies to (i) describe how SES concepts were examined and measured, (ii) describe how the studies included feedbacks and thresholds, and (iii) identify and analyze elements unique to coastal and marine SES frameworks. We find that progress has been made in understanding key SES properties in coastal and marine ecosystems, which include resilience, adaptive capacity, vulnerability, and governance. A variety of methods has been developed and applied to analyze these features qualitatively and quantitatively. We also find that recent studies have incorporated land-based stressors in their analyses of coastal issues related to nutrient runoff, bacterial pollution, and management of anadromous species to represent explicit links in land-to-sea continuums. However, the literature has yet to identify methods and data that can be used to provide causal evidence of non-linearities and thresholds within SES. In addition, our findings suggest that greater alignment and consistency are needed in models with regard to metrics and spatial boundaries between ecological and social systems to take full advantage of themore »SES framework and improve coastal and marine management.« less
  3. Across four studies, we investigated whether perceptions of children’s pain are influenced by their socioeconomic status (SES). We found evidence that children with low SES were believed to feel less pain than children with high SES (Study 1), and this effect was not moderated by child’s age (Study 2). Next, we examined life hardship as a mediator of this effect among children, finding that children with low SES were rated as having lived a harder life and thus as feeling less pain (Study 3). Finally, we examined downstream consequences for hypothetical treatment recommendations. We found that participants perceived children with low SES as less sensitive to pain and therefore as requiring less pain treatment than children with high SES (Study 4). Thus, we consistently observe that stereotypes of low-SES individuals as insensitive to pain may manifest in judgments of children and their recommended pain care. Implications of this work for theory and medical practice are discussed.

  4. Shape expressions (SEs) is a novel specification language that was recently introduced to express behavioral patterns over real-valued signals observed during the execution of cyber-physical systems. An SE is a regular expression composed of arbitrary parameterized shapes, such as lines, exponential curves, and sinusoids as atomic symbols with symbolic constraints on the shape parameters. SEs enable a natural and intuitive specification of complex temporal patterns over possibly noisy data. In this article, we propose a novel method for mining a broad and interesting fragment of SEs from time-series data using a combination of techniques from linear regression, unsupervised clustering, and learning finite automata from positive examples. The learned SE for a given dataset provides an explainable and intuitive model of the observed system behavior. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on two case studies from different application domains and experimentally evaluate the implemented specification mining procedure.
  5. Socioeconomic status (SES) has been repeatedly linked to the developmental trajectory of vocabulary acquisition in young children. However, the nature of this relationship remains underspecified. In particular, despite an extensive literature documenting young children's reliance on a host of skills and strategies to learn new words, little attention has been paid to whether and how these skills relate to measures of SES and vocabulary acquisition. To evaluate these relationships, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, 205 2.5‐ to 3.5‐year‐old children from widely varying socioeconomic backgrounds were tested on a broad range of word‐learning skills that tap their ability to resolve cases of ambiguous reference and to extend words appropriately. Children's executive functioning and phonological memory skills were also assessed. In Study 2, 77 of those children returned for a follow‐up session several months later, at which time two additional measures of vocabulary were obtained. Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and multivariate regression, we provide evidence of the mediating role of word‐learning skills on the relationship between SES and vocabulary skill over the course of early development.