Streptomyces and Bacillus species utilize volatile organic compounds to impact Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. vasinfectum race 4 (Fov4) virulence and suppress Fusarium wilt in Pima cotton

Emergence of a highly virulent Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. vasinfectum race 4 (Fov4) with aggressiveness towards Pima cotton (Gossypium barbadense) has raised significant concern for cotton producers while revealing challenges in soil-borne cotton disease management strategies which rely heavily on crop resistance and chemical controls. An alternative management approach uses antagonistic bacteria as biocontrol agents against Fov4. Initial studies showed a unique combination of bacteria Bacillus Rz141 and Streptomyces HC658 isolates displayed a mutualistic relationship capable of altering Fov4 growth. Notably, experimental design placed Fov4 between each isolate preventing direct physical contact of bacterial colonies. These observations led us to hypothesize that bacterial volatile organic compounds (VOCs) impact the growth and virulence of Fov4. Ensuring physical separation, I-plate cultures showed Rz141 had a VOC inhibition of 24%. Similarly, physically separated cultures of Rz141 and HC658 showed slight increase in VOC inhibition, 26% with some loss of Fov4 pigmentation. Pathogenicity assays where Fov4-infected Pima cotton was exposed to VOCs from physically separated Rz141 and HC658 showed VOCs can suppress Fov4 infection and reduce tissue darkening. Our results provide evidence that rhizosphere bacteria can use VOCs as a communication tool impacting fungal physiology and virulence, and ultimately Fov4-cotton interactions without direct physical contact.

METHODOLOGICAL SUPPORT FOR THE ORGANIZATION OF EXAMS IN TECHNICAL DISCIPLINES DURING DISTANCE EDUCATION

Current realities have revealed an urgent need for the development and improvement of distance forms of educational processes. The most important of which are to control and obtain assessments of the knowledge of the examinees who are not in direct physical contact with the examiner. This article presents the results of a review and analysis of various forms of organization of distance examinations in technical disciplines. There are revealed the main disadvantages of each form of organization of the remote exam, including those that do not allow recommending them for widespread, widespread use. There is considered in detail physical implementation of the most simple form of conducting a distance exam, called “Assignment by e-mail”. This form has been used many times when organizing remote exams at the BMSTU and can be successfully implemented in educational institutions that do not have their own sufficient experience in distance education.

Complicating leadership: choral conducting training through movement theatre practice

Conductors are typically presumed to possess the physical, interpretative control in choral performance. Questioning that presumption, this article explores how student conductors might be encouraged to engage physically with the musical sound – and sounding bodies – of a choir. It argues that singers’ vocal performance directly and fruitfully impacts on a conductor’s gestural leadership. Borrowing techniques from established physical/movement-based performance and theatre, it explores how conductors might act as the embodied nexus of the poietic and esthesic dimensions of interpretation (Nattiez, 1990), thus collaboratively constructing a performance. To frame the discussion, a conceptualisation of the overlap between body and voice is set out. This conceptualisation emerged during the development of vocal-physical performance projects (2015-16) and was subsequently developed into a broader philosophical orientation. Focusing on issues of embodiment and empathy, this orientation is enlisted to re-examine choral conducting training practices. The influence of these explorations on Daniel Galbreath’s choral conducting teaching is outlined. Additional action-research with theatre practitioner and teacher Gavin Thatcher is then detailed to demonstrate further developments and disruptions to Galbreath’s practice. As a result, a conducting training practice emerges from these practical enquiries that exploits performers’ mutual, direct physical contact via sound.

A Touchable God

This chapter argues that the cosmology of the Middle Ages was tactile. Heaven may have seemed to be all light and music and fragrance, but the primordial qualities of the universe were held to be the contrasting forces of hot, cold, moist, and dry. All of these qualities could only be experienced through touch, making touch the only sense open to the fundamental nature of reality. As such, this chapter explores first explores the Biblical narratives of touch, particularly through the person of Jesus Christ. It then turns to another aspect of touch in religion—embodied practice through ritual gestures. Another form of religious touch explored here are the objects of touch themselves, the physical relics that bring one in direct physical contact with holiness, to say nothing of the Eucharist, which involves the actual body of Christ. To close, the chapter explores conferring of the sacred via heat.

Transforming Celebrity Objects: Implications for an Account of Psychological Contagion

The celebrity effect is the well-documented phenomenon in which people ascribe an enhanced worth to artefacts owned by famous individuals. This effect has been attributed to a belief in psychological contagion, the transmission of a person’s essence to an object via contact. We examined people’s judgments of the persisting worth of celebrity-owned artefacts following transformations of their parts/material and found that the celebrity effect was evident only for post-transformation artefacts that were composed of parts/material that had direct physical contact with the celebrity. Insofar as the celebrity effect arises from psychological contagion, the findings suggest that the essence imparted to a celebrity-owned artefact is conceived as akin to a residue deposited in/on the object rather than a germ capable of spreading in an indirect manner to new parts/material added to the object. The results illuminate the nature of psychological contagion and offer insight into how best to preserve the value of historically important artefacts.