Chromosome-level genome assembly of Bactrocera dorsalis reveals its adaptation and invasion mechanisms

Bactrocera dorsalis is an invasive polyphagous pest causing considerable ecological and economic damage worldwide. We report a high-quality chromosome-level genome assembly and combine various transcriptome data to explore the molecular mechanisms of its rapid adaptation to new environments. The expansions of the DDE transposase superfamily and key gene families related to environmental adaptation and enrichment of the expanded and unique gene families in metabolism and defence response pathways explain its environmental adaptability. The relatively high but not significantly different expression of heat-shock proteins, regardless of the environmental conditions, suggests an intrinsic mechanism underlying its adaptation to high temperatures. The mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway plays a key role in adaptation to new environments. The prevalence of duplicated genes in its genome explains the diversity in the B. dorsalis complex. These findings provide insights into the genetic basis of the invasiveness and diversity of B. dorsalis, explaining its rapid adaptation and expansion.

Defining Post-Pandemic Work and Organizations: The Need for Team Belongingness and Trust

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forth substantial unrest in the ways in which people work and organize. This had led to disconnection, rapid adaptation, work from home, emergence of a new digital industry, and an opportunity to create anew. This chapter provides a position for the future state of work and organizing, drawing on the belongingness hypothesis, to characterize a revised method of human connection that acknowledges unique differences in online connections. It also explores the role that flexibility and working from home have on organizational outcomes, through changing presenteeism, changes in how people develop trust, and how social resources are deployed. Advancing an understanding of this position creates a possible post-pandemic model of work that acknowledges the current climate and the learnings from before that pandemic. Through genuine acknowledgment of the current and past ways of working, it is possible to build a pathway to heighten employee’s sense of belonging and trust. This will support the return to, and evolution of, a form of normality post-pandemic.

Evaluation at the Endgame: Evaluating Sustainability and the SDGs by Moving Past Dominion and Institutional Capture

Three facts underlay this chapter. First, the human system and all our ambitions for improving the human system depend on sustainable natural systems. Second, we do not have much time. On track to fall well short of all sustainability goals, the climate and sustainability crises grow and extinction looms. Third, up to this point evaluation has shown little interest in sustainability, yet evaluation potentially addresses the very questions that are central to informing and guiding rapid adaptation of human behavior to successfully surmounting extinction.Business-as-usual evaluation will not suffice. At the endgame with extinction looming, we need an evaluation that is more nimble, keeps up with rapidly accelerating knowledge, is relentlessly use-seeking and that guides the way to joined-up approaches. The evaluation we need will systematically mainstream sustainability across all evaluations and interventions, in all evaluation criteria and standards. For this, all evaluations will always address nexus where human and natural systems join and incorporate knowledge and methods from both systems. Existing evaluation knowledge is well suited to this task, as are knowledges in biophysical sciences. We know and promote knowledge processes for integrative evaluation and are starting to shift toward the requirements for evaluation at the nexus. As this chapter shows, the anchors holding us back are political, not technical.

Evolution by Sexual Selection

Charles Darwin published his second book “Sexual selection and the descent of man” in 1871 150 years ago, to try to explain, amongst other things, the evolution of the peacock’s train, something that he famously thought was problematic for his theory of evolution by natural selection. He proposed that the peacock’s train had evolved because females preferred to mate with males with more elaborate trains. This idea was very controversial at the time and it wasn’t until 1991 that a manuscript testing Darwin’s hypothesis was published. The idea that a character could arise as a result of a female preference is still controversial. Some argue that there is no need to distinguish sexual from natural selection and that natural selection can adequately explain the evolution of extravagant characteristics that are characteristic of sexually selected species. Here, I outline the reasons why I think that this is not the case and that Darwin was right to distinguish sexual selection as a distinct process. I present a simple verbal and mathematical model to expound the view that sexual selection is profoundly different from natural selection because, uniquely, it can simultaneously promote and maintain the genetic variation which fuels evolutionary change. Viewed in this way, sexual selection can help resolve other evolutionary conundrums, such as the evolution of sexual reproduction, that are characterised by having impossibly large costs and no obvious immediate benefits and which have baffled evolutionary biologists for a very long time. If sexual selection does indeed facilitate rapid adaptation to a changing environment as I have outlined, then it is very important that we understand the fundamentals of adaptive mate choice and guard against any disruption to this natural process.

The blackgrass genome reveals patterns of divergent evolution of non-target site resistance to herbicides.

Globally, weedy plants result in more crop yield loss than plant pathogens and insect pests combined. Much of the success of weeds rests with their ability to rapidly adapt in the face of human-mediated environmental management and change. The evolution of resistance to herbicides is an emblematic example of this rapid adaptation. Here, we focus on Alopecurus myosuroides (blackgrass), the most impactful agricultural weed in Europe. To gain insights into the evolutionary history and genomic mechanisms underlying adaptation in blackgrass, we assembled and annotated its large, complex genome. We show that non-target site herbicide resistance is oligogenic and likely evolves from standing genetic variation. We present evidence for divergent selection of resistance at the level of the genome in wild, evolved populations, though at the transcriptional level, resistance mechanisms are underpinned by similar patterns of up-regulation of stress- and defence-responsive gene families. These gene families are expanded in the blackgrass genome, suggesting that the large, duplicated, and dynamic genome plays a role in enabling rapid adaptation in blackgrass. These observations have wide significance for understanding rapid plant adaptation in novel stressful environments.

Transnational crime: features and basic models

The study found that the features of modern transnational organized crime are: rapid adaptation to realities, instant response to changes and transformations in life and economy, the ability to improve and adjust the methods and tools used in activities; coordination; rationality; thoughtfulness and systematic actions; systematization; the desire to minimize potential risks and get the most profit and maximum profits. Such models of transnational organized crime as: corporate, trade unions, partnerships, ethnic, network are considered. Modern transnational criminal groups, regardless of model, have been shown to be “well-concealed, well-off criminal communities with a well-defined internal structure, distribution of spheres of influence and functions, and extensive interregional or international ties. It is emphasized that now transnational crime is turning into cybercrime. This is made possible by the fact that it is easier to hide criminal activity on the Internet, anonymity is ensured, and it is possible to act uncontrollably, which, in turn, guarantees security for criminal activity

ORGANIZATION OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS IN SPECIAL SCHOOLS FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS (2011-2017)

The article presents the results of the analysis of historical and pedagogical literature and regulatory documents in the field of education of children with special needs. It was found that the new regulatory documents State Standard (2011), the Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine "On Approval of the Procedure for the Organization of Inclusive Education in General Education Institutions" (2011) and others have played a large role in the development of not only the educational process of children with special needs but also their rapid adaptation to society. It was determined that children with special needs, having their own characteristics, studied in special and inclusive classes. The urgency of the problem in this direction was substantiated and it was proved that their education and upbringing was carried out in specially created conditions, it was found out what services were provided to children with special needs by general educational institutions in classes with inclusive education, and it was also established how the educational process of children with special needs. It was determined what needs belonged to the peculiarities of the educational process of such children, namely: correctional development classes that, taking into account the conclusion of the psychological, medical and pedagogical consultation and standard curricula of special general educational institutions for children in need of physical and / or mental correction development. It was found that educational services were provided in educational institutions in classes with inclusive education using personality-oriented teaching methods and taking into account the individual characteristics of the educational and cognitive activities of children with special needs. It is proved that the educational process in classes with inclusive education was carried out in accordance with the working curriculum of a general educational institution, drawn up on the basis of standard curricula of general educational institutions, taking into account the individual characteristics of the educational and cognitive activity of children with special educational needs. It has been established that inclusive education contributes to the rapid adaptation of such children to society. It has been proven that the introduction of inclusive education is still one of the pressing problems of the development of children with special needs.

Information-Seeking Under Threat: How the Characteristics of Web Searches Changed During the Pandemic

To adjust to novel and threatening environments people seek information. Here, we examine whether and how a threatening global event -–the pandemic– altered the characteristics of the information people sought out online. An analysis of queries submitted to Google search engine revealed that people were more likely to submit queries for information that could guide action (i.e., “How to” and “How do” searches) during the pandemic relative to before, controlling for total search volume. This tendency may have contributed to the rapid adaptation observed in response to the pandemic. Indeed, stress levels reported weekly by 17K individuals predicted the proportion of “How to” and “How do” searches, controlling for COVID-19 related confinement. Markedly, population stress levels were more strongly associated with this high-level feature of web searches than they were with searches for specific terms such as “anxiety” or “stress”. In contrast, COVID-19 related confinement, but not stress levels, was associated with the proportion of “What” and “Why” questions submitted to Google, suggesting that the confinement was related to increased desire for general knowledge. Key results were replicated across two countries (UK and US). The study suggests that in situations of high stress people ask questions that can guide action. An intriguing possibility is that tracking of this feature could be used to monitor population stress levels beyond the pandemic.

ecc_finder: A Robust and Accurate Tool for Detecting Extrachromosomal Circular DNA From Sequencing Data

Extrachromosomal circular DNA (eccDNA) has been observed in different species for decades, and more and more evidence shows that this specific type of DNA molecules may play an important role in rapid adaptation. Therefore, characterizing the full landscape of eccDNA has become critical, and there are several protocols for enriching eccDNAs and performing short-read or long-read sequencing. However, there is currently no available bioinformatic tool to identify eccDNAs from Nanopore reads. More importantly, the current tools based on Illumina short reads lack an efficient standardized pipeline notably to identify eccDNA originating from repeated loci and cannot be applied to very large genomes. Here, we introduce a comprehensive tool to solve both of these two issues.1 Applying ecc_finder to eccDNA-seq data (either mobilome-seq, Circle-Seq and CIDER-seq) from Arabidopsis, human, and wheat (with genome sizes ranging from 120Mb to 17 Gb), we document the improvement of computational time, sensitivity, and accuracy and demonstrate ecc_finder wide applicability and functionality.

Forced alignment for Nordic languages: Rapidly constructing a high-quality prototype

We propose a rapid adaptation of FAVE-Align to the Nordic languages, and we offer our own adaptation to Swedish as a template. This study is motivated by the fact that researchers of lesser-studied languages often neither have sufficient speech material nor sufficient time to train a forced aligner. Faced with a similar problem, we made a limited number of surface changes to FAVE-Align so that it – along with its original hidden Markov models for English – could be used on Stockholm Swedish. We tested the performance of this prototype on the three main sociolects of Stockholm Swedish and found that read-aloud alignments met all of the minimal benchmarks set by the literature. Spontaneous-speech alignments met three of the four minimal benchmarks. We conclude that an adaptation such as ours would especially suit laboratory experiments in Nordic phonetics that rely on elicited speech.