Single seed microbiota: assembly and transmission from parent plant to seedling

Gaining basic understanding of processes involved in seed microbiota assembly is a prerequisite for improving crop establishment. Investigation of microbiota structure during seed development revealed that individual seeds of bean and radish were associated with a dominant bacterial taxon representing more than 75% of all reads. The identity of this taxon was highly variable between plants and within seeds of the same plant. Succession of dominant taxa occurred during seed filling and maturation through Selection. In a second step, we evaluated seed to seedling transmission of these dominant seed-borne taxa. We showed that initial bacterial abundance on seeds was not a good predictor of seedling transmission and that the identity of seed-borne taxa can impact seedling phenotype. Altogether this work unveiled that seeds are colonized by few bacterial taxa of highly variable identity, which appears to be important for the early stages of plant development.

Turnout, Status, and Identity: Mobilizing Latinos to Vote with Group Appeals

The rise of micro-targeting in American elections raises new questions about the effects of identity-based mobilization strategies. In this article, we bring together theories of expressive voting with literature on racial and ethnic identification to argue that prior studies, which have found either weak or null effects of identity messages targeting minority groups, have missed a crucial moderating variable—identity strength—that varies across both individuals and communities. Identity appeals can have powerful effects on turnout, but only when they target politicized identities to which individuals hold strong prior attachments. Using two innovative GOTV field experiments that rely on publicly available data as a proxy for identity strength, we show that the effects of both ethnic and national identity appeals among Latinos in California and Texas are conditional on the strength of those identities in different communities and among different Latino subgroups.

On the spectrum of Stein quasigroups

In this paper we investigate the spectrum of a variety of quasigroups satisfying the 2-variable identity x(xy) = yx, called Stein quasigroups. Stein quasigroups are known to be self-orthogonal and have been given a considerable amount of attention because of this property. It is known that there are no Stein quasigroups of order 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14. The object of this paper is to show that for all but 36 values of n ≥ 15 there exists a Stein quasigroup of order n. In particular, the spectrum of Stein quasigroups contains all n ≥ 191.