Vegetation of alpine screes on Bjelašnica Mt. — syntaxonomy and ecology

We analised vegetation of calcareous screes in the alpine belt of Bjelašnica Mt. (Western Balkan) by the Central European phytosociological method. In total, 69 relevés were submitted to numerical analysis in R ver. 3.5.2. (UPGMA clustering with chord distance). The obtained cluster dendrogram showed differentiation in nine associations, of which Festuco xanthinae—Valerianetum montanae Trakić et al. ass. nov. and Drypido spinosae—Seslerietum wettsteinii Trakić et al. ass. nov. are new ones. In lower section of the alpine belt we described new subassociation Pseudofumarietum leiospermae helictochloetosum Trakić et al. subass. nov. which raises questions about ecological preferences of the alliance Corydalion ochroleucae. We also neotypified the association Drypidi—Heracleetum orsinii Redžić et al. ex Trakić et al. and made correction for Pseudofumarietum leiospermae Lakušić et Redžić 1991 nom. corr. The observed high diversification of the alpine screes on Bjelašnica Mt. is based upon its ecological heterogeneity and tranzitional position in the Dinarides.

Moss-inhabiting diatom communities from Ile Amsterdam (TAAF, southern Indian Ocean)

Background and aims – Despite the ongoing taxonomical revision of the entire (sub)-Antarctic diatom flora, our knowledge on the ecology and community associations of moss-inhabiting diatoms is still rather limited. In the present study, our research aim was to survey the diversity together with the environmental factors structuring the epiphytic moss diatom communities on Ile Amsterdam (TAAF), a small volcanic island in the southern Indian Ocean.Material and methods – A morphology-based dataset and (physico)chemical measurements were used for the ecological and biogeographical analysis of moss-inhabiting diatom flora from Ile Amsterdam. In total, 148 moss samples were examined using light microscopy.Key results – The analysis revealed the presence of 125 diatom taxa belonging to 38 genera. The uniqueness of the Ile Amsterdam diatom flora is mainly reflected by the species composition of the dominant genera Pinnularia, Nitzschia, Humidophila, and Luticola, with a large number of unknown and often new species. This highly specific diatom flora, together with differences in the habitats sampled and the isolated position of the island, resulted in very low similarity values between Ile Amsterdam and the other islands of the Southern Ocean. From a biogeographical point of view, 40% of the taxa have a typical cosmopolitan distribution, whereas 22% of all observed species can be considered endemic to Ile Amsterdam, with another 17% species showing a restricted sub-Antarctic distribution. The NMDS analysis, based on a cluster dendrogram, divides the samples into six main groups. For each group, indicator species were determined. Both environmental data and diatom distributions indicate that apart from elevation, specific conductance, pH, and moisture are the major factors determining the structure of moss-inhabiting diatom communities on Ile Amsterdam.Conclusion – The isolated geographic position and unique climatological and geological features of the island shaped the presence of a unique diatom flora, characterised by many endemic species. The results of the study are of prime importance for further (palaeo-)ecological and biogeographical research.

Invertebrate Community Similarity in the Nglambor Intertidal Zone, Indonesia

This study aims to investigate the community composition similarity of invertebrates in the Nglambor intertidal zone. The similarity of invertebrate communities in the Nglambor intertidal zone in Indonesia was studied in August and September 2020.. The data of occurring invertebrates and algae were obtained by plot method. Abiotic factors such as water pH, light intensity, and salinity were measured at each station. The similarity in invertebrate communities among habitat types was determined using the Dice’s coefficient, meanwhile to estimate similarities in habitat utilization we use Jaccard’s coefficient in PAST 4 software. Both invertebrate community similarity and habitat utilization were displayed in an cluster dendrogram. A total of five phyla was recorded, comprising Annelida, Arthropoda, Echinodermata, Mollusca and Nemertea. Algae cover varies from each station with the average cover reaches 52%. The result of the cluster analysis showed different models of invertebrate community similarity and habitat use that may be used for species conservation.

Islamic Banking Performance: A Bibliometric Review

Islamic banks (IBs) have been criticized as not being genuinely Islamic, and the methods in measuring their performances have been debatable. While the literature on IBs performance has been emerging, such studies precisely assess its recent development remains absent. Therefore, we aim to evaluate the development of scholarly articles that measure IBs’ performances. We employ bibliometric analysis and sample related articles from the Scopus database. We find that the development of IBs performance literature may be understood by 111 peer-reviewed journal articles, 4 conference papers, 1 book, and 1 book series. We analyze these materials based on publication sources, country and institution affiliation, keywords association, and cluster dendrogram. Our model that quantifies the keywords association and cluster dendrogram provides a novelty in assessing IBs performance literature development. Future studies may replicate our model to cluster and identify the keyword associations from the unstructured data sources.

Characteristics of Microsatellites Mined from Transcriptome Data and the Development of Novel Markers in Paeonia lactiflora

The insufficient number of available simple sequence repeats (SSRs) inhibits genetic research on and molecular breeding of Paeonia lactiflora, a flowering crop with great economic value. The objective of this study was to develop SSRs for P. lactiflora with Illumina RNA sequencing and assess the role of SSRs in gene regulation. The results showed that dinucleotides with AG/CT repeats were the most abundant type of repeat motif in P. lactiflora and were preferentially distributed in untranslated regions. Significant differences in SSR size were observed among motif types and locations. A large number of unigenes containing SSRs participated in catalytic activity, metabolic processes and cellular processes, and 28.16% of all transcription factors and 21.74% of hub genes for inflorescence stem straightness were found to contain SSRs. Successful amplification was achieved with 89.05% of 960 pairs of SSR primers, 55.83% of which were polymorphic, and most of the 46 tested primers had a high level of transferability to the genus Paeonia. Principal component and cluster dendrogram analyses produced results consistent with known genealogical relationships. This study provides a set of SSRs with abundant information for future accession identification, marker-trait association and molecular assisted breeding in P. lactiflora.

Photocatalysis as a Tool for in Vitro Drug Metabolism Simulation: Multivariate Comparison of Twelve Metal Oxides on a Set of Twenty Model Drugs

The constant development in the area of medicinal substances on the market and their subsequent progress in the field of drug analysis has become one of the reasons for the search for alternative, cheaper, and faster methods to determine the metabolism pathways of new molecular entities (NMEs). The simulation of transformation processes using photocatalysis is considered to be one of the promising methods. Although its effectiveness has been proven, the research has so far focused especially on titanium dioxide, while a more accurate comparison of the suitability of different photocatalysts in terms of their use in drug metabolism studies has not been performed. For this purpose, a set of twelve metal oxides was prepared and their photocatalytic efficiency in the direction of drug metabolism mimicking was checked on a model mixture of twenty medicinal substances differing both in chemical structure and pharmacological properties. Incubation with human liver microsomes (HLMs) was used as the reference method. The metabolic profiles obtained with the use of LC-MS analysis were compared using multidimensional chemometric techniques; and the graphic presentation of the results in the form of PCA plot and cluster dendrogram enabled their detailed interpretation and discussion. All tested photocatalysts confirmed their effectiveness. However, the exact outcome of the study indicate advantage of the WO3-assisted photocatalysis over other metal oxides.

A Study of the Evaluation of the Pecan Drought Resistance of Grafted ‘Pawnee’ Trees From Different Seedling Rootstocks

To describe the influence of different pecan seedling rootstocks on drought stress resistance, 12 rootstocks of ‘87MX1-2.2’, ‘87MX5-1.7’, ‘Elliott’, ‘Frutoso’, ‘Giles’, ‘Major’, ‘Moore’, ‘Peruque’, ‘Posey’, ‘Riverside’, ‘San Felipe’, and ‘VC1-68’ were selected as rootstock treatments for grafting. In addition, the experimental materials for the grafted young ‘Pawnee’ tree treatments included the pressure-volume technique (PV technique) and cutting shoot transpiration methods to plot the PV and the cutting shoot transpiration curves, and the parameters calculated from the two curves were used to analyze the data produced by the subordinate function and cluster dendrogram methods. The results revealed that the different seedling rootstock treatments influenced the ‘Pawnee’ grafted trees to varying degrees on aspects of drought resistance, the ability to save water, the modulation of osmosis, and the sensitivity of the stomatal response. The order of drought tolerance for these different pecan seedling rootstock treatments from high to low was as follows: ‘Posey’, ‘Peruque’, ‘Riverside’, ‘87MX5-1.7’, ‘VC1-68’, ‘Elliott’, ‘87MX1-2.2’, ‘San Felipe’, ‘Moore’, ‘Major’, ‘Giles’, and ‘Frutoso’.

Short Communication: Investigation of leaf architectural patterns: Implications in delineating taxonomically controversial Hoya merrillii Schlechter and Hoya quinquenervia Warburg

Paguntalan DP, Buot JrIE. 2019. Short Communication: Investigation of leaf architectural patterns: Implications in delineating taxonomically controversial Hoya merrillii Schlechter and Hoya quinquenervia Warburg. Biodiversitas 20: 833-839. Variations in leaf traits of two very likely similar plants, Hoya merrillii Schlechter and Hoya quinquenervia Warburg were examined together with an outgroup, Hoya cagayanensis Burton. The objectives of the study are to examine the leaf architectural characteristics of Hoya merrillii and Hoya quinquenervia and use the information as an additional basis of delineation between the said species of Hoya plants. Thirty leaf samples for each species were examined for laminal and vein characters. The characters laminar size, laminar shape, number of basal veins, quinternary vein fabric, areole development and characteristics of FEVs (free-ending veins), were well-defined from either one or both species. Overall, the results showed variability between the studied plant groups using univariate and multivariate analysis. The data ordination on the morphometric traits using PCOa showed distinct groupings among studied leaf samples and yielded consistent results with the single linkage or nearest neighbor cluster dendrogram which showed distinct clustering of individual species in terms of morphometric traits that were considered in the study. Detected variations of the leaf architectural traits on the leaves of Hoya merrillii Schlechter and Hoya quinquenervia Warburg allowed for the more available basis of separation in addition to established floral morphologies that are primarily used as criteria for delineation between species. Variations in leaf architecture characters can be of great value to illustrate or imply meanings in the taxonomic relationships of the Hoya species studied.

VizTract: Visualization of Complex Social Networks for Easy User Perception

Social networking platforms connect people from all around the world. Because of their user-friendliness and easy accessibility, their traffic is increasing drastically. Such active participation has caught the attention of many research groups that are focusing on understanding human behavior to study the dynamics of these social networks. Oftentimes, perceiving these networks is hard, mainly due to either the large size of the data involved or the ineffective use of visualization strategies. This work introduces VizTract to ease the visual perception of complex social networks. VizTract is a two-level graph abstraction visualization tool that is designed to visualize both hierarchical and adjacency information in a tree structure. We use the Facebook dataset from the Social Network Analysis Project from Stanford University. On this data, social groups are referred as circles, social network users as nodes, and interactions as edges between the nodes. Our approach is to present a visual overview that represents the interactions between circles, then let the user navigate this overview and select the nodes in the circles to obtain more information on demand. VizTract aim to reduce visual clutter without any loss of information during visualization. VizTract enhances the visual perception of complex social networks to help better understand the dynamics of the network structure. VizTract within a single frame not only reduces the complexity but also avoids redundancy of the nodes and the rendering time. The visualization techniques used in VizTract are the force-directed layout, circle packing, cluster dendrogram, and hierarchical edge bundling. Furthermore, to enhance the visual information perception, VizTract provides interaction techniques such as selection, path highlight, mouse-hover, and bundling strength. This method helps social network researchers to display large networks in a visually effective way that is conducive to ease interpretation and analysis. We conduct a study to evaluate the user experience of the system and then collect information about their perception via a survey. The goal of the study is to know how humans can interpret the network when visualized using different visualization methods. Our results indicate that users heavily prefer those visualization techniques that aggregate the information and the connectivity within a given space, such as hierarchical edge bundling.

A study on social big data analysis using text clustering

Background/Objectives: As the use of big data increases in various fields, the use of social big data analysis for social media is increasing rapidly.This study proposed a method to apply text clustering for analysis by related topics of texts extracted using text mining of social big data.Methods/Statistical analysis: R was used for data collection and analysis, and social big data was collected from Twitter. The clustering model applicable to the related subject analysis of Twitter text was compared and selected and text clustering was performed. Text clustering is analyzed through a cluster dendrogram by generating a corpus, then grouping similar entities from the term-document matrix, and removing the sparse words.Findings: In this study, text clustering improves the difficulty in analyzing by word association and subject in text mining methods such as word cloud. Especially, in the text clustering model for the related topic analysis of social big data, the hierarchical clustering model based on the cosine similarity was more suitable than the non-hierarchical model for identifying which terms in the tweet have an association with each other. In addition, cluster dendrogram has been found to be effective in analyzing text contexts by grouping several groups of similar texts repeatedly in the visualization process.Improvements/Applications: This study can be used to confirm ideas and opinions of various participants by using Social Big Data, and to analyze more precisely the complex relationship between the prediction of social problems and the phenomenon.