Contaminants as viral cofactors: assessing indirect population effects

Assessing natural direct and indirect effects through multiple pathways.

Within the fields of epidemiology, interventions research and social sciences researchers are often faced with the challenge of decomposing the effect of an exposure into different causal pathways working through defined mediator variables. The goal of such analyses is often to understand the mechanisms of the system or to suggest possible interventions. The case of a single mediator, thus impl...

Indirect effects of primary prey population dynamics on alternative prey.

We develop a theory of generalist predation showing how alternative prey species are affected by changes in both mean abundance and variability (coefficient of variation) of their predator's primary prey. The theory is motivated by the indirect effects of cyclic rodent populations on ground-breeding birds, and developed through progressive analytic simplifications of an empirically-based model....

Long Polyamines Act as Cofactors in PIP

Phosphatidylinosital-4,5-bisphosphate (PIP 2 ) acts as an essential factor regulating the activity of all Kir channels. In most Kir members, the dependence on PIP 2 is modulated by other factors, such as protein kinases (in Kir1), G (in Kir3), and the sulfonylurea receptor (in Kir6). So far, however, no regulator has been identified in Kir2 channels. Here we show that polyamines, which cause in...

Viral contaminants of molluscan shellfish: detection and characterisation

Multimedia persistence as an indicator of potential for population-level intake of environmental contaminants.

Although intuitively it is apparent that population-level exposure to contaminants dispersed in the environment must be related to the persistence of the contaminant, there has been little effort to quantify this link formally. In this paper we investigate the relationship between overall persistence and/or overall residence time in a multimedia exposure environment and the population-level int...