A group of legumes generically known as brooms are among the most successful shrubs invading grasslands in South America and other regions. These species share a set of biological features that enhance their invasiveness, such as abundant and long-lasting seed banks, aggressive root systems and rapid growth, combined with their ability for re-sprouting after cutting or burning and for avoiding ...

BACKGROUND Collection technique is critical in the performance of the Papanicolaou (Pap) smear as an important screening tool for cervical cancer. While superior devices have been established, less effective devices continue to be used for both conventional and liquid-based Pap smears. Our aim is to determine the performance of collection devices currently used in obtaining conventional Pap sme...

In this issue of Cell, Panatier et al. (2006) show that D-serine released by astrocytes, a type of glial cell in the brain, promotes NMDA receptor activity at synapses in the hypothalamus. These results confirm that glial cells participate in synaptic signaling and show that they can dictate the tenor of synaptic plasticity.

The bacterial genus "Candidatus Phytoplasma" contains a group of insect-transmitted plant pathogens in the class Mollicutes. Here, we report a draft genome assembly and annotation of strain NCHU2014, which belongs to the 16SrII-A subgroup within this genus and is associated with purple coneflower witches' broom disease in Taiwan.

The eccentric connectivity index ξ is a distance–based molecular structure descriptor that was recently used for mathematical modeling of biological activities of diverse nature. We prove that the broom has maximum ξ among trees with a fixed maximum vertex degree, and characterize such trees with minimum ξ . In addition, we propose a simple linear algorithm for calculating ξ of trees.

The multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree (ML-MCTDH) method is discussed and a fully general implementation for any number of layers based on the recursive ML-MCTDH algorithm given by Manthe [J. Chem. Phys. 128, 164116 (2008)] is presented. The method is applied first to a generalized Henon-Heiles (HH) hamiltonian. For 6D HH the overhead of ML-MCTDH makes the method slower than M...