Search

Sequencing of a recently identified isolate of Soil-borne wheat mosaic virus (SBWMV) from the UK confirmed its identity as a European strain of the species and provided further evidence for taxonomic divisions in the group. Two RT–PCR protocols were developed for the detection of all SBWMV strains and for the specific detection of the European SBWMV strain, and were tested successfully on 21 isolates of SBWMV from a range of countries. Both protocols worked well using either purified total RNA in one- or two-step RT-PCR, or immunocapture (IC) RT–PCR. The sensitivity of IC RT-PCR was 100 times greater than ELISA. Neither set of primers produced any PCR product with either Wheat spindle streak mosaic virus or Wheat yellow mosaic virus which are frequently associated with SBWMV, or with the related viruses Indian peanut clump virus, Potato mop-top virus, Beet soil-borne virus and Beet necrotic yellow vein virus. This new diagnostic protocol will improve disease management by enabling correct identification of the causal pathogen and earlier detection than is possible serologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale networks of human interaction, in particular country-wide telephone call networks, can be used to redraw geographical maps by applying algorithms of topological community detection. The geographic projections of the emerging areas in a few recent studies on single regions have been suggested to share two distinct properties: first, they are cohesive, and second, they tend to closely follow socio-economic boundaries and are similar to existing political regions in size and number. Here we use an extended set of countries and clustering indices to quantify overlaps, providing ample additional evidence for these observations using phone data from countries of various scales across Europe, Asia, and Africa: France, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Ivory Coast. In our analysis we use the known approach of partitioning country-wide networks, and an additional iterative partitioning of each of the first level communities into sub-communities, revealing that cohesiveness and matching of official regions can also be observed on a second level if spatial resolution of the data is high enough. The method has possible policy implications on the definition of the borderlines and sizes of administrative regions.