Cryptomarkets are online marketplaces that are part of the Dark Web and mainly devoted to the sale of illicit drugs. They combine tools to ensure anonymity of participants with the delivery of products by mail to enable the development of illicit drug trafficking. Using data collected on eight cryptomarkets, this study provides an overview of the Canadian illicit drug market. It seeks to inform about the most prevalent illicit drugs vendors offer for sale and preferred destination countries. Moreover, the research gives an insight into the structure and organisation of distribution networks existing online. In particular, we provide information about how vendors are diversifying and replicating across marketplaces. We inform on the number of listings each vendor manages, the number of cryptomarkets they are active on and the products they offer. This research demonstrates the importance of online marketplaces in the context of illicit drug trafficking. It shows how the analysis of data available online may elicit knowledge on criminal activities. Such knowledge is mandatory to design efficient policy for monitoring or repressive purposes against anonymous marketplaces. Nevertheless, trafficking on Dark Net markets is difficult to analyse based only on digital data. A more holistic approach for investigating this crime problem should be developed. This should rely on a combined use and interpretation of digital and physical data within a single collaborative intelligence model.

SUMMARYFungi of the Pucciniales order cause rust diseases which, altogether, affect thousands of plant species worldwide and pose a major threat to several crops. How rust effectors-virulence proteins delivered into infected tissues to modulate host functionscontribute to pathogen virulence remains poorly understood. Melampsora larici-populina is a devastating and widespread rust pathogen of poplar, and its genome encodes 1184 identified small secreted proteins that could potentially act as effectors. Here, following specific criteria, we selected 16 candidate effector proteins and characterized their virulence activities and subcellular localizations in the leaf cells of Arabidopsis thaliana. Infection assays using bacterial (Pseudomonas syringae) and oomycete (Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis) pathogens revealed subsets of candidate effectors that enhanced or decreased pathogen leaf colonization. Confocal imaging of green fluorescent protein-tagged candidate effectors constitutively expressed in stable transgenic plants revealed that some protein fusions specifically accumulate in nuclei, chloroplasts, plasmodesmata and punctate cytosolic structures. Altogether, our analysis suggests that rust fungal candidate effectors target distinct cellular components in host cells to promote parasitic growth.

Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. has emerged as the dominant plant species used in molecular genetics and functional genomics. Although it possesses several attributes of model organisms, the ease with which it can be transformed genetically is a paramount factor that has led to its widespread application as a tool for functional genomics. Progress made in the late 1990s has relieved users of the need to use a vacuum chamber for transformation, substituting its function with a surfactant known as Silwet L-77, to facilitate access to ovules by bacterial solution. Here, we evaluate the substitution of Silwet L-77 by XIAMETER OFX-0309. We demonstrate that transformation efficiency can be increased by an average of 3-fold (and up to 10-fold) solely by replacing Silwet L-77 with XIAMETER OFX-0309. Because downstream selection of transgenic plants, in either soil or Petri dishes, can be long and tedious, this substitution represents a significant reduction of time and materials required to retrieve transgenic lines.

Ce travail a reçu le soutien de FQRSC-Regroupement stratégique sous la subvention 2012-RG-144343.

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