In an experiment that directly manipulated grassland plant species richness and composition, decreased plant species richness (“diversity”) increased pathogen load (the percentage of leaf area infected by species‐specific foliar pathogens across the plant community) in 1998. Pathogen load was almost three times greater in the average monoculture than in the average plot planted with 24 grassland plant species, an approximately natural diversity. Eleven individual diseases increased in severity (percentage of leaf area infected by a single disease) at lower plant species richness, and severity of only one disease was positively correlated with diversity. For 10 of the 11 diseases whose severity was negatively related to diversity, disease severity was positively correlated with host abundance, and in six of these cases, species diversity had no effect on disease severity after controlling for the effects of host abundance. These results suggest that increased abundances of individual host species at lower species diversity increased disease transmission and severity. In 1996 and 1997, similar results for a smaller number of diseases sampled were found in this experiment and another similar one. Although the effect of diversity on disease was highly significant, considerable variance in pathogen load remained among plots of a given diversity level. Much of this residual variance was explained by community characteristics that were a function of the species composition of the communities (the identity of species present vs. those lost). Specifically, communities that lost less disease‐prone species had higher pathogen loads; this effect explained more variance in pathogen load than did diversity. Also, communities that lost the species dominant at high diversity had higher pathogen loads, presumably because relaxed competition allowed greater increases in host abundances, but this effect was weak. Among plant species, disease proneness appeared to be determined more by regional than local processes, because it was better correlated with frequency of the plant species' populations across the region than with local abundance or frequency across the state. In total, our results support the hypothesis that decreased species diversity will increase foliar pathogen load if this increases host abundance and, therefore, disease transmission. Additionally, changes in community characteristics determined by species composition will strongly influence pathogen load.

Several hypotheses proposed to explain the success of introduced species focus on altered interspecific interactions. One of the most prominent, the Enemy Release Hypothesis, posits that invading species benefit compared to their native counterparts if they lose their herbivores and pathogens during the invasion process. We previously reported on a common garden experiment (from 2002) in which we compared levels of herbivory between 30 taxonomically paired native and introduced old-field plants. In this phylogenetically controlled comparison, herbivore damage tended to be higher on introduced than on native plants. This striking pattern, the opposite of current theory, prompted us to further investigate herbivory and several other interspecific interactions in a series of linked experiments with the same set of species. Here we show that, in these new experiments, introduced plants, on average, received less insect herbivory and were subject to half the negative soil microbial feedback compared to natives; attack by fungal and viral pathogens also tended to be reduced on introduced plants compared to natives. Although plant traits (foliar C:N, toughness, and water content) suggested that introduced species should be less resistant to generalist consumers, they were not consistently more heavily attacked. Finally, we used meta-analysis to combine data from this study with results from our previous work to show that escape generally was inconsistent among guilds of enemies: there were few instances in which escape from multiple guilds occurred for a taxonomic pair, and more cases in which the patterns of escape from different enemies canceled out. Our examination of multiple interspecific interactions demonstrates that escape from one guild of enemies does not necessarily imply escape from other guilds. Because the effects of each guild are likely to vary through space and time, the net effect of all enemies is also likely to be variable. The net effect of these interactions may create ''invasion opportunity windows'': times when introduced species make advances in native communities.

The ) is the longest period of the Paleozoic, which was characterized by a peak of greenhouse climate in Earth history, as well as extreme high sea level (Haq and Schutter, 2008;Munnecke et al., 2010), with warm and humid conditions in early-middle period and seawater temperature up to 45°C (Trotter et al., 2008). The carbon cycle fluctuated greatly (Melchin et al., 2013;Cramer et al., 2015) and atmospheric CO 2 concentrations reached ~4200 ppm. During the

Residual host cell proteins (HCPs) in biopharmaceuticals derived from recombinant DNA technology can present potential safety risks to patients or compromise product stability. Thus, the downstream purification process is designed to demonstrate robust removal of these impurities. ELISA using polyclonal anti-HCP antibodies as reagents for capture, detection, and quantitation purposes is most commonly used to monitor HCP removal during process development, but this technique has limitations. More recently, LC-MS for residual HCP characterization has emerged as a powerful tool to support purification process development. However, mass spectrometry needs to overcome the enormous dynamic range to detect low ppm levels of residual HCPs in biopharmaceutical samples. We describe a simple and powerful methodology to characterize residual HCPs in (monoclonal) antibodies by combining a novel sample preparation procedure using trypsin digestion and a shotgun proteomics approach. Differing from the traditional methodology, the sample preparation approach maintains nearly intact antibody while HCPs are digested. Thus, the dynamic range for HCP detection by MS is 1 to 2 orders of magnitude less than the traditional trypsin digestion sample preparation procedure. HCP spiking experiments demonstrated that our method could detect 0.5 ppm of HCP with molecular weight >60 kDa, such as rPLBL2. Application of our method to analyze a high-purity NIST monoclonal antibody standard RM 8670 derived from a murine cell line expression system resulted in detection of 60 mouse HCPs; twice as many as previously reported with 2D-UPLC/IM/MS method. A control monoclonal antibody used for 70 analyses over 450 days demonstrated that our method is robust.

Biological invasions cause billions of dollars in economic damage each year and are a serious threat to native biodiversity. Introduced animals and plants may escape 75% or more of the parasite and pathogen species from their native range. While they do accumulate novel parasite species from their new location, this number is generally only a fraction of the number lost. Individual plants and animals are also generally less frequently infected (prevalence minus percent individuals infected) in introduced compared to native conspecific populations. In conjunction with other biological and physical factors, release from parasites helps explain the increased demographic performance of invasive species, potentially accounting for much of the damage they cause.