Yingchun Fu); zhezhu@usgs.gov (Zhe Zhu). ABSTRACT:Remote sensing has proven a useful way of evaluating long-term trends in vegetation -greenness‖ through the use of vegetation indices like Normalized Differences Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI). In particular, analyses of greenness trends have been performed for large areas (continents, for example) in an attempt to understand vegetation response to climate. These studies have been most often used coarse resolution sensors like Moderate Resolution Image Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR). However, trends in greenness are also important at more local scales, particularly in and around cities as vegetation offers a variety of valuable ecosystem services ranging from minimizing air pollution to mitigating urban heat island effects.To explore the ability to monitor greenness trends in and around cities, this paper presents a new way for analyzing greenness trends based on all available Landsat 5, 7, and 8 images and applies it to Guangzhou, China. This method is capable of including the effects of land cover change in the evaluation of greenness trends by separating the effects of abrupt and gradual changes, and providing information on the timing of greenness trends.An assessment of the consistency of surface reflectance from Landsat 8 with past Landsat sensors indicates biases in the visible bands of Landsat 8, especially the blue band. Landsat 8 NDVI values were found to have a larger bias than the EVI values; therefore, EVI was used in the analysis of greenness trends for Guangzhou. In spite of massive amounts of development in Guangzhou from 2000 to 2014, greenness was found to increase, mostly as a result of gradual change. Comparison of the greening magnitudes estimated from the approach presented here and a Simple Linear Trend (SLT) method indicated large differences for certain time intervals as the SLT method does not include consideration for abrupt land cover changes. Overall, this analysis demonstrates the importance of considering land cover change when analyzing trends in greenness from satellite time series in areas where land cover change is common.

The antifeedant, oviposition deterrent, and toxic effects of individual dialkoxybenzene compounds/sets and of hydroxy- or alkoxy-substituted allylbenzenes, obtained through Claisen rearrangement of substituted allyloxybenzenes, were assessed against the cabbage looper, Trichoplusia ni , in laboratory bioassays. Most of the compounds/sets strongly deterred larval feeding, with some exhibiting mild toxic and oviposition deterrent effects as well. Some of the compounds/sets were more active than the commercial insect repellent, DEET (N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide), as both feeding and oviposition deterrents against the cabbage looper. On the basis of the obtained oviposition data a general hypothesis was proposed regarding the oviposition sites: one binding mode with the alkyl and allyl groups on the same side of the benzene ring resulted in deterrence, the other with alkyl and allyl groups on opposite sides of the benzene ring resulted in stimulation. The results suggest some structure-activity relationships useful in improving the efficacy of the compounds and designing new, nontoxic insect control agents for agriculture.

The complexation with organoruthenium fragments confers 4-anilinoquinazoline pharmacophores with higher potential for inducing cellular apoptosis while the highly inhibitory activity of 4-anilinoquinazolines against EGFR and the reactivity of the ruthenium centre to 9-ethylguanine are well preserved.

Edited by Norma AllewellPolycystin complexes, or TRPP-PKD complexes, made of transient receptor potential channel polycystin (TRPP) and polycystic kidney disease (PKD) proteins, play key roles in coupling extracellular stimuli with intracellular Ca 2؉ signals. For example, the TRPP2-PKD1 complex has a crucial function in renal physiology, with mutations in either protein causing autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease. In contrast, the TRPP3-PKD1L3 complex responds to low pH and was proposed to be a sour taste receptor candidate. It has been shown previously that the protein partners interact via association of the C-terminal or transmembrane segments, with consequences for the assembly, surface expression, and function of the polycystin complexes. However, the roles of extracellular components, especially the loops that connect the transmembrane segments, in the assembly and function of the polycystin complex are largely unknown. Here, with an immunoprecipitation method, we found that extracellular loops between the first and second transmembrane segments of TRPP2 and TRPP3 associate with the extracellular loops between the sixth and seventh transmembrane segments of PKD1 and PKD1L3, respectively. Immunofluorescence and electrophysiology data further confirm that the associations between these loops are essential for the trafficking and function of the complexes. Interestingly, most of the extracellular loops are also found to be involved in homomeric assembly. Furthermore, autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease-associated TRPP2 mutant T448K significantly weakened TRPP2 homomeric assembly but had no obvious effect on TRPP2-PKD1 heteromeric assembly. Our results demonstrate a crucial role of these functionally underexplored extracellular loops in the assembly and function of the polycystin complexes.