A Blog Around The Clock

Last week's crop of PLoS ONE articles enjoyed quite a nice buzz in the media and on the blogs. But today is a new week, and we start, as always with new articles in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology - here are some of the article that caught my attention:

Could an Open-Source Clinical Trial Data-Management System Be What We Have All Been Looking For:

In Europe, it is a legal requirement to conduct clinical trials in accordance with the International Conference on Harmonisation's guidelines on good clinical practice (see http://www.ich.org/). A recent editorial reported that this directive has led to a decline in the number of trials being conducted by independent academic groups [1]. One possible reason for this is that reporting and documentation requirements are now so burdensome that the process has become unnecessarily complicated [2]. This is rather ironic, given that well-designed clinical trials should be amenable to very simple data handling and analysis [3]. Indeed the flowchart established by the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) statement [4] for carrying out a properly randomised controlled trial has just four steps, which supports the approach of keeping it simple.

Effects of Selection for Honey Bee Worker Reproduction on Foraging Traits:

In social insects, the evolution of the worker caste and the regulation of reproductive behaviour by workers are poorly understood. Evolution is conservative and often proceeds by adapting an existing gene network to a new function. The "reproductive ground plan" hypothesis (RGPH) suggests that social insects evolved their queen and worker castes by modifying a gene network that once regulated the foraging and reproductive phases of solitary ancestors. In this model, queens retain characteristics of insects in their reproductive phase, whereas workers retain characteristics of the foraging phase. Moreover, the foraging behaviour of workers may also be regulated by the same genes that once controlled the switch between foraging and feeding young in the nest. We evaluated the RGPH by studying a line of honey bees selected for high rates of worker reproduction. We show that in this line workers forage late in life and some may never forage, supporting the idea that genes related to reproduction are also related to foraging. However, we found no support for recent suggestions that genes related to reproduction also regulate the foraging behaviour of individual workers: once they start foraging, our highly reproductive workers forage in the same way that unselected workers do.

Assessing Evidence for a Pervasive Alteration in Tropical Tree Communities:

Recent studies have reported major changes in mature tropical forests, with increases in both forest biomass and net primary productivity, as well as shifts in plant species composition that favour fast-growing species over slow-growing ones. These pervasive alterations were attributed to global environmental change, and may result in dramatic shifts in the functioning of tropical forest ecosystems. We reassessed these findings using a dataset of large permanent forest plots on three continents. We found that tree biomass increased at seven of our ten plots, and showed a large decrease at a single plot. Overall, this increase was significant, albeit lower than reported previously for Amazonian forests. At three sites for which we had data for multiple census intervals, we found no concerted increase in biomass gain, in conflict with the increased productivity hypothesis. With the exception of one plot, slow-growing species gained more biomass than either fast-growing species or the tree community as a whole. Hence, our results do not support the hypothesis that fast-growing species are consistently increasing in dominance in tropical tree communities. Overall, our results suggest that our plots may be simultaneously recovering from past disturbances and affected by changes in resource availability.