Australian National University

About: Australian National University is a education organization based out in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Galaxy. The organization has 34419 authors who have published 109261 publications receiving 4315448 citations. The organization is also known as: The Australian National University & ANU.

Environmental and physiological determinants of carbon isotope discrimination in terrestrial plants

Abstract: Summary Stable carbon isotope ratios (d 13 C) of terrestrial plants are employed across a diverse range of applicationsinenvironmentalandplantsciences;however,thekindofinformationthatisdesired fromthed 13 Csignaloftendiffers.Attheextremes,itrangesbetweenpurely environmentaland purely biological. Here, we review environmental drivers of variation in carbon isotope discrimination (D) in terrestrial plants, and the biological processes that can either damp or amplifytheresponse.ForC3plants,whereDisprimarilycontrolledbytheratioofintercellularto ambient CO2 concentrations (ci/ca), coordination between stomatal conductance and photo- synthesisandleafareaadjustmenttendstoconstrainthepotentialenvironmentallydrivenrange of D. For C4 plants, variation in bundle-sheath leakiness to CO2 can either damp or amplify the effects of ci/ca on D. For plants with crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), D varies over a relatively largerange asafunctionoftheproportion ofdaytimetonight-time CO2fixation. This range can be substantially broadened by environmental effects onD when carbon uptake takes place primarily during the day. The effective use of D across its full range of applications will require a holistic view of the interplay between environmental control and physiological modulation of the environmental signal.

Invariance Matters: Exemplar Memory for Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification

Abstract: This paper considers the domain adaptive person re-identification (re-ID) problem: learning a re-ID model from a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain. Conventional methods are mainly to reduce feature distribution gap between the source and target domains. However, these studies largely neglect the intra-domain variations in the target domain, which contain critical factors influencing the testing performance on the target domain. In this work, we comprehensively investigate into the intra-domain variations of the target domain and propose to generalize the re-ID model w.r.t three types of the underlying invariance, i.e., exemplar-invariance, camera-invariance and neighborhood-invariance. To achieve this goal, an exemplar memory is introduced to store features of the target domain and accommodate the three invariance properties. The memory allows us to enforce the invariance constraints over global training batch without significantly increasing computation cost. Experiment demonstrates that the three invariance properties and the proposed memory are indispensable towards an effective domain adaptation system. Results on three re-ID domains show that our domain adaptation accuracy outperforms the state of the art by a large margin. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhunzhong07/ECN

Animal personality: what are behavioural ecologists measuring?

Abstract: The discovery that an individual may be constrained, and even behave sub-optimally, because of its personality type has fundamental implications for understanding individual- to group-level processes. Despite recent interest in the study of animal personalities within behavioural ecology, the field is fraught with conceptual and methodological difficulties inherent in any young discipline. We review the current agreement of definitions and methods used in personality studies across taxa and systems, and find that current methods risk misclassifying traits. Fortunately, these problems have been faced before by other similar fields during their infancy, affording important opportunities to learn from past mistakes. We review the tools that were developed to overcome similar methodological problems in psychology. These tools emphasise the importance of attempting to measure animal personality traits using multiple tests and the care that needs to be taken when interpreting correlations between personality traits or their tests. Accordingly, we suggest an integrative theoretical framework that incorporates these tools to facilitate a robust and unified approach in the study of animal personality.

The role of interleukin-6 in mucosal IgA antibody responses in vivo

Abstract: In mice with targeted disruption of the gene that encodes interleukin-6 (IL-6), greatly reduced numbers of immunoglobulin A (IgA)-producing cells were observed at mucosae and grossly deficient local antibody responses were recorded after mucosal challenge with either ovalbumin or vaccinia virus. The IgA response in the lungs was completely restored after intranasal infection with recombinant vaccinia viruses engineered to express IL-6. These findings demonstrate a critical role for IL-6 in vivo in the development of local IgA antibody responses and illustrate the effectiveness of vector-directed cytokine gene therapy.