In the last decade, rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum L., Sapindaceae) and pulasan (N. mutabile Blume) have been cultivated in Honduras to produce exotic fruits for export to North America (2). Recently, a disease was observed that produces dark brown to black fissured cankers from 1 to 3 cm long and 1 to 4 cm wide. The infected bark tissue becomes swollen with the middle region 3 to 8 mm thick. Symptoms appear when the trees are approximately 3 years old. As the trees mature, the cankers increase in size and weaken the branches, often resulting in breakage with the weight of the fruit causing substantial plant damage and fruit loss. In August 2010, fissured branch samples of rambutan and pulasan were collected from 6- to 8-year-old trees from the Humid Tropical Demonstrative Agroforestry Center in Honduras, Atlantida, La Masica (15°33'47.4″N, 87°05'2.5″W, elevation 106 m). A fungus associated with the cankers was identified as Dolabra nepheliae. It produces black, stipitate, elongate ascomata, 312 to 482 × 250 to 281 μm with broadly cylindric, bitunicate asci, 120 to 138 × 11.2 to 15.0 μm, and filiform, hyaline ascospores, 128 to 135 × 2.8 to 3.2 μm. Fungi from rambutan and pulasan were isolated on cornmeal agar plus 0.5% dextrose and antibiotics. On potato dextrose agar, the ascospores produced slow-growing colonies, 5 mm per week. In culture, isolates from both hosts produced pycnidia with elongated, slightly to strongly curved or S-shaped, hyaline conidia, 22.8 to 46.4 × 2.8 to 3.7 μm. This fungus was first reported on rambutan and pulasan from Malaysia (1,4), and later reported on rambutan and litchi in Hawaii and Puerto Rico (3). To our knowledge, this is the first report of D. nepheliae on pulasan and rambutan from Honduras. Specimens have been deposited at the U.S. National Fungus Collections (BPI 882442 on N. lappaceum and BPI 882443 on N. mutabile). Cultures were deposited at the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures (CBS) as CBS 131490 on N. lappaceum and CBS 131491 on N. mutabile. Sequences of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region including ITS1, 5.8S, and ITS2 intergenic spacers were deposited in GenBank (Accession No. JQ004281 on N. lappaceum and Accession No. JQ004280 on N. mutabile). A BLAST search and pairwise comparison using the GenBank web server were used to compare ITS sequence data and recovered the following results: (i) CBS 131490 on N. lappaceum is 99% (538 of 544) identical to D. nepheliae CBS 123297 on Litchi chinensis from Puerto Rico; and (ii) CBS 131491 on N. mutabile is 99% (527 of 533) identical to the same strain of D. nepheliae. On the basis of the ITS sequence data, the isolates from Honduras were confirmed as the same species, D. nepheliae from Puerto Rico. Efforts to develop resistant germplasm and management strategies to control this disease have been initiated. References: (1) C. Booth and W. P. Ting. Trans. Brit. Mycol. Soc. 47:235, 1964. (2) T. Ramírez et al. Manual Para el Cultivo de Rambutan en Honduras. Fundación Hondureña de Investigación Agrícola. La Lima, Cortes, Honduras, 2003. (3) A. Y. Rossman et al. Plant Dis. 91:1685, 2007. (4) H. Zalasky et al. Can. J. Bot. 49:559, 1971.
There is no consensus regarding the classification of optic neuritis, and precise diagnostic criteria are not available. This reality means that the diagnosis of disorders that have optic neuritis as the first manifestation can be challenging. Accurate diagnosis of optic neuritis at presentation can facilitate the timely treatment of individuals with multiple sclerosis, neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, or myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody-associated disease. Epidemiological data show that, cumulatively, optic neuritis is most frequently caused by many conditions other than multiple sclerosis. Worldwide, the cause and management of optic neuritis varies with geographical location, treatment availability, and ethnic background. We have developed diagnostic criteria for optic neuritis and a classification of optic neuritis subgroups. Our diagnostic criteria are based on clinical features that permit a diagnosis of possible optic neuritis; further paraclinical tests, utilising brain, orbital, and retinal imaging, together with antibody and other protein biomarker data, can lead to a diagnosis of definite optic neuritis. Paraclinical tests can also be applied retrospectively on stored samples and historical brain or retinal scans, which will be useful for future validation studies. Our criteria have the potential to reduce the risk of misdiagnosis, provide information on optic neuritis disease course that can guide future treatment trial design, and enable physicians to judge the likelihood of a need for long-term pharmacological management, which might differ according to optic neuritis subgroups.
The first evidence for the Higgs boson decay to a Z boson and a photon is presented, with a statistical significance of 3.4 standard deviations. The result is derived from a combined analysis of the searches performed by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations with proton-proton collision datasets collected at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from 2015 to 2018. These correspond to integrated luminosities of around 140 fb^{-1} for each experiment, at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The measured signal yield is 2.2±0.7 times the standard model prediction, and agrees with the theoretical expectation within 1.9 standard deviations.
A combination of fifteen top quark mass measurements performed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC is presented. The datasets used correspond to an integrated luminosity of up to 5 and 20 fb^{-1} of proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV, respectively. The combination includes measurements in top quark pair events that exploit both the semileptonic and hadronic decays of the top quark, and a measurement using events enriched in single top quark production via the electroweak t channel. The combination accounts for the correlations between measurements and achieves an improvement in the total uncertainty of 31% relative to the most precise input measurement. The result is m_{t}=172.52±0.14(stat)±0.30(syst) GeV, with a total uncertainty of 0.33 GeV.