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A selection of new content on F1000Research from the past week. To receive notification of all new articles, sign up for our table of contents alerts.

Featured article:

Ecological implications of reduced pollen supply in the alpine: a case study using a dominant cushion plant species

Anya Reid, Robyn Hooper, Olivia Molenda, Christopher J. Lortie

Changes in temperature and precipitation in alpine and arctic ecosystems can have a negative impact on the biodiversity and distribution of plants.

Global warming may lead to reduced pollination rates due to a mismatch between pollinator emergence and plant flowering times. This is particularly pronounced in alpine and polar environments that have experienced a more rapid increase in the annual temperature due to climate change than the global average.

In this study, Christopher Lortie from York University in Canada investigated how reduced pollen supply affects the reproduction of self-compatible versus self-incompatible plants of the cushion plant Silene acaulis. The authors report that female plants are more sensitive than hermaphrodites to reduced pollen conditions, and that in such stressful conditions, the abundance of beneficiary plant species on these cushions positively relates to the percent fruit-set of S acaulis.

This study highlights how loss of alpine plant species may have a significant negative impact on pollinator communities, and helps understand the outcome of plant-pollinator interactions in future climate change scenarios.

Image courtesy by Jerzy Opioła (Own work) [GFDL (https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Other newly indexed articles:

WikiPathways App for Cytoscape: Making biological pathways amenable to network analysis and visualization [v1; ref status: indexed, https://f1000r.es/3ij]
Martina Kutmon, Samad Lotia, Chris T Evelo, Alexander R Pico

Density but not climate affects the population growth rate of guanacos (Lama guanicoe) (Artiodactyla, Camelidae) [v2; ref status: indexed, https://f1000r.es/3h1]
María Zubillaga, Oscar Skewes, Nicolás Soto, Jorge E Rabinovich

Immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry identify non-cell autonomous Otx2 homeoprotein in the granular and supragranular layers of mouse visual cortex [v1; ref status: indexed, https://f1000r.es/40d]
Namsuk Kim, Dario Acampora, Florent Dingli, Damarys Loew, Antonio Simeone, Alain Prochiantz, Ariel A. Di Nardo

Newly published:

Important considerations for microRNA extraction methods from whole blood and peripheral blood mononuclear cells [v1; ref status: awaiting peer review, https://f1000r.es/40u]
Sadaf Atarod, Hannah Smith, Anne Dickinson, Xiao-Nong Wang

There were many newly indexed and newly published articles this week! Make sure to subscribe to the table of contents alert emails to keep up with everything.