In order to quantify and monitor the spatio-temporal growth of urban areas, remote sensing data and GIS techniques are getting attention for its unparallel utility by the city planners as well as decision makers. The present study aims to analyse the rapid increase of built-up area in Dehradun city, the capital of Uttarakhand, India. The study uses multi-temporal Landsat images to monitor the pattern of urban growth of Dehradun. To classify coarse satellite data the traditional supervised and unsupervised techniques are not very useful because of mixed pixels in the classified data and poor accuracy. In this situation linear spectral unmixing (LSU) is a very useful classification technique because it classifies land use land cover classes by estimating the fractional values of each class. The study shows that built-up area of the city has grown about 20 per cent during 2000–2010 which is also identical with the population growth of Dehradun when compared with the Census of India data. The accuracy of Landsat based LSU model was assessed using high resolution LISS IV data and the RMSE was 0.07 and 0.11 respectively for vegetation and built-up fraction classes. It is seen that built-up area in the Kaulagarh, Kargi, Deep Nagar, Indirapuram and Kawli wards of Dehradun city have experienced more than 30% increase mainly in the South and South-West part of the city. The multi-temporal, multi-scale maps of the Dehradun city generated from remote satellite data will be very useful for planning both at micro- and macro-levels and further to identify the potential areas for urban expansion and future planning keeping in view protecting the urban green landscape of the Himalayan city of Dehradun.

Studies in soil meiofauna with traditional methods are highly laborious and identification exclusively by means of morphological traits usually underestimates species richness. Although the mitochondrial DNA Cytochrome c Oxidase subunit I gene (COI, CO1, cox1, coxI) has been proposed as a standard DNA barcode for animals, nuclear ribosomal DNA markers such as Large Subunit (LSU, 28S) and Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) have proven efficient to distinguish among species of animals, eukaryotic microbes and plants. The COI and LSU markers discriminate among closely related species of Collembola, but the efficiency of ITS2 has never been tested. We evaluated the relative performance of these three markers for DNA barcoding of Collembola. All three markers proved highly efficient in discriminating species, but LSU exhibited very low differences among certain closely related species. We conclude that ITS2 may serve as an alternative barcode to identify Collembola and has a potential to be used for metabarcoding analyses.

No political leader is more closely identified with Louisiana State University than the flamboyant governor and U.S. senator Huey P. Long, who devoted his last years to turning a small, undistinguished state school into an academic and football powerhouse. From 1931, when Long declared himself the “official thief” for LSU, to his death in 1935, the school’s budget mushroomed, its physical plant burgeoned, its faculty flourished, and its enrollment tripled. Along with improving LSU’s academic reputation, Long believed the school’s football program and band were crucial to its success. Taking an intense interest in the team, Long delivered pregame and halftime pep talks, devised plays, stalked the sidelines during games, and fired two coaches. He poured money into a larger, flashier band, supervised the hiring of two directors, and, with the second one, wrote a new fight song, “Touchdown for LSU.” While he rarely meddled in academic affairs, Long insisted that no faculty member criticize him publicly. When students or faculty from “his school” opposed him, retribution was swift. Long’s support for LSU did not come without consequences. His unrelenting involvement almost cost the university its accreditation. And after his death, several of his allies—including his handpicked university president—went to prison in a scandal that almost destroyed LSU. Rollicking and revealing, Robert Mann’s Kingfish U is the definitive story of Long’s embrace of LSU.

An insertion of one or two amino acids at the monomer–monomer junctions of polyubiquitin is a distinct and highly conserved molecular character that is shared by two very diverse clades of microeukaryotes, the Cercozoa and the Foraminifera. It has been suggested that an insertion consisting of one amino acid, like that found in foraminiferans and some cercozoans, represents an ancestral state, and an insertion consisting of two amino acids represents a derived state. However, the limited number of cercozoan taxa examined so far limits inferences about the number and frequency of state changes associated with this character over deep evolutionary time. Cercozoa include a very diverse assemblage of mainly uncultivated amoeboflagellates, and their tenuous phylogenetic interrelationships have been based largely on small subunit (SSU) rDNA sequences. Because concatenated datasets consisting of both SSU and large subunit (LSU) rDNA sequences have been shown to more robustly recover the phylogenetic relationships of other major groups of eukaryotes, we employed a similar approach for the Cercozoa. In order to reconstruct the evolutionary history of this group, we amplified twelve LSU rDNAs, three SSU rDNAs, and seven polyubiquitin sequences from several different cercozoans, especially uncultured taxa isolated from marine benthic habitats. The distribution of single amino acid insertions and double amino acid insertions on the phylogenetic trees inferred from the concatenated dataset indicates that the gain and loss of amino acid residues between polyubiquitin monomers occurred several times independently. Nonetheless, all of the cercozoans we examined possessed at least one amino acid insertion between the polyubiquitin monomers, which reinforced the significance of this feature as a molecular signature for identifying members of the Cercozoa and the Foraminifera. Our study also showed that analyses combining both SSU and LSU rDNA sequences leads to improved phylogenetic resolution and statistical support for deeper branches within the Cercozoa.

The order Gymnodiniales comprises unarmoured dinoflagellates. However, the lack of sequences hindered determining the phylogenetic positions and systematic relationships of several gymnodinioid taxa. In this study, a monophyletic clade was defined for the species Ceratoperidinium margalefii Loeblich III, Gyrodinium falcatum Kofoid & Swezy, three Cochlodinium species, and two Gymnodinium-like dinoflagellates. Despite their substantial morphotypic differentiation, Cochlodinium cf. helix, G. falcatum and ‘Gymnodinium’ sp. 1 share a common shape of the acrobase. The phylogenetic data led to the following conclusions: (1) C. margalefii is closely related to several unarmoured dinoflagellates. Its sulcus shape has been observed for the first time. (2) G. falcatum was erroneously assigned to the genus Gyrodinium and is transferred to Ceratoperidinium (C. falcatum (Kofoid & Swezy) Reñé & de Salas comb. nov.). (3) The genus Cochlodinium is polyphyletic and thus artificial; our data support its separation into three different genera. (4) The two Gymnodinium-like species could not be morphologically or phylogenetically related to any other gymnodinioid species sequenced to date. While not all studied species have been definitively transferred to the correct genus, our study is a step forward in the classification of inconspicuous unarmoured dinoflagellates. The family Ceratoperidiniaeceae and the genus Ceratoperidinium are emended.

Several populations of Peridinium lomnickii were examined by SEM and serial section TEM. Comparison with typical Peridinium, Peridiniopsis, Palatinus and Scrippsiella species revealed significant structural differences, congruent with phylogenetic hypotheses derived from partial LSU rDNA sequences. Chimonodinium gen. nov. is described as a new genus of peridinioids, characterized by the Kofoidian plate formula Po, cp, x, 4′, 3a, 7′′, 6c, 5 s, 5′′′, 2′′′′, the absence of pyrenoids, the presence of a microtubular basket with four or five overlapping rows of microtubules associated with a small peduncle, a pusular system with well-defined pusular tubes connected to the flagellar canals, and the production of non-calcareous cysts. Serial section examination of Scrippsiella trochoidea, here taken to represent typical Scrippsiella characters, revealed no peduncle and no associated microtubular strands. The molecular phylogeny placed C. lomnickii comb. nov. as a sister group to a clade composed of Thoracosphaera and the pfiesteriaceans. Whereas the lack of information on fine structure of the swimming stage of Thoracosphaera leaves its affinities unexplained, C. lomnickii shares with the pfiesteriaceans the presence of a microtubular basket and the unusual connection between two plates on the left side of the sulcus, involving extra-cytoplasmic fibres.