Publications by authors named "Nicolas Barbier"

Stromal cells are found in all tissues of the body. Among them, lymphoid stromal cells (LSCs) correspond to the cell subsets found in secondary and tertiary lymphoid organs. LSC heterogeneity has been characterized in depth in mice based on cell-fate mapping, high-resolution imaging and single-cell RNAseq analysis, and more recently in humans despite the difficulty of accessing these rare cell populations.

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Background: Swine influenza A viruses (swIAV) are highly contagious zoonotic pathogens that cause an acute respiratory infection in pigs, presenting substantial economic and health risks for animals and farmers. This drives the pig industry and stakeholders in animal health to monitor swIAV in livestock. In the 10 years prior to the 2009 flu pandemic, H1N1 (HA-1C.

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Trees can differ enormously in their crown architectural traits, such as the scaling relationships between tree height, crown width and stem diameter. Yet despite the importance of crown architecture in shaping the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems, we lack a complete picture of what drives this incredible diversity in crown shapes. Using data from 374,888 globally distributed trees, we explore how climate, disturbance, competition, functional traits, and evolutionary history constrain the height and crown width scaling relationships of 1914 tree species.

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Bone marrow (BM) involvement is a common feature of germinal center-derived B-cell lymphomas and is associated with a poor prognosis. In particular, follicular lymphoma (FL) infiltrates the BM in 70% of cases, and analysis of in vitro-expanded FL BM mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) has revealed an extensive alteration of BM stromal cell phenotypic, transcriptomic, and functional profiles. However, the mechanisms underlying the direct interplay between lymphoma B cells and their permissive stromal niche in situ have not yet been identified.

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Whereas bovine has been demonstrated as the main reservoir of influenza D virus (IDV), this virus was first isolated in a pig and is regularly detected in some swine populations. However, the role of swine in IDV ecology, as well as the outcomes of IDV infection in pigs, is still unclear. This study aimed to provide additional information on pathogenesis, transmission, and adaptation of a bovine-origin IDV in swine.

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Background: Animals with key ecological roles, such as seed-dispersing fruit bats, rely to varying degrees on habitat structure to indicate the locations of resources and risks.

Methods: To understand how variation in vegetation structure influences fruit bat habitat selection, we related movement steps of hammer-headed bats (Hypsignathus monstrosus) to attributes of canopy height, vertical and horizontal vegetation structure, and habitat type in a mature rainforest of southern Cameroon. Vegetation structural metrics were measured with UAV-LiDAR at 10 m resolution for a 25 km study area.

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Lianas are important components of tropical forest diversity and dynamics, yet little is known about the drivers of their community structure and composition. Combining extensive field and LiDAR data, we investigated the influence of local topography, forest structure, and tree composition on liana community structure, and their floristic and functional composition, in a moist forest in northern Republic of Congo. We inventoried all lianas ≥ 1 cm in diameter in 144 20 × 20-m quadrats located in four 9-ha permanent plots, where trees and giant herbs were inventoried.

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Swine influenza A viruses (swIAVs) are a major cause of respiratory disease in pigs worldwide, presenting significant economic and health risks. These viruses can reassort, creating new strains with varying pathogenicity and cross-species transmissibility. This study aimed to monitor the genetic and antigenic evolution of swIAV in France from 2019 to 2022.

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Forest expansion into savanna is a pervasive phenomenon in West and Central Africa, warranting comparative studies under diverse environmental conditions. We collected vegetation data from the woody and grassy components within 73 plots of 0.16 ha distributed along a successional gradient from humid savanna to forest in Central Africa.

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Three-dimensional (3D) vegetation structure influences animal movements and, consequently, ecosystem functions. Animals disperse the seeds of 60%-90% of trees in tropical rainforests, which are among the most structurally complex ecosystems on Earth. Here, we investigated how 3D rainforest structure influences the movements of large, frugivorous birds and resulting spatial patterns of seed dispersal.

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Article Synopsis
  • Accurately mapping tropical forests' aboveground biomass (AGB) is essential for effective carbon emission reduction and understanding the carbon cycle, yet existing maps often show inconsistent estimates.
  • To overcome this issue, the study focuses on creating high-quality reference AGB datasets using field plots and airborne LiDAR data from underrepresented regions in Central Africa and South Asia.
  • These reference maps, with detailed uncertainty information, will help enhance the accuracy of future Earth Observation missions and improve AGB mapping reliability.
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Trees structure the Earth's most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge.

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Mature lymphoid stromal cells (LSCs) are key organizers of immune responses within secondary lymphoid organs. Similarly, inflammation-driven tertiary lymphoid structures depend on immunofibroblasts producing lymphoid cytokines and chemokines. Recent studies have explored the origin and heterogeneity of LSC/immunofibroblasts, yet the molecular and epigenetic mechanisms involved in their commitment are still unknown.

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Data capturing multiple axes of tree size and shape, such as a tree's stem diameter, height and crown size, underpin a wide range of ecological research-from developing and testing theory on forest structure and dynamics, to estimating forest carbon stocks and their uncertainties, and integrating remote sensing imagery into forest monitoring programmes. However, these data can be surprisingly hard to come by, particularly for certain regions of the world and for specific taxonomic groups, posing a real barrier to progress in these fields. To overcome this challenge, we developed the Tallo database, a collection of 498,838 georeferenced and taxonomically standardized records of individual trees for which stem diameter, height and/or crown radius have been measured.

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Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) and swine influenza A virus (swIAV) are major pathogens of the porcine respiratory disease complex, but little is known on their interaction in super-infected pigs. In this study, we investigated clinical, virological and immunological outcomes of successive infections with PRRSV-1 and H1N2 swIAV. Twenty-four specific pathogen-free piglets were distributed into four groups and inoculated either with PRRSV at study day (SD) 0, or with swIAV at SD8, or with PRRSV and swIAV one week apart at SD0 and SD8, respectively, or mock-inoculated.

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Modified-live vaccines (MLVs) against porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome viruses (PRRSVs) are usually administrated to piglets at weaning when swine influenza A virus (swIAV) infections frequently occur. SwIAV infection induces a strong interferon alpha (IFNa) response and IFNa was shown to abrogate PRRSV2 MLV replication and an inherent immune response. In this study, we evaluated the impacts of swIAV infection on the replication of a PRRSV1 MLV (MLV1), post-vaccine immune responses and post-challenge vaccine efficacy at both the systemic and pulmonary levels.

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Article Synopsis
  • Africa faces significant climate change and population growth that poses a threat to its rainforests, requiring better understanding of forest composition and their vulnerability to change.
  • Using a large dataset of 6 million trees, researchers modeled the distribution of dominant tree species in central Africa, revealing patterns in forest composition across different climates and soils.
  • Findings indicate the northern and southern margins of forests are particularly vulnerable to climate and human-induced changes by 2085, providing essential data for conservation efforts.
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Background And Aims: Terrestrial LiDAR scanning (TLS) data are of great interest in forest ecology and management because they provide detailed 3-D information on tree structure. Automated pipelines are increasingly used to process TLS data and extract various tree- and plot-level metrics. With these developments comes the risk of unknown reliability due to an absence of systematic output control.

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Article Synopsis
  • This study examined the genetic and antigenic changes in swine influenza A viruses (swIAV) in France from 2000 to 2018, focusing on two main H1 lineages: HA-1C and HA-1B.
  • The researchers analyzed swine nasal swabs, leading to the identification of predominant H1N1 and H1N2 subtypes and the discovery of 17 distinct genotypes, highlighting the presence of significant antigenic drift in some strains.
  • Findings also revealed mutations related to virulence and antiviral resistance, emphasizing the need for measures to control the spread of swIAV among pigs and prevent inter-species transmission.
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Mapping aboveground forest biomass is central for assessing the global carbon balance. However, current large-scale maps show strong disparities, despite good validation statistics of their underlying models. Here, we attribute this contradiction to a flaw in the validation methods, which ignore spatial autocorrelation (SAC) in data, leading to overoptimistic assessment of model predictive power.

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Article Synopsis
  • Forest biomass plays a crucial role in the Earth's carbon cycle and is essential for climate change initiatives like REDD+, but there is uncertainty in measuring aboveground biomass (AGB) in tropical forests.
  • The new Congo basin Forests AGB (CoFor-AGB) dataset includes AGB estimates and uncertainties for nearly 60,000 1-km pixels, based on field data from extensive forest management inventories in central Africa between 2000 and the early 2010s.
  • The dataset reveals a large-scale view of AGB variations in central Africa, providing valuable data for addressing uncertainties in forest biomass measurements, which is critical for environmental research and climate action.
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Wood density (WD) relates to important tree functions such as stem mechanics and resistance against pathogens. This functional trait can exhibit high intraindividual variability both radially and vertically. With the rise of LiDAR-based methodologies allowing nondestructive tree volume estimations, failing to account for WD variations related to tree function and biomass investment strategies may lead to large systematic bias in AGB estimations.

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In order to assess influenza D virus (IDV) infections in swine in France, reference reagents were produced in specific pathogen free pigs to ensure serological and virological analyses. Hemagglutination inhibition (HI) assays were carried out on 2090 domestic pig sera collected in 2012-2018 in 102 farms. Only 31 sera from breeding sows sampled in 2014-2015 in six farrow-to-finish herds with respiratory disorders contained IDV-specific antibodies.

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