Bruno Santos Alves Figueiredo Brasil

Background: Carbon stocks in agricultural and livestock systems play a relevant role in linking productivity, resilience, and climate change mitigation objectives. Higher levels of carbon stored in soils and biomass are associated with improved soil fertility, greater water retention capacity, and increased resilience to climate variability, while contributing to atmospheric carbon sequestration. Although agricultural practices such as conservation tillage, cover cropping, crop rotation, agroforestry, and improved grazing management can enhance carbon accumulation, their adoption remains uneven and is often constrained by technical, economic, and institutional barriers. Public policies and private initiatives, including economic incentives, regulatory instruments, technical assistance programs, carbon markets, payments for environmental services, and sustainability standards, among others, have been implemented to promote the adoption of these practices. However, evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions in increasing carbon stocks remains fragmented across contexts and production systems. As part of the Avanzar2030 initiative, this systematic review aims to synthesize the available evidence on how public policies and private initiatives influence carbon stocks in tropical and temperate agricultural and livestock systems, assess their associated environmental, social, and economic outcomes, and identify key enabling factors and implementation barriers. The review is intended to support evidence-informed policy design and implementation in the Mercosur countries: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Methods: A systematic literature search will be conducted in Web of Science, Scopus, CAB Abstracts, CAB Global Health, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, Agricola, LILACS, and grey literature sources accessed through the Agricultural Information and Documentation Service of the Americas (SIDALC). Searches will be performed in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Eligible studies will examine agricultural or livestock systems exposed to a public policy or private initiative intended to increase carbon stocks and will report measured carbon stock outcomes. Included study designs comprise before-after (BA), control intervention (CI), and BACI studies. Screening, data extraction, and risk-of-bias assessment will be conducted according to predefined protocols, with consistency checks among reviewers. Data extracted will include characteristics of interventions, study contexts, measurement approaches, and reported environmental, social, and economic outcomes, as well as factors identified as enabling or constraining the implementation and effectiveness of interventions.

A crescente demanda por transparência nas cadeias agropecuárias e o avanço de regulações internacionais, como o Regulamento de Desmatamento da União Europeia (EUDR), exigem novos modelos de governança capazes de integrar boas práticas agropecuárias, rastreabilidade e certificação. Este artigo analisa os desafios organizacionais associados à fragmentação dos sistemas existentes no Brasil e propõe um modelo conceitual de plataforma integrada, estruturado em camadas funcionais que reúnem integração de dados, conformidade, certificação, incentivos financeiros, rastreabilidade e transparência de mercado. A partir de abordagem qualitativa e propositiva, o estudo demonstra que a interoperabilidade entre bases públicas e iniciativas privadas é condição essencial para reduzir assimetrias de informação, fortalecer a credibilidade do setor e garantir competitividade internacional. Conclui-se que a criação de um programa nacional de rastreabilidade e certificação representa uma oportunidade estratégica de consolidação da governança agroambiental brasileira.

The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation is a public research company, comprised of a central management structure and forty-three research centers. Given the recent dismissal of employees, due to retirement or to promoted layoffs, and the expected announcement of a recruitment to replace the staff, it is important to define how these vacancies will be distributed among its member units. This study proposes data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to allocate the vacancies to the company’s research centers, using Zero Sum Gains DEA (ZSG-DEA). We studied both production and performance modeling perspectives. Given the approaches adopted and the variables selected, the ZSG-DEA models generated allocation proposals in which all units are 100% efficient. This is the ideal scenario for a central management: maximum efficiency in the use of its resources.

Standard diagnostic methods currently in use for the identification of helminth infections in ruminants are based on the morphological analysis of immature and adult stages of parasites. This paper describes a method for the semiquantitative identification of nematodes, mainly Trichostrongyloidea, at species-level resolution. The method is based on amplification and fragment analysis followed by minisequencing of the ITS-2 region (internal transcribed spacer 2) of the ribosomal DNA of parasite eggs or larvae. This method allows for the identification of seven genera (Chabertia, Cooperia, Haemonchus, Oesophagostomum, Ostertagia, Teladorsagia, and Trichostrongylus) and 12 species (Chabertia ovina, Cooperia curticei, Cooperia punctata, Cooperia oncophora/Cooperia surnabada, Haemonchus contortus, Haemonchus placei, Haemonchus longistipes, Oesophagostomum asperum, Oesophagostomum radiatum, Ostertagia ostertagi, Trichostrongylus axei, and Trichostrongylus colubriformis) of infectious nematodes of domestic ruminants. The concordance between the morphological and molecular analyses in the detection of genera ranged from 0.84 to 0.99, suggesting the proposed detection method is specific, semiquantitative, less laborious, and highly cost-efficient.

Evolution has equipped poxvirus genomes with the coding capacity for several virus-host interaction products which interfere with host cell gene expression and protein function, creating an adequate intracellular environment for a productive infection. We show here that Vaccinia virus (VACV) induces the expression of the cellular transcription factor EGR-1 (early growth response-1) in Mouse Embryonic Fibroblasts (MEFs) through the MEK (mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK)/ERK)/ERK (extracellular signal-regulated kinases) pathway, from 3 to 12 h post infection (h.p.i.). By using starved egr-1 knockout (egr-1^−/−) MEFs, we demonstrate that VACV replication is reduced by ~1 log in this cell line. Although western blotting and electron microscopy analyses revealed no difference in VACV gene expression or morphogenesis, the specific infectivity of VACV propagated in egr-1^−/− MEFs was lower than virus propagated in wild type (WT) cells. This lower infectivity was due to decreased VACV DNA replication during the next cycle of infection. Taken together, these results revealed that EGR-1 appears to facilitate VACV replication in starved fibroblasts by affecting viral particles infectivity.