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FROM THE EDITOR

This June 2020 issue of Science Diliman is memorable in a way because it is being 
released in the midst of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused 
by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). To date, 
there are over 14 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 600,000 
deaths worldwide. In the Philippines, as of this writing, there have been 70,764 
confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,837 deaths. These numbers continue to 
increase as scientists are scrambling to develop vaccines for this dreaded disease. 
This disease has caused so much anxiety and misery as lives and livelihoods have 
been lost and as our normal lives have been disrupted in very profound ways. Our 
hope rests in science to stem the tide of the spread of the virus, to find cures for this 
disease, and eventually, to bring our lives back to normalcy. 

As we are struggling with anxiety and uncertainty amid the COVID-19 pandemic, 
Science Diliman deeply mourns the passing of one of its Associate Editors, Dr. Alonzo 
A. Gabriel, on March 31, 2020. He was a professor in the Department of Food Science 
and Nutrition at the College of Home Economics, University of the Philippines 
Diliman. He was a prolific and multi-awarded food scientist. His research focused 
on food processing and preservation, microbiological food safety, and traditional 
and innovative food technologies. He was a tremendous loss, indeed, not just to 
Science Diliman and the university, but also to the scientific community. 

In this issue, we feature five research articles. The first article is by Galgana et al. 
who determined the effects of the tectonic deformation of Luzon on existing survey 
networks in the Philippines. Their block and continuum modeling experiments 
revealed the amount and spatial extent of deformation within the island of Luzon. 
Understanding the nature of this deformation is needed so that appropriate 
corrections can be applied to minimize transient errors affecting the Philippine 
survey network. Their study, however, is limited to examining the contribution 
of tectonic deformation to the overall error field. The authors recommend the 
application of corrections for other systematic error sources, such as global reference 
system corrections, rapid horizontal and vertical crustal motions, volcano-induced 
deformation, and hydrological effects. The second article is by Gonda and Paras who 
determined the Jordan canonical form of a product of two elementary 𝑆-unitaries. 



The third article is by Mapile and Obusan who isolated bacteria and fungi from the 
gut of the earthworm, African Nightcrawler, and screened these microorganisms 
for their ability to fix nitrogen, solubilize phosphate, and utilize polyethylene, as 
well as for the antagonistic potential of fungal isolates against bacterial isolates. 
The authors hope to harness the earthworm’s casts and compost for agricultural, 
medical, and other applications. The fourth article is by Molina et al. who examined 
the body size, microhabitat, and feeding ecology of two species of edible freshwater 
or semi-terrestrial crabs that are endemic to Mindanao island in the Philippines. 
The authors hope to contribute to a better understanding of the biology of these 
two economically important crabs so that appropriate conservation strategies can 
be formulated for the two species. The fifth and last article is by Que et al. who 
used DNA barcoding to trace the possible source of the non-native Philippine 
population of the Greenhouse Frog. Their analysis revealed that the DNA sequences 
of the samples they collected from the Philippines are genetically identical to DNA 
sequences of samples from Hawai’i and Florida, USA and are closely related to the 
DNA sequence of an individual from Cuba. The authors surmised that importation 
of plants from the USA is the most likely mode of introduction because this frog 
species lays its eggs in soil and is often found in bromeliad plants that are commonly 
imported from the USA into the country.

                                                                                              Jonas P. Quilang, Ph.D.

                        Editor-in-Chief