School Engagement among Youth in Canadian Forces Families: A Comparative Analysis

There has been a growing body of literature on adolescents in military families since 2002.  This research has focused on how frequent moves and parental deployments are two unique potential stressors for youth in military families, and are associated with negative school outcomes. Analyzing data collected from a school in a military community, and data from a national sample of Canadian youth, we examine the impact of military stressors on the school engagement of youth in military families.  While we found evidence of residential mobility contributing to negative school engagement outcomes, we also found a positive association between school engagement and parental deployments.  Surprisingly, relative to both the civilian youth in our sample and the national sample, military youth exhibited higher levels of school engagement when a parent has been deployed. Depuis 2002, de plus en plus d’études ont été publiées sur les adolescents de familles de militaires. Cette recherche explique que les déplacements fréquents et les déploiements d’un parent constituent pour ces jeunes des agents de stress potentiels et uniques, et qu’ils sont associés à des résultats scolaires négatifs. Nous avons analysé des données provenant d’une école dans une communauté militaire ainsi que des données tirées d’un échantillon national de jeunes canadiens pour étudier l’impact des agents de stress d’origine militaire sur l’implication scolaire chez les jeunes de familles de militaires. Si nous avons trouvé des indications que la mobilité résidentielle contribuait aux résultats scolaires négatifs, nous avons également trouvé une association positive entre l’implication scolaire et les déploiements d’un parent. Étonnamment, nous avons constaté que, comparés aux jeunes civils dans notre échantillon et dans l’échantillon national, les jeunes de familles de militaires manifestent plus d’implication scolaire pendant les déploiements d’un parent.

Effects of Dynamical Quarks in UKQCD Simulations

Recent results from the UKQCD Collaboration's dynamical simulations are presented. The main feature of these ensembles is that they have a fixed lattice spacing and volume, but varying sea quark mass from infinite (corresponding to the quenched simulation) down to roughly that of the strange quark mass. The main aim of this work is to uncover dynamical quark effects from these ``matched'' ensembles. We obtain some evidence of dynamical quark effects in the static quark potential with less effects in the hadronic spectrum.Comment: Invited paper presented at the Workshop on Lattice Hadron Physics, July 2001, Cairns, Australia. 7 pages. Uses espcrc2.sty (included

β-catenin signaling and regulation of cyclin D1 promoter in NRK-49F cells transformed by down-regulation of the tumor suppressor lysyl oxidase

AbstractLysyl oxidase is the enzyme that is essential for collagen and elastin cross-linking. Previous investigations showed that lysyl oxidase is down-regulated in many human tumors and ras-transformed cells. Recently, we proved that antisense down-regulation of lysyl oxidase in NRK-49F cells induced phenotypic changes and oncogenic transformation, characterized by p21ras activation and β-catenin/cyclin D1 up-regulation. In the present paper, we examined β-catenin intracellular distribution and its association with E-cadherin. We observed an increased association between E-cadherin and β-catenin in the lysyl-oxidase down-regulated cells during serum starvation. Moreover, we found that β-catenin cytoplasmic and nuclear levels were increased, suggesting a failure of its down-regulation by the APC-GSK-3β system, in particular the GSK-3β phosphorylation of ser-33/37 and thr-41 of β-catenin. Finally, we investigated the mechanisms leading to the observed cyclin D1 up-regulation. We showed that in the antisense lysyl oxidase cells the cyclin D1 promoter was activated through the LEF and the ATF/CRE sites in the proximal promoter. While the promoter activation through LEF is compatible with β-catenin signaling, we investigated the possibility that the CRE-dependent activation might be linked to the down-regulation of lysyl oxidase. In fact, up-regulation of lysyl oxidase in a COS-7 cell model showed a significant diminution of the CREB protein binding to the cyclin D1 promoter, leading to a dramatic inhibition of its activity and a significant down-regulation of cyclin D1 protein level in vivo. Finally, our study describes some major anomalies occurring in lysyl oxidase down-regulated fibroblasts, related to β-catenin signaling and cyclin D1 expression

Induction of Metastatic Gastric Cancer by Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptorδ Activation

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptorδ (PPARδ) regulates a multiplicity of physiological processes associated with glucose and lipid metabolism, inflammation, and proliferation. One or more of these processes likely create risk factors associated with the ability of PPARδ agonists to promote tumorigenesis in some organs. In the present study, we describe a new gastric tumor mouse model that is dependent on the potent and highly selective PPARδ agonist GW501516 following carcinogen administration. The progression of gastric tumorigenesis was rapid as determined by magnetic resonance imaging and resulted in highly metastatic squamous cell carcinomas of the forestomach within two months. Tumorigenesis was associated with gene expression signatures indicative of cell adhesion, invasion, inflammation, and metabolism. Increased PPARδ expression in tumors correlated with increased PDK1, Akt, β-catenin, and S100A9 expression. The rapid development of metastatic gastric tumors in this model will be useful for evaluating preventive and therapeutic interventions in this disease

Amniotic stem cells as a source of regenerative medicine to treat female infertility

Impaired reproductive health is a worldwide problem that affects the psychological well-being of a society. Despite the technological developments to treat infertility, the global infertility rate is increasing significantly. Many infertility conditions are currently treated using various advanced clinical approaches such as intrauterine semination (IUI), in vitro fertilization (IVF), and intracytoplasmic injection (ICSI). Nonetheless, clinical management of some conditions such as dysfunctional endometrium, premature ovarian failure, and ovarian physiological aging still pose significant challenges. Stem cells based therapeutic strategies have a long-standing history to treat many infertility conditions, but ethical restrictions do not allow the broad-scale utilization of adult mesenchymal stromal/stem cells (MSCs). Easily accessible, placental derived or amniotic stem cells present an invaluable alternative source of non-immunogenic and non-tumorigenic stem cells that possess multilineage potential. Given these characteristics, placental or amniotic stem cells (ASCs) have been investigated for therapeutic purposes to address infertility in the last decade. This study aims to summarize the current standing and progress of human amniotic epithelial stem cells (hAECs), amniotic mesenchymal stem cells (hAMSCs), and amniotic fluid stem cells (hAFSCs) in the field of reproductive medicine. The therapeutic potential of these cells to restore or enhance normal ovarian function and pregnancy outcomes are highlighted in this study.Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library. The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article

An Overnight Success?: Usage Patterns and Demographics of Academic Library Patrons During the Overnight Period From 11 p.m.–8 a.m.

During the Fall 2013 semester East Carolina University's main library piloted 24/5 hours of operation by opening on Sunday morning and not closing until Friday night. This article details the planning and execution of the pilot program, as well the findings from the data collected during the overnight period by people-counting cameras and a university identification card reader. The data reveal library usage during specific days and hours of the overnight period, usage during specific periods of the semester, and the demographic information of overnight undergraduate and graduate student users

Parity doubling of nucléons, Delta and Omega baryons across the deconfinement phase transition

In this work we analyse positive- and negative-parity channels for the nucleon (spin 1/2 octet), Δ and Ω baryons (spin 3/2 decuplet) using lattice QCD. In Nature, at zero temperature, chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken, causing positive- and negative-parity ground states to have different masses. However, chiral symmetry is expected to be restored (for massless quarks) around the crossover temperature, implying that the two opposite parity channels should become degenerate. Here we study what happens in a temperature range which includes both the hadronic and the quark gluon plasma (QGP) phase. By analysing the correlation and spectral functions via exponential fits and the Maximum Entropy Method respectively, we have found parity doubling for the nucleon and Δ baryon channels in the QGP phase. For the Ω baryon we see a clear signal of parity doubling at the crossover temperature, which is however not complete, due to the nonzero strange quark mass. Moreover, in-medium effects in the hadronic phase are evident for all three baryons, in particular for the negative-parity ground states. This might have implications for the hadron resonance gas model. In this work we used the FASTSUM anisotropic Nf=2+1 ensembles

Supplementary guidance: listening to staff: Autumn 2017

Kinases play a critical role in cellular signaling and are dysregulated in a number of diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and neurodegeneration. Therapeutics targeting kinases currently account for roughly 50% of cancer drug discovery efforts. The ability to explore human kinase biochemistry and biophysics in the laboratory is essential to designing selective inhibitors and studying drug resistance. Bacterial expression systems are superior to insect or mammalian cells in terms of simplicity and cost effectiveness but have historically struggled with human kinase expression. Following the discovery that phosphatase coexpression produced high yields of Src and Abl kinase domains in bacteria, we have generated a library of 52 His-tagged human kinase domain constructs that express above 2 μg/mL of culture in an automated bacterial expression system utilizing phosphatase coexpression (YopH for Tyr kinases and lambda for Ser/Thr kinases). Here, we report a structural bioinformatics approach to identifying kinase domain constructs previously expressed in bacteria and likely to express well in our protocol, experiments demonstrating our simple construct selection strategy selects constructs with good expression yields in a test of 84 potential kinase domain boundaries for Abl, and yields from a high-throughput expression screen of 96 human kinase constructs. Using a fluorescence-based thermostability assay and a fluorescent ATP-competitive inhibitor, we show that the highest-expressing kinases are folded and have well-formed ATP binding sites. We also demonstrate that these constructs can enable characterization of clinical mutations by expressing a panel of 48 Src and 46 Abl mutations. The wild-type kinase construct library is available publicly via Addgene

Path Integral Monte Carlo Approach to the U(1) Lattice Gauge Theory in (2+1) Dimensions

Path Integral Monte Carlo simulations have been performed for U(1) lattice gauge theory in (2+1) dimensions on anisotropic lattices. We extractthe static quark potential, the string tension and the low-lying "glueball" spectrum.The Euclidean string tension and mass gap decrease exponentially at weakcoupling in excellent agreement with the predictions of Polyakov and G{\" o}pfert and Mack, but their magnitudes are five times bigger than predicted. Extrapolations are made to the extreme anisotropic or Hamiltonian limit, and comparisons are made with previous estimates obtained in the Hamiltonian formulation.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure

Quantifying the CDK inhibitor VMY-1-103\u27s activity and tissue levels in an in vivo tumor model by LC-MS/MS and by MRI.

The development of new small molecule-based therapeutic drugs requires accurate quantification of drug bioavailability, biological activity and treatment efficacy. Rapidly measuring these endpoints is often hampered by the lack of efficient assay platforms with high sensitivity and specificity. Using an in vivo model system, we report a simple and sensitive liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry assay to quantify the bioavailability of a recently developed novel cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor VMY-1-103, a purvalanol B-based analog whose biological activity is enhanced via dansylation. We developed a rapid organic phase extraction technique and validated wide and functional VMY-1-103 distribution in various mouse tissues, consistent with its enhanced potency previously observed in a variety of human cancer cell lines. More importantly, in vivo MRI and single voxel proton MR-Spectroscopy further established that VMY-1-103 inhibited disease progression and affected key metabolites in a mouse model of hedgehog-driven medulloblastoma