5,640 research outputs found

    Converging organoids and extracellular matrix::New insights into liver cancer biology

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    Specificity of the innate immune responses to different classes of non-tuberculous mycobacteria

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    Mycobacterium avium is the most common nontuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) species causing infectious disease. Here, we characterized a M. avium infection model in zebrafish larvae, and compared it to M. marinum infection, a model of tuberculosis. M. avium bacteria are efficiently phagocytosed and frequently induce granuloma-like structures in zebrafish larvae. Although macrophages can respond to both mycobacterial infections, their migration speed is faster in infections caused by M. marinum. Tlr2 is conservatively involved in most aspects of the defense against both mycobacterial infections. However, Tlr2 has a function in the migration speed of macrophages and neutrophils to infection sites with M. marinum that is not observed with M. avium. Using RNAseq analysis, we found a distinct transcriptome response in cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction for M. avium and M. marinum infection. In addition, we found differences in gene expression in metabolic pathways, phagosome formation, matrix remodeling, and apoptosis in response to these mycobacterial infections. In conclusion, we characterized a new M. avium infection model in zebrafish that can be further used in studying pathological mechanisms for NTM-caused diseases

    Valorisation of unconventional lignocellulosic biomass into bioenergy and bioproducts using ionic-liquid based technologies

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    In order to transition energy use away from fossil fuels, the transformation of renewable lignocellulosic biomass needs to be improved and its supply of sustainable bioenergy into a wider bioeconomy increased. Achieving this will require: (1) renewable, cheap and high-quality lignocellulosic feedstocks, (2) a robust process to transform this feedstock into bioenergy and finally (3) a system to recover and use this bioenergy as well as value-added products. In this PhD, multiple examples were used to explore unconventional feedstocks, novel transformation processes and opportunities for value-added products. Feedstocks ranging from invasive species threatening the UK environment, Rhododendron and Japanese Knotweed (Chapter 3), metal contaminated waste wood (Chapter 4), metal enriched biomass grown on marginal land (Chapter 5), and wastewater irrigated willow, a leading dedicated bioenergy crop (Chapter 6). While conventional bioenergy systems often burn wood pellets for energy co-generation, the innovative transformation process of ionic liquid-based technologies are explored as flexible enough to fractionate unconventional biomass feedstocks and deliver high yields of sustainable bioenergy and bioproducts. This was allowed by the unique and tuneable properties of protic ionic liquids. Here dimethylbutyl-hydrogen sulphate - [DMBA][HSO4], a cheap hydrogen sulphate [HSO4]- based ionic liquid, and 1-methylimidazolium chloride - [C1Him][Cl], were used in the ionic-liquid based ionoSolv process. Key efficiency parameters such as temperature, reaction time, biomass to solvent loading and solvent recycling, were explored. The process was also challenged with the presence of diverse metal contamination to determine the potential to extract the metals and produce a fermentable pulp and lignin in parallel. Bioenergy recovery from the ionoSolv process was explored as well as the potential to recover multiple value-added products. In addition to determination of heating values of isolated lignin as well as hydrolysis and fermentation yields of cellulose rich pulps into bioethanol, interactions of contaminating metals and their impact on yeast fermentation yields were investigated. This investigation highlights the benefits of [C1Him][Cl] ionic liquid pretreatment for the production of clean bioenergy and bioproducts from highly contaminated feedstocks. As an important property of ionic liquids is that they can act as media for electrochemical reactions, electrodeposition of metals from ionic liquid liquor, metal extraction efficiencies and any detrimental interactions with ionic liquid recycling were assessed. To further diversify system outputs beyond bioenergy alone, production of bio-oils, char and gases from pyrolysis of post-hydrolysis residue was determined, as well as the possibility for recovery of phytochemicals as potential complementary value-added products. This research highlights that unconventional feedstocks have the potential to support a developing bioeconomy and that the reallocation of waste and reclamation of contaminated soils and waters could act as a financial, social and environmental levers to improve the sustainability of bioenergy production. The studies also showcase how a versatile engineered ionic-liquid pretreatment has the potential to transform environmental burdens into resources that are compatible with the diversification of multiple product streams. Taken together, these findings can serve as a proof-of-concept for integrated scale-up of sustainable ionic-liquid based biorefinery.Open Acces

    DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets

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    Multimodal datasets are a critical component in recent breakthroughs such as Stable Diffusion and GPT-4, yet their design does not receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the ML ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12.8 billion image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing the resulting model on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple compute scales spanning four orders of magnitude, which enables the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow leads to better training sets. In particular, our best baseline, DataComp-1B, enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79.2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3.7 percentage points while using the same training procedure and compute. We release DataComp and all accompanying code at www.datacomp.ai

    2023-2024 Boise State University Undergraduate Catalog

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    This catalog is primarily for and directed at students. However, it serves many audiences, such as high school counselors, academic advisors, and the public. In this catalog you will find an overview of Boise State University and information on admission, registration, grades, tuition and fees, financial aid, housing, student services, and other important policies and procedures. However, most of this catalog is devoted to describing the various programs and courses offered at Boise State

    METROPOLITAN ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT. METROPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING MAP CONSTRUCTION

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    We can no longer interpret the contemporary metropolis as we did in the last century. The thought of civil economy regarding the contemporary Metropolis conflicts more or less radically with the merely acquisitive dimension of the behaviour of its citizens. What is needed is therefore a new capacity for imagining the economic-productive future of the city: hybrid social enterprises, economically sustainable, structured and capable of using technologies, could be a solution for producing value and distributing it fairly and inclusively. Metropolitan Urbanity is another issue to establish. Metropolis needs new spaces where inclusion can occur, and where a repository of the imagery can be recreated. What is the ontology behind the technique of metropolitan planning and management, its vision and its symbols? Competitiveness, speed, and meritocracy are political words, not technical ones. Metropolitan Urbanity is the characteristic of a polis that expresses itself in its public places. Today, however, public places are private ones that are destined for public use. The Common Good has always had a space of representation in the city, which was the public space. Today, the Green-Grey Infrastructure is the metropolitan city's monument that communicates a value for future generations and must therefore be recognised and imagined; it is the production of the metropolitan symbolic imagery, the new magic of the city

    Nature’s Stories Preserved in Museums: The value and utility of Natural History Collections for Ecology, Biogeography, and Biodiversity.

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    Natural history collections are hosed in very important institutions called museums, and they play an essential role in documenting species and to let people be educated about ecology, biogeography, and conservation processes. Through the use and digitation of collections, I worked on projects that utilized digitized data using scientific collections from Ecuador and the US (UNRMNH and the McGuire Center) to examine traits related to thermoregulation processes. I also examined land use and habitat change of Lepidoptera and Coleoptera (Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae) across different gradients based on museum specimens. I have identified the main variables influencing dung beetle distribution in Ecuador based on a niche model, finding also high turnover levels in functional groups at larger scales, suggesting that dung beetles show high levels of habitat specialization in Ecuador, providing an essential framework for evaluating potential dung beetle habitat and diversity at different scales. We also implemented an analysis to determine if agroforestry systems support biodiversity in the tropics, using Dung Bettles as a model, we determined that agroforestry production systems are potentially important for maintenance of insect species richness and ecosystem functioning and could be viable alternative conservation systems and biological corridors. Also, by using digitation methods I was able to determine that western Skippers (Hesperiidae) do not follow Bogert’s rule which states that dark coloration in ectotherms becomes beneficial when ambient temperatures are low, allowing faster heating rates and higher body temperatures than in lighter‐colored individuals; instead, their color could be an immune response or crypsis for predator protection. The same digitation methos allowed me to create a workflow for specimens at the UNRMNH that provides a framework for efficient and faster digitization protocols

    Antimicrobial Peptides Aka Host Defense Peptides – From Basic Research to Therapy

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    This Special Issue reprint will address the most current and innovative developments in the field of HDP research across a range of topics, such as structure and function analysis, modes of action, anti-microbial effects, cell and animal model systems, the discovery of novel host-defense peptides, and drug development

    Enhancing primary care psychological therapy for clients with comorbid physical health conditions: A Critical Discourse Analysis investigation into interprofessional identity

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    Background / Aim: Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services are the largest provider in England of primary care psychological therapy for depression and anxiety disorders. Over recent years there has been increased recognition of the importance of therapists and their physical health colleagues (e.g. nurses, physiotherapists or other allied health professionals) integrating care for patients with comorbid long-term health conditions and common psychological disorders. Specialist teams have been creating differentiating Psychological Therapists as Core and Integrated. The aim is to investigate the implications of this shift for Therapists’ professional identity. Method: A Critical Discourse Analysis was conducted based on five focus groups with eighteen professionals from Core IAPT, Integrated IAPT and physical healthcare backgrounds. Key Findings: Discourses related to expertise, responsibility and innovation / creativity emerged from the corpora. The research highlights the niche set of behaviours, skills, values and attitudes under construction by Integrated Therapists and the way in which their role shapes and is shaped by their interactions with their counterparts. Implications: The research makes recommendations for Integrated Therapists’ professional identity including to showcase niche skills and effective collaborative therapy. Future research recommendations are made regarding unheard voices and silenced discourses in professional identity reconstruction. Key Terms: Professional Identity; Integrated Therapy; Cognitive Behaviour Therapy; Long-Term Conditions and Medically Unexplained Symptoms (LTC/MUS

    Metabolic impacts of weight loss intervention on morbid obesity

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    Morbid obesity can result in life-altering health issues, such as type 2 diabetes. Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) surgery has been demonstrated to be one of the most effective treatments for morbid obesity and its co-morbidities in long-term. This aim of this thesis is to investigate the metabolic impact of weight loss intervention (RYGB, caloric restriction, and gut hormone treatment) on urine, plasma, and faecal profiles from morbidly obese patients, and to answer two hypotheses: 1) RYGB-induced metabolic changes are partially attributed to caloric restriction and increased gut hormones; 2) RYGB alters metabolic profile of faecal bacterial pellets separated using a newly developed method. Samples at pre-intervention time point were compared with post-intervention time point, and multivariate and univariate analysis were applied based on different types of datasets using different software to avoid missing potential biomarkers. Samples at post-intervention time point were compared across the intervention groups using the same strategy as above. At 1-month-post-intervention, RYGB-induced metabolic changes could be attributed by caloric restriction via increased metabolisms of ketone bodies, lactic acid, and tricarboxylic acid, and decreased concentrations of total apolipoprotein A1, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) subfraction 3&4, and very-low-density-lipoprotein (VLDL) subfraction 5. RYGB-induced distinct metabolic changes included metabolisms of amino acids, short chain fatty acids, creatine, increased concentration of low-density lipoprotein fraction of triglycerides, and decreased concentration of HDL subfraction 2 of phospholipids. Gut hormone treatment exerted limited metabolic effects on urine and plasma samples. A separation method was developed for faecal bacterial pellets profiling and applied on RYGB and caloric restriction cohorts. Propionate and butyrate productions via dicarboxylic acid pathway were increased significantly 2-5 years after RYGB and 3 months after caloric restriction, respectively. My study showed RYGB-induced metabolic changes could not be fully explained by caloric restriction nor increased gut hormone levels; Gut hormone treatment induced limited metabolic changes and could be an alternate therapy for morbid obesity followed by clinical trial with increased sample size and follow-up study in long term.Open Acces
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