Restoring brain function after stroke - bridging the gap between animals and humans

Stroke is the leading cause of complex adult disability in the world. Recovery from stroke is often incomplete, which leaves many people dependent on others for their care. The improvement of long-term outcomes should, therefore, be a clinical and research priority. As a result of advances in our understanding of the biological mechanisms involved in recovery and repair after stroke, therapeutic opportunities to promote recovery through manipulation of poststroke plasticity have never been greater. This work has almost exclusively been carried out in preclinical animal models of stroke with little translation into human studies. The challenge ahead is to develop a mechanistic understanding of recovery from stroke in humans. Advances in neuroimaging techniques now enable us to reconcile behavioural accounts of recovery with molecular and cellular changes. Consequently, clinical trials can be designed in a stratified manner that takes into account when an intervention should be delivered and who is most likely to benefit. This approach is expected to lead to a substantial change in how restorative therapeutic strategies are delivered in patients after stroke

Exploring teachers’ perceptions and practices of intercultural education in an international school

This article examines teachers’ perceptions and experiences of intercultural education. The participants (n = 11) were teachers who work in the Primary Years Programme (PYP) of an International Baccalaureate (IB) school in the Netherlands. The school was chosen as the context for this study due to the emphasis on intercultural understanding in IB education. The data were collected through a closed and open-ended survey in 2019 and complemented by an ethnographical method. The results showed that the teachers mostly drew on cultural-differentialist approaches in their definition of intercultural education. They considered intercultural education to be important for the pupils’ future but felt insecure in implementing it. All teachers reported implementing intercultural education in their teaching at least to some extent, however with some limitations. The teachers focused predominantly on national cultures and traditions to address interculturality in class. Despite the overall trend, a few teachers expressed more critical views on interculturality and expanded their perceptions of it to ‘small cultures’. The findings of this study speak to the importance of paying attention to pre-service teacher training to provide teachers with tangible tools to implement a type of intercultural education that departs from solely essentialist views of culture

A unique cluster of roo insertions in the promoter region of a stress response gene in Drosophila melanogaster

Transposable elements (TEs) are not randomly distributed in the genome. A genome-wide analysis of the D. melanogaster genome found that differences in TE density across 50 kb genomic regions was due both to transposition and duplication. At smaller genomic scales, promoter regions of hsp genes and the promoter region of CG18446 have been shown to accumulate TE insertions. In this work, we have further analyzed the promoter region of CG18446. We screened 218 strains collected in 15 natural populations, and we found that the CG18446 promoter region contains 20 independent roo insertions. Based on phylogenetic analysis, we suggest that the presence of multiple roo insertions in this region is likely to be the result of several bursts of transposition. Moreover, we found that the roo insertional cluster in the CG18446 promoter region is unique: no other promoter region in the genome contains a similar number of roo insertions. We found that, similar to hsp gene promoters, chromatin accessibility could be one of the factors explaining the recurrent insertions of roo elements in CG18446 promoter region.This work was funded by the European Commission (H2020-ERC-2014-CoG-647900). C.I. was funded by an ERASMUS+ fellowship. We acknowledge the support of the Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Economia i Coneixement de laGeneralitat de Catalunya (GRC 2017 SGR 880). We also acknowledge support of the publication fee by the CSIC Open Access Publication Support Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI)