Community training manual on macro-propagation using detached corms

Within the framework of a Bioversity International project titled “Addressing micronutrient deficiencies in sub –Saharan Africa through Musa – based foods”, banana varieties rich in vitamin A originally from outside East and Central Africa were introduced in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. To increase the availability and quality of planting material in communities, training on macro-propagation using detached corms was conducted in project sites. This manual uses a training of trainer approach to cover the different actions and processes required to successfully multiply banana planting materials using a range of available materials

Book Reviews

The article contains reviews and notation of the following books: Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Lincoln\u27s First Vice President by H. Draper Hunt; Two Decades of Organized Labor and Labor Politics in Maine, 1880-1900 by Charles A. Scontras; The Senator from Maine: Margaret Chase Smith by Alice Fleming; Canada Preserved: The Journal of Captain Thomas Ainslie by Sheldon S. Cohen; Aids to the Teaching of Maine in the Public Schools by Elizabeth Ring; An Illustrated History of Bangor, Maine by James B. Vickery; History of Parkman: Mainstream Democracy in Parkman, Maine 1794-1969 by Roger C. Storms; Camden-Rockport Bicentennial: 1769-1969; Maine: A Guide to the Vacation State by Ray Bears

Audit tools for culturally safe and responsive healthcare practices with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: A scoping review

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia face disparities in accessing culturally safe and appropriate health services. While current cultural safety and responsiveness frameworks set standards for improving healthcare practices, ensuring accountability and sustainability of changes, necessitates robust mechanisms for auditing and monitoring progress. This study examined existing cultural safety audit tools, and facilitators and barriers to implementation, in the context of providing culturally safe and responsive healthcare services with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This will assist organisations, interested in developing tools, to assess culturally responsive practice. A scoping review was undertaken using Medline, Scopus, CINAHL, Informit and PsychInfo databases. Articles were included if they described an audit tool used for healthcare practices with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Selected tools were evaluated based on alignment with the six capabilities of the Indigenous Allied Health Australia (IAHA) Cultural Responsiveness in Action Framework. Implementation barriers and facilitators were identified. 15 papers were included. Audit tools varied in length, terminology, domains assessed and whether they had been validated or evaluated. Seven papers reported strong reliability and validity of the tools, and one reported tool evaluation. Implementation facilitators included: tool comprehensiveness and structure; effective communication; clear organisational responsibility for implementation; commitment to prioritising cultural competence; and established accountability mechanisms. Barriers included: the tool being time-consuming and inflexible; responsibility for implementation falling on a small team or single staff member; deprioritising tool use; and lack of accountability for implementation. Two of the six IAHA capabilities (respect for the centrality of cultures and inclusive engagement) were strongly reflected in the tools. The limited tool evaluation highlights the need for further research to determine implementation effectiveness and sustainability. Action-oriented tools, which comprehensively reflect all cultural responsiveness capabilities, are lacking and further research is needed to progress meaningful change within the healthcare system

The latest development of the DELAD project for sharing corpora of speech disorders

Corpora of speech of individuals with communication disorders (CSD) are invaluable resources for education and research, but they are costly and hard to build and difficult to share for various reasons. DELAD, which means 'shared' in Swedish, is a project initiated by Professors Nicole Muller and Martin Ball in 2015 that aims to address this issue by establishing a platform for researchers to share datasets of speech disorders with interested audiences. To date four workshops have been held, where selected participants, covering various expertise including researchers in clinical phonetics and linguistics, speech and language therapy, infrastructure specialists, and ethics and legal specialists, participated to discuss relevant issues in setting up such an archive. Positive and steady progress has been made since 2015, including refurbishing the DELAD website (http://delad.net/) with information and application forms for researchers to join and share their datasets and linking with the CLARIN K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (https://ace.ruhosting.nl/) where CSD can be hosted and accessed through the CLARIN B-Centres, The Language Archive (https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/) and TalkBank (https://talkbank.org/). The latest workshop, which was funded by CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) was held as an online event in January 2021 on topics including Data Protection Impact Assessments, reviewing changes in ethics perspectives in academia on sharing CSD, and voice conversion as a mean to pseudonomise speech. This paper reports the latest progress of DELAD and discusses the directions for further advance of the initiative, with information on how researchers can contribute to the repository.Peer reviewe

Recipes for vitamin A-rich bananas: developed for South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo

Recipes were developed through a participatory process with banana farmers in South Kivu, DRC to incorporate the Vitamin A-rich bananas and improve the nutrient quality of the meals. Recipes are applicable among banana producing and consuming regions of Eastern Africa. The Vitamin A-rich bananas mentioned in these recipes are naturally rich in vitamin A and they are from the countries in the table

Targeting of low ALK antigen density neuroblastoma using AND logic-gate engineered CAR-T cells

Background aims: The targeting of solid cancers with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells faces many technological hurdles, including selection of optimal target antigens. Promising pre-clinical and clinical data of CAR T-cell activity have emerged from targeting surface antigens such as GD2 and B7H3 in childhood cancer neuroblastoma. Anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) is expressed in a majority of neuroblastomas at low antigen density but is largely absent from healthy tissues. / Methods: To explore an alternate target antigen for neuroblastoma CAR T-cell therapy, the authors generated and screened a single-chain variable fragment library targeting ALK extracellular domain to make a panel of new anti-ALK CAR T-cell constructs. / Results: A lead novel CAR T-cell construct was capable of specific cytotoxicity against neuroblastoma cells expressing low levels of ALK, but with only weak cytokine and proliferative T-cell responses. To explore strategies for amplifying ALK CAR T cells, the authors generated a co-CAR approach in which T cells received signal 1 from a first-generation ALK construct and signal 2 from anti-B7H3 or GD2 chimeric co-stimulatory receptors. The co-CAR approach successfully demonstrated the ability to avoid targeting single-antigen-positive targets as a strategy for mitigating on-target off-tumor toxicity. / Conclusions: These data provide further proof of concept for ALK as a neuroblastoma CAR T-cell target

RhoA-ROCK signaling is involved in contraction-mediated inhibition of SERCA2a expression in cardiomyocytes

In neonatal ventricular cardiomyocytes (NVCM), decreased contractile activity stimulates sarco-endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPase2a (SERCA2a), analogous to reduced myocardial load in vivo. This study investigated in contracting NVCM the role of load-dependent RhoA-ROCK signaling in SERCA2a regulation. Contractile arrest of NVCM resulted in low peri-nuclear localized RhoA levels relative to contracting NVCM. In arrested NVCM, ROCK activity was decreased (59%) and paralleled a loss in F-actin levels. Y-27632-induced ROCK inhibition in contracting NVCM increased SERCA2a messenger RNA expression by 150%. This stimulation was transcriptional, as evident from transfections with the SERCA2a promoter. A reciprocal effect of Y-27632 treatment on the promoter activity of atrial natriuretic factor was observed. SERCA2a transcription was not altered by co-transfection of the RhoA-ROCK-dependent serum response factor (SRF) alone or in combination with myocardin. Furthermore, GATA4, another ROCK-dependent transcription factor, induced rather than repressed SERCA2a transcription. This study shows that contractile activity suppresses SERCA2a gene expression via RhoA-ROCK-dependent transcription modulation. This modulation is likely to be accomplished by a transcription factor other than SRF, myocardin, or GATA4

Agronomic performance of provitamin A-rich banana cultivars in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo

Banana researchers have been evaluating the performance of high provitaminA banana cultivars to Vitamin A deficiency in Sub-Saharan Africa. This study evaluated the agronomic performance of six provitamin A-rich banana cultivars originally from outside Burundi and Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Growth and yield parameters were collected for the first, second and third crop cycles. Results revealed that growth and yield parameters were significantly affected by the interaction between sites and cultivars. The most promising cultivars in terms of yield were ‘Apantu-AAB’, ‘Lahi-AAB’, ‘Lai- AA’, ‘Bira-AAB’ and ‘Pelipita-ABB’ across all sites and crop cycles. These evaluations provide hard evidence of the high potential for adoption of the most promising cultivars by farming communities

INTERDISCIPLINARIDADE: SUPERAÇÃO DA DIVISÃO DO TRABALHO NO SABER-FAZER CIENTÍFICO OU SUA FRAGMENTÁRIA DESFRAGMENTAÇÃO?

O objetivo deste artigo é abordar criticamente a interdisciplinaridade enquanto um movimento epistemológico contemporâneo que propõe superar, concomitantemente, a fragmentação do saber-fazer científico e a atitude contemplativa e determinista do ser humano diante de uma realidade supostamente objetiva e imutável. Mostrar-se-á – com base em uma revisão bibliográfica – que a reflexão humana sobre a realidade – dos primórdios da filosofia ocidental, passando pela constituição da ciência, até os dias atuais – é um processo histórico de disputa em torno da possibilidade da verdade e no qual se enfrentam perspectivas que oscilam entre um objetivismo (a natureza como modelo do real) e um subjetivismo (o conhecimento restrito à experiência do sujeito cognoscente). Diante desse cenário, a emergência do materialismo histórico marxiano trouxe importante contribuição ao demonstrar que o substrato das práxis filosófica e científica está no trabalho – enquanto relação ontológica entre ser humano (social) e natureza – e propor que tais saberes-fazeres não apenas superem suas fragmentações internas, como se lancem para uma transformação revolucionária da realidade. Não sendo tais apontamentos uma novidade histórica, e nem mesmo o tom do modismo atual em torno da interdisciplinaridade, o presente artigo termina por indagar quais seriam, então, os propósitos desse movimento

Recettes pour les bananes riches en Vitamine A: Développées pour le Sud Kivu, République Démocratique du Congo

Les recettes ont été dévelopées à travers une approche participative avec les cultivateurs du bananier du Sud Kivu, en RDC, pour incorporer les bananes riches en vitamine A dans les repas et améliorer leur qualité nutritionnelle. Ces recettes sont applicables dans les régions de l'Afrique de l'Est qui produisent et consomment la banane. Ces bananes mentionnées dans ces recettes sont naturellement riches en Vitamine A et sont originaires des pays se trouvant dans ce tableau