Life at school in Australia and Japan: the impact of stress and support on bullying and adaptation to school

In this international, comparative study, path analysis was used to examine eight different aspects of Japanese and Australian students' experiences of school life in relation to their effect on adaptation to school. Adaptation was constructed to include information on enjoyment of school, feelings of belonging to school, and relationships with other students. Two separate path models were tested to compare questionnaire data from over 3000 Australian and 6000 Japanese students across Years 5-10. The questionnaire was developed collaboratively by the authors to examine issues of common concern in both countries. Issues that related to the impact on adaptation to school of stress and support: family teachers, peers and school work, as well as bullying were of particular interest. Lack of support and the influential effect of stress were found to exert direct negative effects on adaptation to school, especially for high school students in Japan and Australia. The path results also confirmed the stressful effects of bullying in both countries. The finding of a strong relationship between bullying others and being victimised is discussed in the paper. Finally, the differences and similarities between Japanese and Australian students' perceptions of school life are extrapolated

Does midlife obesity really lower dementia risk?

Neurological Motor Disorder

Body Weight Is a Robust Predictor of Clinical Progression in Huntington Disease

Public Health and primary car

Simplified monopalmitoyl toll-like receptor 2 ligand mini-UPam for self-adjuvanting neoantigen-based synthetic cancer vaccines

Synthetic vaccines, based on antigenic peptides that comprise MHC−I and MHC‐II T‐cell epitopes expressed by tumors, show great promise for the immunotherapy of cancer. For optimal immunogenicity, the synthetic peptides (SPs) should be adjuvanted with suitable immunostimulatory additives. Previously, we have shown that improved immunogenicity in vivo is obtained with vaccine modalities in which an SP is covalently connected to an adjuvanting moiety, typically a ligand to Toll‐like receptor 2 (TLR2). SPs were covalently attached to UPam, which is a derivative of the classic TLR2 ligand Pam3CysSK4. A disadvantage of the triply palmitoylated UPam is its high lipophilicity, which precludes universal adoption of this adjuvant for covalent modification of various antigenic peptides as it renders the synthetic vaccine insoluble in several cases. Here, we report a novel conjugatable TLR2 ligand, mini‐UPam, which contains only one palmitoyl chain, rather than three, and therefore has less impact on the solubility and other physicochemical properties of a synthetic peptide. In this study, we used SPs that contain the clinically relevant neoepitopes identified in a melanoma patient who completely recovered after T‐cell therapy. Homogeneous mini‐UPam‐SP conjugates have been prepared in good yields by stepwise solid‐phase synthesis that employed a mini‐UPam building block pre‐prepared in solution and the standard set of Fmoc‐amino acids. The immunogenicity of the novel mini‐UPam‐SP conjugates was demonstrated by using the cancer patient's T‐cells.Bio-organic Synthesi