A Period Seroprevalence (SARS-CoV-2) Survey in MHCCN Cancer Healthcare Workers (HCWs) Providing Patient Care during the Height of the Outbreak: A Registry Study (Initial Progress)

Introduction: There is little information on the basic epidemiologic and serologic profile(s) of the novel SARSCoV- 2 coronavirus especially in HCWs employed in rural settings. We embarked on a period seroprevalence study in the MaineHealth Cancer Network (MHCCN) to document Covid-19 exposure in our rural cancer care workforce. Our fundamental hypothesis is that despite implementing procedures to safeguard patients and the use of appropriate PPE in the care of known source patients/PUIs in both the inpatient and outpatient cancer care settings a small, but not insignificant number of cancer care providers (hereafter referred to as cancer HCWs) will have evidence of exposure by virtue of plasma antibody seroconversion.https://knowledgeconnection.mainehealth.org/lambrew-retreat-2021/1001/thumbnail.jp

Seasonal production and bacterial utilization of DOC in the Ross Sea, Antarctica

often dominant component of the euphotic zone biomass throughout much of the world ocean. In Antarctic waters however, the bacterial biomass is a much small-er fraction of the total plankton stock, at least during the Austral summer. In the Ross Sea during the 1996-1997 growing season, bacterial abundance reached a peak of 2-3 x 109 cells liter-!, comparable to peak levels in the fertile regions of the world ocean, but bacterial biomass was a paltry 5 % of the phytoplankton stock. Bacterial production ranged from <1 to 22 % of the daily primary produc-tion, averaging 6 % during October-April. Bacterial abundance and production were significantly correlated with the accumulation of semilabile dissolved organic carbon (DOC) over the growing season, indicating the importance of this carbon pool as a source of bacterial nutrition. Bacterial production increased prior to any increase in temperature. The semilabile DOC is entirely consumed by the end of the growing season. A microbial carbon budget based on these observa-tions suggests that ca. 30 % of the total annual primary production is metabolized by bacteria. Bacterioplankton biomass accumulation and production rates are reg-ulated by the amount of labile dissolved organic carbon produced on seasonal times cales in the upper 150 m of the Ross Sea. This relationship argues for the predominance of bottom-up control of bacterial standing stocks in these waters, possibly in contrast to other Antarctic coastal regions

Gravity, Lorentz Violation, and the Standard Model

The role of the gravitational sector in the Lorentz- and CPT-violating Standard-Model Extension (SME) is studied. A framework is developed for addressing this topic in the context of Riemann-Cartan spacetimes, which include as limiting cases the usual Riemann and Minkowski geometries. The methodology is first illustrated in the context of the QED extension in a Riemann-Cartan background. The full SME in this background is then considered, and the leading-order terms in the SME action involving operators of mass dimension three and four are constructed. The incorporation of arbitrary Lorentz and CPT violation into general relativity and other theories of gravity based on Riemann-Cartan geometries is discussed. The dominant terms in the effective low-energy action for the gravitational sector are provided, thereby completing the formulation of the leading-order terms in the SME with gravity. Explicit Lorentz symmetry breaking is found to be incompatible with generic Riemann-Cartan geometries, but spontaneous Lorentz breaking evades this difficulty.Comment: 21 pages REVTeX, references added, accepted in Physical Review

Squaring the circle: a priority-setting method for evidence-based service development, reconciling research with multiple stakeholder views.

BACKGROUND: This study demonstrates a technique to aid the implementation of research findings through an example of improving services and self-management in longer-term depression. In common with other long-term conditions, policy in this field requires innovation to be undertaken in the context of a whole system of care, be cost-effective, evidence-based and to comply with national clinical guidelines. At the same time, successful service development must be acceptable to clinicians and service users and choices must be made within limited resources. This paper describes a novel way of resolving these competing requirements by reconciling different sources and types of evidence and systematically engaging multiple stakeholder views. METHODS: The study combined results from mathematical modelling of the care pathway, research evidence on effective interventions and findings from qualitative research with service users in a series of workshops to define, refine and select candidate service improvements. A final consensus-generating workshop used structured discussion and anonymised electronic voting. This was followed by an email survey to all stakeholders, to achieve a pre-defined criterion of consensus for six suggestions for implementation. RESULTS: An initial list of over 20 ideas was grouped into four main areas. At the final workshop, each idea was presented in person, visually and in writing to 40 people, who assigned themselves to one or more of five stakeholder groups: i) service users and carers, ii) clinicians, iii) managers, iv) commissioners and v) researchers. Many belonged to more than one group. After two rounds of voting, consensus was reached on seven ideas and one runner up. The survey then confirmed the top six ideas to be tested in practice. CONCLUSIONS: The method recruited and retained people with diverse experience and views within a health community and took account of a full range of evidence. It enabled a diverse group of stakeholders to travel together in a direction that converged with the messages coming out of the research and successfully yielded priorities for service improvement that met competing requirements

Marine genomics: at the interface of marine microbial ecology and biodiscovery

The composition and activities of microbes from diverse habitats have been the focus of intense research during the past decade with this research being spurred on largely by advances in molecular biology and genomic technologies. In recent years environmental microbiology has entered very firmly into the age of the ‘omics’– (meta)genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics – with probably others on the rise. Microbes are essential participants in all biogeochemical processes on our planet, and the practical applications of what we are learning from the use of molecular approaches has altered how we view biological systems. In addition, there is considerable potential to use information about uncultured microbes in biodiscovery research as microbes provide a rich source of discovery for novel genes, enzymes and metabolic pathways. This review explores the brief history of genomic and metagenomic approaches to study environmental microbial assemblages and describes some of the future challenges involved in broadening our approaches – leading to new insights for understanding environmental problems and enabling biodiscovery research

Use of stable isotope-labelled cells to identify active grazers of picocyanobacteria in ocean surface waters

Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus are the two most abundant marine cyanobacteria. They represent a significant fraction of the total primary production of the world oceans and comprise a major fraction of the prey biomass available to phagotrophic protists. Despite relatively rapid growth rates, picocyanobacterial cell densities in open-ocean surface waters remain fairly constant, implying steady mortality due to viral infection and consumption by predators. There have been several studies on grazing by specific protists on Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus in culture, and of cell loss rates due to overall grazing in the field. However, the specific sources of mortality of these primary producers in the wild remain unknown. Here, we use a modification of the RNA stable isotope probing technique (RNA-SIP), which involves adding labelled cells to natural seawater, to identify active predators that are specifically consuming Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus in the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean. Four major groups were identified as having their 18S rRNA highly labelled: Prymnesiophyceae (Haptophyta), Dictyochophyceae (Stramenopiles), Bolidomonas (Stramenopiles) and Dinoflagellata (Alveolata). For the first three of these, the closest relative of the sequences identified was a photosynthetic organism, indicating the presence of mixotrophs among picocyanobacterial predators. We conclude that the use of RNA-SIP is a useful method to identity specific predators for picocyanobacteria in situ, and that the method could possibly be used to identify other bacterial predators important in the microbial food-web

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente