Label-free multi-step microfluidic device for mechanical characterization of blood cells: Diabetes type II

The increasing interest to establish significant correlations between blood cell mechanical measurements and blood diseases, has led to the promotion of microfluidic devices as attractive clinical tools for potential use in diagnosis. A multi-step microfluidic device able to separate red and white blood cells (RBCs and WBCs) from plasma and simultaneously measure blood cells deformability (5 and 20% of hematocrit) is presented in this paper. The device employs passive separation based on the cross-flow filtration principle, introduced at each daughter channel. At the outlets, hyperbolic geometries allow single-cell deformability analysis. The device was tested with blood from five healthy and fifteen diabetic type II voluntary donors. The results have shown that WBCs have lower deformability than RBCs, and no significant differences were observed in WBCs from healthy and pathological blood samples. In contrast, RBCs have shown significant differences, with pathological cells exhibiting lower deformability. Shear rheology has shown that blood from patients with type II diabetes has higher viscosity than blood from healthy donors. This microfluidic device has demonstrated the ability to reduce cell concentration at the outlets down to 1%, an ideal cell concentration for assessing the blood cells deformability, under healthy and pathological conditions. The results provide new insights and quantitative information about the hemodynamics of in vitro type II diabetes mellitus RBCs. Thus, such device can be a promising complement in clinical diagnosis and biological research as part of an integrated blood-on-a-chip system.This work was supported by Projects NORTE-01-0145-FEDER- 028178, NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-029394, NORTE-01-0145-FEDER- 030171 funded by COMPETE2020, NORTE2020, PORTUGAL2020, and FEDER. This work was also supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the strategic grants UIDB/04077/2020 and UIDB/00532/2020. D. Pinho and V. Faustino acknowledge the Ph.D. scholarships SFRH/BD/89077/2012 and SFRH/BD/99696/2014, respectively, both provided by FCT. Susana Catarino thanks FCT for her contract funding provided through 2020.00215.CEECIND. F. T. Pinho is thankful to FCT for financial support through projects LA/P/0045/2020 of the Associate Laboratory in Chemical Engineering (ALiCE) and projects UIDB/00532/2020 and UIDP/00532/2020 of Centro de Estudos de Fenómenos de Transporte.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Label-free multi-step microfluidic device for mechanical characterization of blood cells: diabetes type II

The increasing interest to establish significant correlations between blood cell mechanical measurements and blood diseases, has led to the promotion of microfluidic devices as attractive clinical tools for potential use in diagnosis. A multi-step microfluidic device able to separate red and white blood cells (RBCs and WBCs) from plasma and simultaneously measure blood cells deformability (5 and 20% of hematocrit) is presented in this paper. The device employs passive separation based on the cross-flow filtration principle, introduced at each daughter channel. At the outlets, hyperbolic geometries allow single-cell deformability analysis. The device was tested with blood from five healthy and fifteen diabetic type II voluntary donors. The results have shown that WBCs have lower deformability than RBCs, and no significant differences were observed in WBCs from healthy and pathological blood samples. In contrast, RBCs have shown significant differences, with pathological cells exhibiting lower deformability. Shear rheology has shown that blood from patients with type II diabetes has higher viscosity than blood from healthy donors. This microfluidic device has demonstrated the ability to reduce cell concentration at the outlets down to 1%, an ideal cell concentration for assessing the blood cells deformability, under healthy and pathological conditions. The results provide new insights and quantitative information about the hemodynamics of in vitro type II diabetes mellitus RBCs. Thus, such device can be a promising complement in clinical diagnosis and biological research as part of an integrated blood-on-a-chip system.This work was supported by Projects NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-028178, NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-029394, NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-030171 funded by COMPETE2020, NORTE2020, PORTUGAL2020, and FEDER. This work was also supported by Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the strategic grants UIDB/04077/2020 and UIDB/00532/2020. D. Pinho and V. Faustino acknowledge the Ph.D. scholarships SFRH/BD/89077/2012 and SFRH/BD/99696/2014, respectively, both provided by FCT. Susana Catarino thanks FCT for her contract funding provided through 2020.00215.CEECIND. F. T. Pinho is thankful to FCT for financial support through projects LA/P/0045/2020 of the Associate Laboratory in Chemical Engineering (ALiCE) and pro-jects UIDB/00532/2020 and UIDP/00532/2020 of Centro de Estudos de Fenomenos de Transporte

『忠度集』の「恋のこころを」の題詠歌について

The Portuguese sole, Synaptura lusitanica Capello, 1868, is distributed from Portugal to Angola. In Portugal, it occurs on the west coast and on the south-eastern coast. The genetic and morphological variation of S. lusitanica was studied based on protein electrophoresis and morphometric and meristic analyses of samples collected in four areas along the Portuguese coast. The genetic analysis was based on 12 loci, 10 of which were polymorphic. The morphological analysis included 12 morphometric measurements and 7 meristic counts. Both analyses indicated divergence between the west coast sample (Setúbal) and the other samples collected in the south-eastern coast (Olhão, Tavira and Vila Real de Santo António). Although the discreteness of the west coast individuals of S. lusitanica was not completely evident, a conservative approach to the fisheries management of this species would consider two independent stocks

Impact of the citizen science project COLLECT on ocean literacy and well-being within a north/west African and south-east Asian context

Plastic pollution is both a societal and environmental problem and citizen science has shown to be a useful tool to engage both the public and professionals in addressing it. However, knowledge on the educational and behavioral impacts of citizen science projects focusing on marine litter remains limited. Our preregistered study investigates the impact of the citizen science project Citizen Observation of Local Litter in coastal ECosysTems (COLLECT) on the participants' ocean literacy, pro-environmental intentions and attitudes, well-being, and nature connectedness, using a pretest-posttest design. A total of 410 secondary school students from seven countries, in Africa (Benin, Cabo Verde, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria) and Asia (Malaysia) were trained to sample plastics on sandy beaches and to analyze their collection in the classroom. Non-parametric statistical tests (n = 239 matched participants) demonstrate that the COLLECT project positively impacted ocean literacy (i.e., awareness and knowledge of marine litter, self-reported litter-reducing behaviors, attitudes towards beach litter removal). The COLLECT project also led to higher pro-environmental behavioral intentions for students in Benin and Ghana (implying a positive spillover effect) and higher well-being and nature connectedness for students in Benin. Results are interpreted in consideration of a high baseline in awareness and attitudes towards marine litter, a low internal consistency of pro-environmental attitudes, the cultural context of the participating countries, and the unique settings of the project's implementation. Our study highlights the benefits and challenges of understanding how citizen science impacts the perceptions and behaviors towards marine litter in youth from the respective regions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain

ience, this issue p. eaap8757 Structured Abstract INTRODUCTION Brain disorders may exhibit shared symptoms and substantial epidemiological comorbidity, inciting debate about their etiologic overlap. However, detailed study of phenotypes with different ages of onset, severity, and presentation poses a considerable challenge. Recently developed heritability methods allow us to accurately measure correlation of genome-wide common variant risk between two phenotypes from pools of different individuals and assess how connected they, or at least their genetic risks, are on the genomic level. We used genome-wide association data for 265,218 patients and 784,643 control participants, as well as 17 phenotypes from a total of 1,191,588 individuals, to quantify the degree of overlap for genetic risk factors of 25 common brain disorders. RATIONALE Over the past century, the classification of brain disorders has evolved to reflect the medical and scientific communities' assessments of the presumed root causes of clinical phenomena such as behavioral change, loss of motor function, or alterations of consciousness. Directly observable phenomena (such as the presence of emboli, protein tangles, or unusual electrical activity patterns) generally define and separate neurological disorders from psychiatric disorders. Understanding the genetic underpinnings and categorical distinctions for brain disorders and related phenotypes may inform the search for their biological mechanisms. RESULTS Common variant risk for psychiatric disorders was shown to correlate significantly, especially among attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder (MDD), and schizophrenia. By contrast, neurological disorders appear more distinct from one another and from the psychiatric disorders, except for migraine, which was significantly correlated to ADHD, MDD, and Tourette syndrome. We demonstrate that, in the general population, the personality trait neuroticism is significantly correlated with almost every psychiatric disorder and migraine. We also identify significant genetic sharing between disorders and early life cognitive measures (e.g., years of education and college attainment) in the general population, demonstrating positive correlation with several psychiatric disorders (e.g., anorexia nervosa and bipolar disorder) and negative correlation with several neurological phenotypes (e.g., Alzheimer's disease and ischemic stroke), even though the latter are considered to result from specific processes that occur later in life. Extensive simulations were also performed to inform how statistical power, diagnostic misclassification, and phenotypic heterogeneity influence genetic correlations. CONCLUSION The high degree of genetic correlation among many of the psychiatric disorders adds further evidence that their current clinical boundaries do not reflect distinct underlying pathogenic processes, at least on the genetic level. This suggests a deeply interconnected nature for psychiatric disorders, in contrast to neurological disorders, and underscores the need to refine psychiatric diagnostics. Genetically informed analyses may provide important "scaffolding" to support such restructuring of psychiatric nosology, which likely requires incorporating many levels of information. By contrast, we find limited evidence for widespread common genetic risk sharing among neurological disorders or across neurological and psychiatric disorders. We show that both psychiatric and neurological disorders have robust correlations with cognitive and personality measures. Further study is needed to evaluate whether overlapping genetic contributions to psychiatric pathology may influence treatment choices. Ultimately, such developments may pave the way toward reduced heterogeneity and improved diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5,6,7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8,9,10,11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases.13,14,15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

Micro- and nanoplastics effects in a multiple stressed marine environment

Micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) pollution is an environmental issue of concern, but current effect assessments often overlook realistic scenarios, and a contextualised vision of the magnitude of the impact of complex mixtures of MNPs together with other environmental stressors is urgently needed. Plastic particles exist in the environment as complex mixtures of particles from various size ranges, shapes, and polymer types, but the potential effects of realistic MNPs mixtures and concentrations are still poorly understood, and current effects data is insufficient to produce high quality risk assessments. Organisms exposed to MNPs in the marine environment are simultaneously subjected to global change driven stressors, amongst others, such as ocean warming (OW), marine heat waves (MHW), ocean acidification (OA), and ocean deoxygenation (OD). Stress responses due to MNPs ingestion can, in particular cases, lead to a metabolic and energetic cost, which may be aggravated in the case of organisms already vulnerable due to simultaneous exposure to global change-related stressors. In this work, we discuss how MNPs effects could be assessed while considering plastics complexity and other environmental stressors. We identify knowledge gaps in MNPs assessments, acknowledge the importance of environmental data acquisition and availability for improved assessments, and consider how mechanistic ecological models can be used to unveil and to increase our understanding of MNPs effects on marine ecosystems. Understanding the importance of plastic pollution in the context of other stressors such as climate change and their potential combined effects on marine ecosystems is important. The assessment of realistic effects of MNPs on all biological levels of organisation should consider the co-occurrence in the environment of global change-related stressors. Even though the number of studies is still limited, recent effect assessment reports indicate that the MNPs interaction with global change stressors can affect processes in organisms such as ingestion and digestion, energy allocation, growth, and fecundity. The potential impact of this interaction at population levels is largely unknown and requires increased attention from the research community, to provide information to stakeholders on the vulnerability of marine species and ecosystems now and under future environmental conditions

Properties, morphogenesis, and effect of acidification on spines of the cidaroid sea urchin Phyllacanthus imperialis

Cidaroid sea urchins are the sister clade to all other extant echinoids and have numerous unique features, including unusual primary spines. These lack an epidermis when mature, exposing their high-magnesium calcite skeleton to seawater and allowing the settlement of numerous epibionts. Cidaroid spines are made of an inner core of classical monocrystalline skeleton and an outer layer of polycrystalline magnesium calcite. Interestingly, cidaroids survived the Permian-Triassic crisis, which was characterized by severe acidification of the ocean. Currently, numerous members of this group inhabit the deep ocean, below the saturation horizon for their magnesium calcite skeleton. This suggests that members of this taxon may have characteristics that may allow them to resist ongoing ocean acidification linked to global change. We compared the effect of acidified seawater (pH 7.2, 7.6, or 8.2) on mature spines with a fully developed cortex to that on young, growing spines, in which only the stereom core was developed. The cortex of mature spines was much more resistant to etching than the stereom of young spines. We then examined the properties of the cortex that might be responsible for its resistance compared to the underlying stereomic layers, namely morphology, intramineral organic material, magnesium concentration, intrinsic solubility of the mineral, and density. Our results indicate that the acidification resistance of the cortex is probably due to its lower magnesium concentration and higher density, the latter reducing the amount of surface area in contact with acidified seawater. The biofilm and epibionts covering the cortex of mature spines may also reduce its exposure to seawater. © 2014, The American Microscopical Society, Inc

Science and Heritage Language Integrated Learning (SHLIL):Evidence of the effectiveness of an innovative science outreach program for migrant students

Migrant students tend to underperform in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects and are less likely to pursue higher education in STEM when compared with their nonmigrant peers. Given the substantial increase in migration, this disparity has been a central concern in science education in many European countries. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of an innovative science outreach program that brings together migrant students and STEM professionals with the same linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The program consists of one-off workshops that follow an inquiry-based approach and include hands-on activities and science communication in the students' heritage language. Using surveys with adapted scales and open-ended questions, we applied a randomized block design with waitlist control groups and repeated measures. Eighty-three Portuguese-speaking migrant students aged 6–17 years participated in the workshops in Germany and the United Kingdom. Results indicate that both the students and STEM professionals evaluated the program positively and that students who participated in the workshops tended to demonstrate an increase in their attainment value for science and an increase in their self-concept of ability for the heritage language 4 weeks after the intervention when compared with students in the control condition. These effects were particularly pronounced for students with low prior motivation to study science or speak the heritage language. Our results thus show that it is possible to foster migrant students' attainment value for science and increase their self-concept of ability regarding the heritage language through a brief science outreach intervention