Chytrid fungus infections in laboratory and introduced <i>Xenopus laevis </i>populations:assessing the risks for U.K. native amphibians

The chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) is notorious amongst current conservation biology challenges, responsible for mass mortality and extinction of amphibian species. World trade in amphibians is implicated in global dissemination. Exports of South African Xenopus laevis have led to establishment of this invasive species on four continents. Bd naturally infects this host in Africa and now occurs in several introduced populations. However, no previous studies have investigated transfer of infection into co-occurring native amphibian faunas. A survey of 27 U.K. institutions maintaining X. laevis for research showed that most laboratories have low-level infection, a risk for native species if animals are released into the wild. RT-PCR assays showed Bd in two introduced U.K. populations of X. laevis, in Wales and Lincolnshire. Laboratory and field studies demonstrated that infection levels increase with stress, especially low temperature. In the U.K., native amphibians may be exposed to intense transmission in spring when they enter ponds to spawn alongside X. laevis that have cold-elevated Bd infections. Exposure to cross-infection has probably been recurrent since the introduction of X. laevis, &gt;20years in Lincolnshire and 50years in Wales. These sites provide an important test for assessing the impact of X. laevis on Bd spread. However, RT-PCR assays on 174 native amphibians (Bufo, Rana, Lissotriton and Triturus spp.), sympatric with the Bd-infected introduced populations, showed no foci of self-sustaining Bd transmission associated with X. laevis. The abundance of these native amphibians suggested no significant negative population-level effect after the decades of co-occurrence

Pojamide: An HDAC3-selective ferrocene analogue with remarkably enhanced redox-triggered ferrocenium activity in cells.

A ferrocene containing ortho-aminoanilide, N1-(2-aminophenyl)-N8-ferrocenyloctanediamide, 2b (Pojamide) displayed nanomolar potency vs. HDAC3. Compared to RGFP966, a potent and selective HDAC3 inhibitor, Pojamide displayed superior activity in HCT116 colorectal cancer cell invasion assays; however, TCH106 and Romidepsin, potent HDAC1 inhibitors, outperformed Pojamide in cellular proliferation and colony formation assays. Together, these data suggest that HDAC 1 & 3 inhibition is desirable to achieve maximum anti-cancer benefits. Additionally, we explored Pojamide-induced redox-pharmacology. Indeed, treating HCT116 cells with Pojamide, SNP (sodium nitroprusside) and glutathione (GSH) led to greatly enhanced cytotoxicity and DNA damage attributed to activation to an Fe(III) species

Universal heteroplasmy of human mitochondrial DNA.

Mammalian cells contain thousands of copies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). At birth, these are thought to be identical in most humans. Here, we use long read length ultra-deep resequencing-by-synthesis to interrogate regions of the mtDNA genome from related and unrelated individuals at unprecedented resolution. We show that very low-level heteroplasmic variance is present in all tested healthy individuals, and is likely to be due to both inherited and somatic single base substitutions. Using this approach, we demonstrate an increase in mtDNA mutations in the skeletal muscle of patients with a proofreading-deficient mtDNA polymerase γ due to POLG mutations. In contrast, we show that OPA1 mutations, which indirectly affect mtDNA maintenance, do not increase point mutation load. The demonstration of universal mtDNA heteroplasmy has fundamental implications for our understanding of mtDNA inheritance and evolution. Ostensibly de novo somatic mtDNA mutations, seen in mtDNA maintenance disorders and neurodegenerative disease and aging, will partly be due to the clonal expansion of low-level inherited variants

Locating farmer-based knowledge and vested interests in natural resource management: the interface of ethnopedology, land tenure and gender in soil erosion management in the Manupali watershed, Philippines

This paper examines local soil knowledge and management in the Manupali watershed in the Philippines

'You likes your way, we got our own way': Gypsy and Travellers' views on infant feeding and health professional support

Background: Gypsies and Travellers are known to have poor health status and access to health services, even in comparison to other ethnic minority groups. People from this stigmatised ethnic group are rarely consulted about their health needs or health service provision. Optimal infant feeding in the first year of life has the potential to improve life long health. Objective: The aim of this study is to explore mothers and grandmothers' views on feeding in the first year of life, including the support provided by health professionals. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposively selected sample of 22 mothers and grandmothers of English Gypsy, Irish Traveller and Romanian Roma ethnicity between November 2011 and February 2012 in a city in South-West England. Results Few women perceived themselves as requiring help from health professionals in infant feeding, as acceptable and accessible support was available from within their own communities. Roma mothers described a tradition of breastfeeding and appropriately timed weaning, while English Gypsies and Irish Travellers customarily practised less healthy infant feeding. When mothers requested support, health service provision was often found inadequate. Conclusion: Exploring the views of Gypsies and Travellers is important to gain insight into the provision of health services for this marginalised ethnic group. This study has implications for policy and the practice of health professionals, in indicating the customary feeding behaviours of some Gypsy and Travellers, and highlighting areas meriting culturally sensitive health promotion

“I was a full time proper smoker”: A qualitative exploration of smoking in the home after childbirth among women who relapse postpartum

Background: Many women stop smoking during pregnancy but relapse shortly afterwards, potentially putting their infants at risk of secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure. Women who were able to stop during pregnancy may be a motivated group, receptive to making behaviour changes postpartum to protect their infant from SHS exposure. Understanding more about their experiences of relapse, and if this influences home smoking behaviours and children’s exposure to SHS in the home may help to inform intervention development to prevent infant SHS exposure. Methods: Guided by interpretative phenomenological methodology we conducted and analysed nine semi-structured interviews with women who quit smoking during pregnancy, but relapsed ≤3 months postpartum. Findings: Central to mothers’ accounts of their smoking behaviours during pregnancy and postpartum was their desire to be a ‘responsible mother’. Mothers described using strategies to protect their infant from SHS exposure, and held strong negative attitudes towards other smoking parents. After relapsing, mothers appeared to reposition themselves as ‘social’ or ‘occasional’ smokers rather than ‘regular’ smokers Conclusions: Findings suggest that interventions to prevent/reduce infants' home SHS exposure should build on mothers' intentions to be responsible parents. As mothers who relapse principally view themselves as ‘social’ or ‘occasional’ smokers, interventions that are highlighted as relevant for women with these types of smoking patterns may be more likely to be responded to, and, ultimately, be effective

ReadNet: A Hierarchical Transformer Framework for Web Article Readability Analysis

Analyzing the readability of articles has been an important sociolinguistic task. Addressing this task is necessary to the automatic recommendation of appropriate articles to readers with different comprehension abilities, and it further benefits education systems, web information systems, and digital libraries. Current methods for assessing readability employ empirical measures or statistical learning techniques that are limited by their ability to characterize complex patterns such as article structures and semantic meanings of sentences. In this paper, we propose a new and comprehensive framework which uses a hierarchical self-attention model to analyze document readability. In this model, measurements of sentence-level difficulty are captured along with the semantic meanings of each sentence. Additionally, the sentence-level features are incorporated to characterize the overall readability of an article with consideration of article structures. We evaluate our proposed approach on three widely-used benchmark datasets against several strong baseline approaches. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on estimating the readability for various web articles and literature.Comment: ECIR 202