Sustainable Work

In a highly globalised world where all production and consumption activities are internationally intertwined and the environmental consequences of those actions are hard to identify, rethinking the role of work in our societies according to sustainability principles is a complex but highly necessary task. Salaried work has become one of the crucial indicators to analyse any country in the world. By looking at the proportion of the population that is employed, the working conditions they have, and how productive they are when performing their tasks, it is possible to produce an image of a country's society to assist in the understanding of the levels of well-being of its citizens. Work and labour markets not only largely structure the way the economy and society function, they also heavily influence an individual's life satisfaction and happiness; virtually the entire life of a person is designed around their work. Given the relevance work has at all levels, diving into the concept of sustainable work is a crucial project due to the urgency of environmental matters. The biggest role humanity faces is how to transform our societies so that they are sustainable from a social, ecological and economic perspective. For the sustainable society vision, work would need to be drastically altered in order to adapt it to the multi-dimensional sustainability requirements. This research aims to contribute to this enterprise by identifying the conditions that define the sustainability of work and then present an overview of seven European countries from this perspective. The present document introduces our conceptualisation of work and explains its main components. These are designed around the idea of the sustainable society and are composed of individuals' needs, equity and planetary boundaries. The final section concludes and introduces the different country-case studies.Series: WWWforEurop

COVID-19 vaccination in haematology patients: an Australian and New Zealand consensus position statement

Australia and New Zealand have achieved excellent community control of COVID-19 infection. In light of the imminent COVID-19 vaccination roll out in both countries, representatives from the Haematology Society of Australia and New Zealand and infectious diseases specialists have collaborated on this consensus position statement regarding COVID-19 vaccination in patients with haematological disorders. It is our recommendation that patients with haematological malignancies, and some benign haematological disorders, should have expedited access to high-efficacy COVID-19 vaccines, given that these patients are at high risk of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 infection. Vaccination should not replace other public health measures in these patients, given that the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination, specifically in patients with haematological malignancies, is not known. Given the limited available data, prospective collection of safety and efficacy data of COVID-19 vaccination in this patient group is a priority

Delineating redox cooperativity in water-soluble and membrane multiheme cytochromes through protein design

Nature has evolved diverse electron transport proteins and multiprotein assemblies essential to the generation and transduction of biological energy. However, substantially modifying or adapting these proteins for user-defined applications or to gain fundamental mechanistic insight can be hindered by their inherent complexity. De novo protein design offers an attractive route to stripping away this confounding complexity, enabling us to probe the fundamental workings of these bioenergetic proteins and systems, while providing robust, modular platforms for constructing completely artificial electron-conducting circuitry. Here, we use a set of de novo designed mono-heme and di-heme soluble and membrane proteins to delineate the contributions of electrostatic micro-environments and dielectric properties of the surrounding protein medium on the inter-heme redox cooperativity that we have previously reported. Experimentally, we find that the two heme sites in both the water-soluble and membrane constructs have broadly equivalent redox potentials in isolation, in agreement with Poisson-Boltzmann Continuum Electrostatics calculations. BioDC, a Python program for the estimation of electron transfer energetics and kinetics within multiheme cytochromes, also predicts equivalent heme sites, and reports that burial within the low dielectric environment of the membrane strengthens heme-heme electrostatic coupling. We conclude that redox cooperativity in our diheme cytochromes is largely driven by heme electrostatic coupling and confirm that this effect is greatly strengthened by burial in the membrane. These results demonstrate that while our de novo proteins present minimalist, new-to-nature constructs, they enable the dissection and microscopic examination of processes fundamental to the function of vital, yet complex, bioenergetic assemblies.</p

COVID

Australia and New Zealand have achieved excellent community control of COVID‐19 infection. In light of the imminent COVID‐19 vaccination roll out in both countries, representatives from the Haematology Society of Australia and New Zealand and infectious diseases specialists have collaborated on this consensus position statement regarding COVID‐19 vaccination in patients with haematological disorders. It is our recommendation that patients with haematological malignancies, and some benign haematological disorders, should have expedited access to high‐efficacy COVID‐19 vaccines, given that these patients are at high risk of morbidity and mortality from COVID‐19 infection. Vaccination should not replace other public health measures in these patients, given that the effectiveness of COVID‐19 vaccination, specifically in patients with haematological malignancies, is not known. Given the limited available data, prospective collection of safety and efficacy data of COVID‐19 vaccination in this patient group is a priority