Efficient Identification of HIV Serodiscordant Couples by Existing HIV Testing Programs in South Brazil.

ObjectiveTo examine the feasibility of identifying HIV negative at risk individuals in HIV serodiscordant couples, during voluntary HIV testing in South Brazil.MethodsWe surveyed HIV testers at 4 public testing sites in Rio Grande do Sul. We obtained information on risk behaviors and sexual partnerships. HIV testing and testing for recent infection were performed; HIV prevalence and risk behaviors were assessed among subjects who reported having a steady partner who was HIV positive (serodiscordant group) and compared with the general testing population.ResultsAmong 3100 patients, 490 (15.8%) reported being in a steady relationship with an HIV positive partner. New HIV infections were diagnosed in 23% of the serodiscordant group (vs. 13% in the general population, p = 0.01); among newly positive subjects, recent HIV infections were more frequent (23/86, 26.7%) among testers with positive partners than among the general testing group (52/334; 15.6%; p = 0.016). Less than half of the serodiscordant testers reported having used a condom during the last sexual intercourse with their HIV-positive partner. Participants with inconsistent condom use with steady partner were four times more likely to test positive for HIV compared to those who reported always using condoms with the steady partner (OR: 4.2; 95% CI: 2.3 to 7.5).ConclusionIt is highly feasible to identify large numbers of HIV susceptible individuals who are in HIV serodiscordant relationships in South Brazil testing sites. Condom use within HIV serodiscordant couples is low in this setting, suggesting urgent need for biomedical prevention strategies to reduce HIV transmission

Binocular vision of designing process for whole systems design crossing boundaries

In the spirit of honoring Bateson’s metaphor of binocular vision (1979), this proposal brings together two design scenes for comparison in the mind of the reader as a way of generating new connections relating design and systems thinking as they played out (and are playing out at the time of this writing) in practice together with stakeholders and others in international and intercultural design contexts. The two comparative design scenes we explore are the Generation of Peace Project in the state of Ceara, Brazil, where more than 10,000 co-researchers sought to foster cultures of peace statewide, and the design of a Design Thinking course in the Honors College at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. Connecting these two distinct scenes are not only shared practices rooted in design and systems thinking but also the World Café (Brown and Isaacs, 2005; Steier, Brown, & Mesquita da Silva, 2015), a group communication process facilitated in each scene that later also emerged as a conversational bridge connecting the scenes. As a first scene for binocular vision, the setting is Brazil’s Generation of Peace Project, a cooperation between the State Department of Education of Ceará (SEDUC), Brazil, and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), aimed at building networks of a culture of peace between 700 high schools and their communities. The focus on peace in a broad sense, promoting inclusion and respect for diversity, directly and indirectly involved almost 500,000 youth and their families as well as over 16,000 teachers and school administrators, in creating and maintaining a culture of peace. The voices of most societal segments brought in conversation facilitated by the World Café across the whole process of inception and development of the project made it possible to reach more than 200 high schools in less than a year. On the fourth year, in 2014, the project certified 509 schools that presented evidence of building peace on a daily basis, accounting for almost 75% of the entire school system explicitly engaged in the movement. The syncretization of the concepts, tools, and methodologies of systems thinking and the vision, values, and philosophy of ecological thought, elegantly organized in Stephen Sterling’s (2003) thesis, gave rise to the conditions that allowed for the schools to contribute to the project’s evolution according to their local characteristics, sharing the same framework with the other schools while providing unique experiences. Hence, “Generation of Peace” is a result of a whole systems design approach (Mesquita da Silva, 2017). As a second scene for binocular vision, the setting is in the United States, in the Honors College at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, Florida, where college leadership sought to bring about change together with their students across a number of different dimensions of student life, ranging from the design of a new, dedicated Honors College building to the redesign of students’ curricular processes. To begin that work, students were invited as co-designers together with college leadership and faculty in bringing about change in the College and the larger campus environment through recursively designing their (our) Design Thinking course. These student co-designers were also invited to consider their observing frames (Steier and Jorgenson, 2003) in relation to their learning together with others, and have engaged so far in diverse design projects ranging from enhancing support of refugees moving to the Tampa Bay area to designing green spaces in USF’s Marshall Student Center, and they are regularly engaged in redesigning the course – ranging from reflection-in-action during group activities in a single class setting to inviting redesign of the course as a whole at the end of the term. By looking at these two scenes in “double vision,” a number of key principles and patterns emerged for us that both connect these local contexts and offer opportunities for further inquiry as more general design principles. Most notably, in this proposal we highlight the recursive connections among design and communication, including how communication emerged as a key focus of design along with the other “objects” of design (Thompson, Steier, & Ostrenko, 2014) in both scenes, and also highlight an emergent need across both scenes for focus on cultivating learning from a whole systems perspective. In attending to communication as a designable aspect of the larger design efforts for both scenes, we extended Glanville’s observation (2012) that design is a conversational process among designers by opening conversations through World Cafés and other group processes with stakeholders and designers together as a way of bridging multiple levels of communication – similar in spirit to Bateson’s development of the “orders of learning” frame (1972) – affording focus on both communication process and content such that a new, “third language” might be cogenerated by designers and stakeholders together, leading to new opportunities for learning and shared understanding about local design contexts. Building on this attention to communication process as a designable aspect for design teams and stakeholders together, we also brought forward the integration of action and inquiry from both second-order cybernetics and action research (Greenwood and Levin, 2007) as a frame of colearning- suggesting that the learners in a design scene include both the designers AND the stakeholders, as well as the larger whole of designers and stakeholders together, as they jointly work toward whole systems design. Through this mutual learning and languaging together, new frames and metaphors emerged cogeneratively with new perspectives on shared possibilities for action. In bringing these systems and design thinking principles into practice through hundreds of meetings we co-facilitated across both of these scenes, ranging from hosting World Cafés for cultivation of peace in Brazil to facilitating students’ learning related to design research in a Design Thinking course, this proposal highlights the importance of transitioning design “meetings” from a frame that primarily foregrounds products over processes and roles over activities to a frame that affords a focus on relationships through joint attention to communication process and on mutual learning toward whole systems design

Identification of sources of seedling resistance to Phytophthora capsici in Cucumis melo

The employment of genetic resistance to minimize yield losses induced by Phytophthora capsici remains unexplored in melon (Cucumis melo). A diverse collection of melon accessions was evaluated against P. capsici isolates at the seedling stage. In the frst screening assay, 105 accessions were evaluated using isolate PCpe-04 obtained from cucumber (Cucumis sativus). In a second assay, 31 accessions displaying high levels of resistance in the frst assay were challenged with a distinct isolate (PCpe-09 also from cucumber). In a third assay, a subset of 14 selected accessions was re-evaluated using isolates PCpe-09 and PCmo-07 (from strawberry). In the last screening, seven accessions with high levels of resistance across all assays were challenged with fve isolates from representative host species [PC-Vagem (snap bean), PCp-129 (Capsicum chinense), PCp-155 (C. annuum), PCpe-09 and PCmo-07] to assess their reaction against a varied sample of P. capsici isolates. For two accessions (CNPH-093 and L040), all plants remained free of symptoms after inoculation with all fve isolates. Accessions WMR-29, CNPH 084, CNPH 088 and CNPH 092 were also free of symptoms to all isolates, except PCmo-07. These large-spectrum resistance sources might be useful for breeding programs aiming to incorporate resistance against P. capsici in elite melon lines

Early Ultraviolet Observations of Type IIn Supernovae Constrain the Asphericity of Their Circumstellar Material

© 2020. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.. We present a survey of the early evolution of 12 Type IIn supernovae (SNe IIn) at ultraviolet and visible light wavelengths. We use this survey to constrain the geometry of the circumstellar material (CSM) surrounding SN IIn explosions, which may shed light on their progenitor diversity. In order to distinguish between aspherical and spherical CSM, we estimate the blackbody radius temporal evolution of the SNe IIn of our sample, following the method introduced by Soumagnac et al. We find that higher-luminosity objects tend to show evidence for aspherical CSM. Depending on whether this correlation is due to physical reasons or to some selection bias, we derive a lower limit between 35% and 66% for the fraction of SNe IIn showing evidence for aspherical CSM. This result suggests that asphericity of the CSM surrounding SNe IIn is common - consistent with data from resolved images of stars undergoing considerable mass loss. It should be taken into account for more realistic modeling of these events

The metalloprotein YhcH is an anomerase providing N-acetylneuraminate aldolase with the open form of its substrate

N-acetylneuraminate (Neu5Ac), an abundant sugar present in glycans in vertebrates and some bacteria, can be used as an energy source by several prokaryotes, including Escherichia coli. In solution, more than 99% of Neu5Ac is in cyclic form (≈92% beta-anomer and ≈7% alpha-anomer), whereas <0.5% is in the open form. The aldolase that initiates Neu5Ac metabolism in E. coli, NanA, has been reported to act on the alphaanomer. Surprisingly, when we performed this reaction at pH 6 to minimize spontaneous anomerization, we found NanA and its human homolog NPL preferentially metabolize the open form of this substrate. We tested whether the E. coli Neu5Ac anomerase NanM could promote turnover, finding it stimulated the utilization of both beta and alpha-anomers by NanA in vitro. However, NanM is localized in the periplasmic space and cannot facilitate Neu5Ac metabolism by NanA in the cytoplasm in vivo. We discovered that YhcH, a cytoplasmic protein encoded by many Neu5Ac catabolic operons and belonging to a protein family of unknown function (DUF386), also facilitated Neu5Ac utilization by NanA and NPL and displayed Neu5Ac anomerase activity in vitro. YhcH contains Zn, and its accelerating effect on the aldolase reaction was inhibited by metal chelators. Remarkably, several transition metals accelerated Neu5Ac anomerization in the absence of enzyme. Experiments with E. coli mutants indicated that YhcH expression provides a selective advantage for growth on Neu5Ac. In conclusion, YhcH plays the unprecedented role of providing an aldolase with the preferred unstable open form of its substrate

“Quando o negro se movimenta, toda a possibilidade de futuro com ele se move”

The aim of this paper is to identify how Afrofuturist language appropriates related proposals such as the Brazilian black movement, as a strategy of resistance to racism. The analysis methodology is based on a literature review based on the studies of identity representation (Stuart Hall), Black Movement (Nilma Lino Gomes) and Afrofuturism (Ytasha Womack). Thus, this study demonstrates how design techniques inserted in aesthetic and artistic productions become crucial tools for the construction of images and social emancipation from the negative representations in contemporary culture.O objetivo deste artigo é identificar como a linguagem Afrofuturista se apropria de proposições correlatas as lutas do movimento negro brasileiro, comouma estratégia de resistência em relação ao racismo. A metodologia de análise se baseia em uma revisão bibliográfica a partir dos estudos de representação identitária (Stuart Hall), Movimento Negro (Nilma Lino Gomes) e Afrofuturismo (Ytasha Womack). Assim, este estudo demonstra como as técnicas de design inseridas nas produções estéticas e artísticas se tornam ferramentas cruciais para a construção imagética e emancipação social a partir das representações das populações negras na cultura contemporânea

Development of a reverse genetics system for Toscana virus (lineage A)

Toscana virus (TOSV) is a Phlebovirus in the Phenuiviridae family, order Bunyavirales, found in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean. TOSV is an important cause of seasonal acute meningitis and encephalitis within its range. Here, we determined the full sequence of the TOSV strain 1500590, a lineage A virus obtained from an infected patient (Marseille, 2007) and used this in combination with other sequence information to construct functional cDNA plasmids encoding the viral L, M, and S antigenomic sequences under the control of the T7 RNA promoter to recover recombinant viruses. Importantly, resequencing identified two single nucleotide changes to a TOSV reference genome, which, when corrected, restored functionality to the polymerase L and made it possible to recover infectious recombinant TOSV (rTOSV) from cDNA, as well as establish a minigenome system. Using reverse genetics, we produced an NSs-deletant rTOSV and also obtained viruses expressing reporter genes instead of NSs. The availability of such a system assists investigating questions that require genetic manipulation of the viral genome, such as investigations into replication and tropism, and beyond these fundamental aspects, also the development of novel vaccine design strategies

The functional response of a generalist predator

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