Perfluorodecalin and bone regeneration

Perfluorodecalin (PFD) is a chemically and biologically inert biomaterial and, as many perfluorocarbons, is also hydrophobic, radiopaque and has a high solute capacity for gases such as oxygen. In this article we have demonstrated, both in vitro and in vivo, that PFD may significantly enhance bone regeneration. Firstly, the potential benefit of PFD was demonstrated by prolonging the survival of bone marrow cells cultured in anaerobic conditions. These findings translated in vivo, where PFD incorporated into bone-marrow-loaded 3D-printed scaffolds substantially improved their capacity to regenerate bone. Secondly, in addition to biological applications, we have also shown that PFD improves the radiopacity of bone regeneration biomaterials, a key feature required for the visualisation of biomaterials during and after surgical implantation. Finally, we have shown how the extreme hydrophobicity of PFD enables the fabrication of highly cohesive self-setting injectable biomaterials for bone regeneration. In conclusion, perfluorocarbons would appear to be highly beneficial additives to a number of regenerative biomaterials, especially those for bone regeneration

Why do you drink caffeine? The development of the Motives for Caffeine Consumption Questionnaire (MCCQ) and its relationship with gender, age and the types of caffeinated beverages

Caffeine is the most popular psychoactive substance that is consumed worldwide. As motives influence behavior, investigation of the motivational background of caffeine consumption should help provide a better understanding of the popularity of caffeinated products. The present study aimed (i) to explore and operationalize the motives of caffeine consumption and (ii) to reveal possible differences in the motives regarding gender, age and the type of caffeinated products consumed. Motives for caffeine consumption were collected from regular caffeine consumers (N = 26) and were informed by a review of the relevant literature. Following this, a cross-sectional study was conducted on a convenience sample of Hungarian university students and working adults (N = 598). The participants completed the Motives for Caffeine Consumption Questionnaire and the Caffeine Consumption Questionnaire. Six motivational factors were identified: Alertness, Habit, Mood, Social, Taste and Symptom Management. Women had higher scores on Habit, Social, Taste and Symptom Management. Younger participants had higher scores on Alertness than the older group, and the older group had higher scores on Habit and Symptom Management. Five types of caffeine users were identified. Those who consumed (i) coffee, (ii) tea, (iii) energy drinks, (iv) coffee and tea and (v) mixed drinks. Several differences between the five groups were revealed across all motives except for Taste. The present study developed a robust psychometric instrument for assessing caffeine consumption motives. The factors varied in importance in relation to gender, age and caffeine consumption habits

Evaluating a selective prevention programme for binge drinking among young adolescents: study protocol of a randomized controlled trial

Contains fulltext : 99319.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Background In comparison to other Europe countries, Dutch adolescents are at the top in drinking frequency and binge drinking. A total of 75% of the Dutch 12 to 16 year olds who drink alcohol also engage in binge drinking. A prevention programme called Preventure was developed in Canada to prevent adolescents from binge drinking. This article describes a study that aims to assess the effects of this selective school-based prevention programme in the Netherlands. Methods A randomized controlled trial is being conducted among 13 to 15-year-old adolescents in secondary schools. Schools were randomly assigned to the intervention and control conditions. The intervention condition consisted of two 90 minute group sessions, carried out at the participants' schools and provided by a qualified counsellor and a co-facilitator. The intervention targeted young adolescents who demonstrated personality risk for alcohol abuse. The group sessions were adapted to four personality profiles. The control condition received no further intervention above the standard substance use education sessions provided in the Dutch national curriculum. The primary outcomes will be the percentage reduction in binge drinking, weekly drinking and drinking-related problems after three specified time periods. A screening survey collected data by means of an Internet questionnaire. Students have completed, or will complete, a post-treatment survey after 2, 6, and 12 months, also by means of an online questionnaire. Discussion This study protocol presents the design and current implementation of a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a selective alcohol prevention programme. We expect that a significantly lower number of adolescents will binge drink, drink weekly, and have drinking-related problems in the intervention condition compared to the control condition, as a result of this intervention.9 p

Coupled aquaponics systems

Coupled aquaponics is the archetype form of aquaponics. The technical complexity increases with the scale of production and required water treatment, e.g. filtration, UV light for microbial control, automatic controlled feeding, computerization and biosecurity. Upscaling is realized through multiunit systems that allow staggered fish production, parallel cultivation of different plants and application of several hydroponic subsystems. The main task of coupled aquaponics is the purification of aquaculture process water through integration of plants which add economic benefits when selecting suitable species like herbs, medicinal plants or ornamentals. Thus, coupled aquaponics with closed water recirculation systems has a particular role to fulfil. Under fully closed recirculation of nutrient enriched water, the symbiotic community of fish, plants and bacteria can result in higher yields compared with stand-alone fish production and/or plant cultivation. Fish and plant choices are highly diverse and only limited by water quality parameters, strongly influenced by fish feed, the plant cultivation area and component ratios that are often not ideal. Carps, tilapia and catfish are most commonly used, though more sensitive fish species and crayfish have been applied. Polyponics and additional fertilizers are methods to improve plant quality in the case of growth deficiencies, boosting plant production and increasing total yield. The main advantages of coupled aquaponics are in the most efficient use of resources such as feed for nutrient input, phosphorous, water and energy as well as in an increase of fish welfare. The multivariate system design approach allows coupled aquaponics to be installed in all geographic regions, from the high latitudes to arid and desert regions, with specific adaptation to the local environmental conditions. This chapter provides an overview of the historical development, general system design, upscaling, saline and brackish water systems, fish and plant choices as well as management issues of coupled aquaponics especially in Europe

BioC interoperability track overview

BioC is a new simple XML format for sharing biomedical text and annotations and libraries to read and write that format. This promotes the development of interoperable tools for natural language processing (NLP) of biomedical text. The interoperability track at the BioCreative IV workshop featured contributions using or highlighting the BioC format. These contributions included additional implementations of BioC, many new corpora in the format, biomedical NLP tools consuming and producing the format and online services using the format. The ease of use, broad support and rapidly growing number of tools demonstrate the need for and value of the BioC format. Database URL: http://bioc.sourceforge.net/

Overview of the BioCreative VI Precision Medicine Track: mining protein interactions and mutations for precision medicine

The Precision Medicine Initiative is a multicenter effort aiming at formulating personalized treatments leveraging on individual patient data (clinical, genome sequence and functional genomic data) together with the information in large knowledge bases (KBs) that integrate genome annotation, disease association studies, electronic health records and other data types. The biomedical literature provides a rich foundation for populating these KBs, reporting genetic and molecular interactions that provide the scaffold for the cellular regulatory systems and detailing the influence of genetic variants in these interactions. The goal of BioCreative VI Precision Medicine Track was to extract this particular type of information and was organized in two tasks: (i) document triage task, focused on identifying scientific literature containing experimentally verified protein–protein interactions (PPIs) affected by genetic mutations and (ii) relation extraction task, focused on extracting the affected interactions (protein pairs). To assist system developers and task participants, a large-scale corpus of PubMed documents was manually annotated for this task. Ten teams worldwide contributed 22 distinct text-mining models for the document triage task, and six teams worldwide contributed 14 different text-mining systems for the relation extraction task. When comparing the text-mining system predictions with human annotations, for the triage task, the best F-score was 69.06%, the best precision was 62.89%, the best recall was 98.0% and the best average precision was 72.5%. For the relation extraction task, when taking homologous genes into account, the best F-score was 37.73%, the best precision was 46.5% and the best recall was 54.1%. Submitted systems explored a wide range of methods, from traditional rule-based, statistical and machine learning systems to state-of-the-art deep learning methods. Given the level of participation and the individual team results we find the precision medicine track to be successful in engaging the text-mining research community. In the meantime, the track produced a manually annotated corpus of 5509 PubMed documents developed by BioGRID curators and relevant for precision medicine. The data set is freely available to the community, and the specific interactions have been integrated into the BioGRID data set. In addition, this challenge provided the first results of automatically identifying PubMed articles that describe PPI affected by mutations, as well as extracting the affected relations from those articles. Still, much progress is needed for computer-assisted precision medicine text mining to become mainstream. Future work should focus on addressing the remaining technical challenges and incorporating the practical benefits of text-mining tools into real-world precision medicine information-related curation