Methodology to Promote Physical Activity Monitoring Adherence in Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background: Objective physical activity (PA) monitoring via accelerometry is both costly and time consuming. Furthermore, overall adherence to a monitoring protocol is often complicated by disability. Therefore it is essential that strategies for supporting accelerometer wear for youth with disabilities are maximized. The purpose of this perspective was to provide researchers a set of efficacious PA monitoring strategies based on the retrospective examination of support methodology on adherence rates for youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Method: Accelerometer data was collected for 163 participants with ASD in three independent cohorts. Each cohort was provided a varying set of support strategies to help maximize adherence. Chi-square analysis was used to determine differences in adherence between each cohort.Results: Adherence rates significantly increased from 51.9% in cohort 1 to 88.7% in cohort 2 [X2(1) =18.333, p<0.001] and again from 88.7% in cohort 2 to 97.4% in cohort 3 [X2(1) =2.663, p=0.103]. The greatest increase in adherence was observed from 51.9% in cohort 1 to 97.4% in cohort 3 [X2(1) =19.837, p<0.001]. Support strategies associated with these increases included: 1) social story; 2) incentive; 3) concealing techniques; and 4) 24 hrs/day wear instructions. Conclusions: Adherence to PA measurement increased when additional support strategies were utilized in combination with a traditional protocol. We recommend these support methodology be considered as preliminary best-practices when measuring objective PA in youth with ASD with likely success in other disability populations

Aflatoxins in wildlife feed: Know how to protect wildlife

The Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service periodically issues revisions to its publications. The most current edition is made available. For access to an earlier edition, if available for this title, please contact the Oklahoma State University Library Archives by email at [email protected] or by phone at 405-744-6311

Competitive Performance of Transgenic Wheat Resistant to Powdery Mildew

Genetically modified (GM) plants offer an ideal model system to study the influence of single genes that confer constitutive resistance to pathogens on the ecological behaviour of plants. We used phytometers to study competitive interactions between GM lines of spring wheat Triticum aestivum carrying such genes and control lines. We hypothesized that competitive performance of GM lines would be reduced due to enhanced transgene expression under pathogen levels typically encountered in the field. The transgenes pm3b from wheat (resistance against powdery mildew Blumeria graminis) or chitinase and glucanase genes from barley (resistance against fungi in general) were introduced with the ubiquitin promoter from maize (pm3b and chitinase genes) or the actin promoter from rice (glucanase gene). Phytometers of 15 transgenic and non-transgenic wheat lines were transplanted as seedlings into plots sown with the same 15 lines as competitive environments and subject to two soil nutrient levels. Pm3b lines had reduced mildew incidence compared with control lines. Chitinase and chitinase/glucanase lines showed the same high resistance to mildew as their control in low-nutrient treatment and slightly lower mildew rates than the control in high-nutrient environment. Pm3b lines were weaker competitors than control lines. This resulted in reduced yield and seed number. The Pm3b line with the highest transgene expression had 53.2% lower yield than the control whereas the Pm3b line which segregated in resistance and had higher mildew rates showed only minor costs under competition. The line expressing both chitinase and glucanase genes also showed reduced yield and seed number under competition compared with its control. Our results suggest that single transgenes conferring constitutive resistance to pathogens can have ecological costs and can weaken plant competitiveness even in the presence of the pathogen. The magnitude of these costs appears related to the degree of expression of the transgenes

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Effects of eight neuropsychiatric copy number variants on human brain structure

Many copy number variants (CNVs) confer risk for the same range of neurodevelopmental symptoms and psychiatric conditions including autism and schizophrenia. Yet, to date neuroimaging studies have typically been carried out one mutation at a time, showing that CNVs have large effects on brain anatomy. Here, we aimed to characterize and quantify the distinct brain morphometry effects and latent dimensions across 8 neuropsychiatric CNVs. We analyzed T1-weighted MRI data from clinically and non-clinically ascertained CNV carriers (deletion/duplication) at the 1q21.1 (n = 39/28), 16p11.2 (n = 87/78), 22q11.2 (n = 75/30), and 15q11.2 (n = 72/76) loci as well as 1296 non-carriers (controls). Case-control contrasts of all examined genomic loci demonstrated effects on brain anatomy, with deletions and duplications showing mirror effects at the global and regional levels. Although CNVs mainly showed distinct brain patterns, principal component analysis (PCA) loaded subsets of CNVs on two latent brain dimensions, which explained 32 and 29% of the variance of the 8 Cohen’s d maps. The cingulate gyrus, insula, supplementary motor cortex, and cerebellum were identified by PCA and multi-view pattern learning as top regions contributing to latent dimension shared across subsets of CNVs. The large proportion of distinct CNV effects on brain morphology may explain the small neuroimaging effect sizes reported in polygenic psychiatric conditions. Nevertheless, latent gene brain morphology dimensions will help subgroup the rapidly expanding landscape of neuropsychiatric variants and dissect the heterogeneity of idiopathic conditions

Correction to: Cluster identification, selection, and description in Cluster randomized crossover trials: the PREP-IT trials

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Are There Long-Term Literal Copies of Visually Presented Words?

Tested the strong version of the literal-copy hypothesis which predicts that a virtual image preserving the details of the perceptual experience generated during the reading of a word is stored in memory with perfectly correlated retention for all visual attributes of the stimulus. 96 undergraduates, instructed to retain information about 0, 1, or 2 visual properties of words, were later tested for item and input-case and color retention. Findings did not support the hypothesis, but were consistent with a model which assumes that each visual attribute is stored independently in abstract propositional form

Memory for Modality: Within Modality Discrimination Is Not Automatic

In 2 experiments, investigated the automaticity of attribute memory; Ss were a total of 78 high school and college students. Results show that when instructed to attend to the case and color in which words were presented, Ss\u27 retention input mode improved, but their recognition performance was depressed. Allocating attention to input mode thus appears to result in diminished attention to semantic aspects of words. When case and color were uncorrelated with taxonomic category, memory for mode of input dropped to chance levels. When case and color were redundant with taxonomic category, memory for mode of input was better than chance. Findings suggest, however, that this result was due to rule learning rather than to memory for input mode for individual items

Trade-Off Between Memory for Verbal Items and Their Visual Attributes

In an experiment with 96 high school students, instructions to attend to the case and color in which words were presented led to improved retention of these visual attributes but depressed recognition performance. This trade-off between item and attribute memory occurred at 3 presentation rates (1.5, 5.5, and 10.5 sec/item), suggesting that visual attributes of verbal stimuli are rarely stored unless Ss expect that knowledge of physical form will be useful later. Visual attributes of high-imagery words were retained better than visual attributes of low-imagery words by Ss instructed to attend to case and color, but not by Ss asked only to attend to word meaning. Implications for the hypothesis that visually presented verbal stimuli are stored as literal copies are discussed