Personal Tutor Scheme : students' expectations and perception

Due to the more recent move to massification in the Higher Education (HE) sector, there has been an emerging necessity for supporting all students, especially those non-traditional students who are increasingly part of the student body. (Mairead, 2002) In the majority of the universities in the UK, this support is offered to students via the Personal Tutor Scheme (PTS), in which many institutions have invested time and resources. The personal tutor is a key point of reference for students during their time at University. In the HE sector, PTS are essentially considered an integral part of students’ services, which provide support to students in relation to study planning and bureaucratic issues, as well as academic writing and referencing, or CV preparation. Yet, the PTS is delivered by academics, who often concentrate on teaching, to the bad of spending time thinking about their roles as personal tutors and of adopting a more desirable holistic approach to the student. In an attempt to answer the question: ‘Why do students need personal tutors?’, Wheeler and Birtle (1993: 3) suggest aspects of the personal tutor system: “the purpose is primarily to provide an anchor on which the support system of the university rests. The personal tutor is needed by all students, including those who enjoy a relatively straightforward passage through university. The existence of this system in itself may reduce student anxiety. Personal tutors also provide assistance for students in need. There is also a welfare component and students may seek advice on a wide range of matters including housing, finance, emotional and relationship problems.” This project aims at seeking the students’ view and perceptions of the PTS. Questionnaires will be used as the data collection tool. Over 800 questionnaires are expected to be distributed with an expect response rate of 50%. This project is expect to provide a quantitative evaluation of students’ perception and expectations on the PTS. The research outcomes will inform HE providers across the UK about the best approach for PTS scheme that can optimize students’ engagement and benefit from the scheme

„Poesie ist das schlechte Gewissen der Literatur“. Durs Grünbeins Frankfurter Poetikvorlesung

Basic parameters of the naive antigen (Ag)-specific T-cell repertoire in humans remain poorly defined. Systematic characterization of this ‘ground state’ immunity in comparison with memory will allow a better understanding of clonal selection during immune challenge. Here, we used high-definition cell isolation from umbilical cord blood samples to establish the baseline frequency, phenotype and T-cell antigen receptor (TCR) repertoire of CD8+ T-cell precursor populations specific for a range of viral and self-derived Ags. Across the board, these precursor populations were phenotypically naive and occurred with hierarchical frequencies clustered by Ag specificity. The corresponding patterns of TCR architecture were highly ordered and displayed partial overlap with adult memory, indicating biased structuring of the T-cell repertoire during Ag-driven selection. Collectively, these results provide new insights into the complex nature and dynamics of the naive T-cell compartment

VDJdb: a curated database of T-cell receptor sequences with known antigen specificity

The ability to decode antigen specificities encapsulated in the sequences of rearranged T-cell receptor (TCR) genes is critical for our understanding of the adaptive immune system and promises significant advances in the field of translational medicine. Recent developments in high-throughput sequencing methods (immune repertoire sequencing technology, or RepSeq) and single-cell RNA sequencing technology have allowed us to obtain huge numbers of TCR sequences from donor samples and link them to T-cell phenotypes. However, our ability to annotate these TCR sequences still lags behind, owing to the enormous diversity of the TCR repertoire and the scarcity of available data on T-cell specificities. In this paper, we present VDJdb, a database that stores and aggregates the results of published T-cell specificity assays and provides a universal platform that couples antigen specificities with TCR sequences. We demonstrate that VDJdb is a versatile instrument for the annotation of TCR repertoire data, enabling a concatenated view of antigen-specific TCR sequence motifs. VDJdb can be accessed at https://vdjdb.cdr3.net and https://github.com/antigenomics/vdjdb-db