Agricultural producer perceptions of climate change and climate education needs for the Central Great Plains

Citation: Hibbs, Amber Campbell, Daniel Kahl, Lisa PytlikZillig, Ben Champion, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Timothy Steffensmeier, Charles W. Rice, and Kenneth Hubbard. “Agricultural Producer Perceptions of Climate Change and Climate Education Needs for the Central Great Plains.” Journal of Extension 52, no. 3 (June 2014). https://www.joe.org/joe/2014june/a2.php.The Central Great Plains Climate Education Partnership conducted focus groups throughout Kansas to gain a better understanding of farmer perceptions and attitudes towards climate change education. Results indicate concern about climatic changes, even if producers are unsure that "human caused climate change" is occurring. Participants indicated they would like access to information through Web-based programs that allow them to manipulate variables relevant to their area and situation. Participants prefer locally relevant information and identified Extension agents as trusted educators. The study provided an expanded understanding of agricultural producer perceptions that will be valuable to individuals or organizations providing climate education

Vomocytosis: Too Much Booze, Base, or Calcium?

Macrophages are well known for their phagocytic activity and their role in innate immune responses. Macrophages eat non-self particles, via a variety of mechanisms, and typically break down internalized cargo into small macromolecules. However, some pathogenic agents have the ability to evade this endosomal degradation through a nonlytic exocytosis process termed vomocytosis. This phenomenon has been most often studied for Cryptococcus neoformans, a yeast that causes roughly 180,000 deaths per year, primarily in immunocompromised (e.g., human immunodeficiency virus [HIV]) patients. Existing dogma purports that vomocytosis involves distinctive cellular pathways and intracellular physicochemical cues in the host cell during phagosomal maturation. Moreover, it has been observed that the immunological state of the individual and macrophage phenotype affect vomocytosis outcomes. Here we compile the current knowledge on the factors (with respect to the phagocytic cell) that promote vomocytosis of C. neoformans from macrophages

Cancer immunoediting by the innate immune system in the absence of adaptive immunity

Cancer immunoediting is the process whereby immune cells protect against cancer formation by sculpting the immunogenicity of developing tumors. Although the full process depends on innate and adaptive immunity, it remains unclear whether innate immunity alone is capable of immunoediting. To determine whether the innate immune system can edit tumor cells in the absence of adaptive immunity, we compared the incidence and immunogenicity of 3'methylcholanthrene-induced sarcomas in syngeneic wild-type, RAG2, and RAG2x γc mice. We found that innate immune cells could manifest cancer immunoediting activity in the absence of adaptive immunity. This activity required natural killer (NK) cells and interferon γ (IFN-γ), which mediated the induction of M1 macrophages. M1 macrophages could be elicited by administration of CD40 agonists, thereby restoring editing activity in RAG2x γc mice. Our results suggest that in the absence of adaptive immunity, NK cell production of IFN-γ induces M1 macrophages, which act as important effectors during cancer immunoediting

Beyond tissueInfo: functional prediction using tissue expression profile similarity searches

We present and validate tissue expression profile similarity searches (TEPSS), a computational approach to identify transcripts that share similar tissue expression profiles to one or more transcripts in a group of interest. We evaluated TEPSS for its ability to discriminate between pairs of transcripts coding for interacting proteins and non-interacting pairs. We found that ordering protein–protein pairs by TEPSS score produces sets significantly enriched in reported pairs of interacting proteins [interacting versus non-interacting pairs, Odds-ratio (OR) = 157.57, 95% confidence interval (CI) (36.81–375.51) at 1% coverage, employing a large dataset of about 50 000 human protein interactions]. When used with multiple transcripts as input, we find that TEPSS can predict non-obvious members of the cytosolic ribosome. We used TEPSS to predict S-nitrosylation (SNO) protein targets from a set of brain proteins that undergo SNO upon exposure to physiological levels of S-nitrosoglutathione in vitro. While some of the top TEPSS predictions have been validated independently, several of the strongest SNO TEPSS predictions await experimental validation. Our data indicate that TEPSS is an effective and flexible approach to functional prediction. Since the approach does not use sequence similarity, we expect that TEPSS will be useful for various gene discovery applications. TEPSS programs and data are distributed at http://icb.med.cornell.edu/crt/tepss/index.xml

A visual analytics approach for understanding biclustering results from microarray data

Abstract Background Microarray analysis is an important area of bioinformatics. In the last few years, biclustering has become one of the most popular methods for classifying data from microarrays. Although biclustering can be used in any kind of classification problem, nowadays it is mostly used for microarray data classification. A large number of biclustering algorithms have been developed over the years, however little effort has been devoted to the representation of the results. Results We present an interactive framework that helps to infer differences or similarities between biclustering results, to unravel trends and to highlight robust groupings of genes and conditions. These linked representations of biclusters can complement biological analysis and reduce the time spent by specialists on interpreting the results. Within the framework, besides other standard representations, a visualization technique is presented which is based on a force-directed graph where biclusters are represented as flexible overlapped groups of genes and conditions. This microarray analysis framework (BicOverlapper), is available at http://vis.usal.es/bicoverlapper Conclusion The main visualization technique, tested with different biclustering results on a real dataset, allows researchers to extract interesting features of the biclustering results, especially the highlighting of overlapping zones that usually represent robust groups of genes and/or conditions. The visual analytics methodology will permit biology experts to study biclustering results without inspecting an overwhelming number of biclusters individually.</p

Pediatric immunization-related safety incidents in primary care: A mixed methods analysis of a national database.

Background: Children are scheduled to receive 18–20 immunizations before their 18th birthday in England and Wales; this approximates to 13 million vaccines administered per annum. Each immunization represents a potential opportunity for immunization-related error and effective immunization is imperative to maintain the public health benefit from immunization. Using data from a national reporting system, this study aimed to characterize pediatric immunization-related safety incident reports from primary care in England and Wales between 2002 and 2013. Methods: A cross-sectional mixed methods study was undertaken. This comprised reading the free-text of incident reports and applying codes to describe incident type, potential contributory factors, harm severity, and incident outcomes. A subsequent thematic analysis was undertaken to interpret the most commonly occurring codes, such as those describing the incident, events leading up to it and reported contributory factors, within the contexts they were described. Results: We identified 1745 reports and most (n = 1077, 61.7%) described harm outcomes including three deaths, 67 reports of moderate harm and 1007 reports of low harm. Failure of timely vaccination was the potential cause of three child deaths from meningitis and pneumonia, and described in a further 113 reports. Vaccine administration incidents included the wrong number of doses (n = 476, 27.3%), wrong timing (n = 294, 16.8%), and wrong vaccine (n = 249, 14.3%). Documentation failures were frequently implicated. Socially and medically vulnerable children were commonly described. Conclusion: This is the largest examination of reported contributory factors for immunization-related patient safety incidents in children. Our findings suggest investments in IT infrastructure to support data linkage and identification of risk predictors, development of consultation models that promote the role of parents in mitigating safety incidents, and improvement efforts to adapt and adopt best practices from elsewhere, are needed to mitigate future immunization-related patient safety incidents. These priorities are particularly pressing for vulnerable patient groups.8 page(s

Fostering Climate Change Education in the Central Great Plains: A Public Engagement Approach

Despite its increasing importance for sustainability, building widespread competency in the basic principles of climate literacy among the United States general public is a great challenge. This article describes the methods and results of a public engagement approach to planning climate change education in the Central Great Plains of the United States. Our approach incorporated contextual and lay expertise approaches to public engagement with a focus on supporting the self-determination of the specific stakeholder groups–rural producers, educators, and community members. An integration of results from the focus groups reveal that our approach was received positively and elicited a number of important themes describing stakeholders’ concerns, interests, and needs pertaining to climate change education. Focus group participants were concerned about climate change, cautious regarding conflicting sources of information, and interested in learning more about climate science and climate change impacts. Across all stakeholder groups, participants consistently expressed a desire for trustworthy, personally- and locally-relevant, easy-to-access information that they could evaluate and use in applications as they saw fit. Although these findings do not yet provide a recipe for concrete educational programming, when viewed through the lenses of social, cognitive and educational theories, they suggest a number of important directions for future research and program implementation that are needed in order to advance the understanding of effective climate change education