Older and wiser? First year BDS graduate entry students and their views on using social media and professional practice

Introduction The use of social media sites (SMS) has increased exponentially since their creation and introduction in the early 2000s. The number of regular users of SMS is estimated at over two billion people worldwide. Ethical and legal guidelines exert an additional responsibility on the behaviour of both graduate and undergraduate dentists when compared to members of the general public with some assumption that life experience can offer some insight into attitudes about online use of social media in relation to professional practice. Aim We set out to explore the views of the first year graduate entry programme students at the University of Central Lancashire and their use of SMS together with their opinions on what they consider to be professional online behaviour. Methods A mixed-methods approach was adopted with a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews which were designed to elicit the students' opinions. Results For this group of students, 100% were using social media sites and some were aware of some of their limitations and possible impact on their careers. There was some rather superficial knowledge of what is and is not professional to post via social media, however, students were not fully aware about the legal and ethical guidelines in place in relation to the topic. Conclusion Results from this study present an opportunity and a challenge for educators to incorporate additional details not only about professionalism and ethical and legal aspects within the undergraduate curriculum but more specific emphasis on the use of social media as part of the undergraduate BDS course

Versatile Assays for High Throughput Screening for Activators or Inhibitors of Intracellular Proteases and Their Cellular Regulators

BACKGROUND: Intracellular proteases constitute a class of promising drug discovery targets. Methods for high throughput screening against these targets are generally limited to in vitro biochemical assays that can suffer many technical limitations, as well as failing to capture the biological context of proteases within the cellular pathways that lead to their activation. METHODS #ENTITYSTARTX00026; FINDINGS: We describe here a versatile system for reconstituting protease activation networks in yeast and assaying the activity of these pathways using a cleavable transcription factor substrate in conjunction with reporter gene read-outs. The utility of these versatile assay components and their application for screening strategies was validated for all ten human Caspases, a family of intracellular proteases involved in cell death and inflammation, including implementation of assays for high throughput screening (HTS) of chemical libraries and functional screening of cDNA libraries. The versatility of the technology was also demonstrated for human autophagins, cysteine proteases involved in autophagy. CONCLUSIONS: Altogether, the yeast-based systems described here for monitoring activity of ectopically expressed mammalian proteases provide a fascile platform for functional genomics and chemical library screening