Phosphoenolpyruvate phosphomutase activity in an L-phosphonoalanine-mineralizing strain of Burkholderia cepacia

A strain of Burkholderia cepacia isolated by enrichment culture utilized l-2-amino-3-phosphonopropionic acid (phosphonoalanine) at concentrations up to 20 mM as a carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus source in a phosphate-insensitive manner. Cells contained phosphoenolpyruvate phosphomutase activity, presumed to be responsible for cleavage of the C—P bond of phosphonopyruvate, the transamination product of l-phosphonoalanine; this was inducible in the presence of phosphonoalanine

How young can children reliably and validly self-report their health-related quality of life?: An analysis of 8,591 children across age subgroups with the PedsQL™ 4.0 Generic Core Scales

BACKGROUND: The last decade has evidenced a dramatic increase in the development and utilization of pediatric health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measures in an effort to improve pediatric patient health and well-being and determine the value of healthcare services. The emerging paradigm shift toward patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in clinical trials has provided the opportunity to further emphasize the value and essential need for pediatric patient self-reported outcomes measurement. Data from the PedsQL™ Database(SM )were utilized to test the hypothesis that children as young as 5 years of age can reliably and validly report their HRQOL. METHODS: The sample analyzed represented child self-report age data on 8,591 children ages 5 to 16 years from the PedsQL™ 4.0 Generic Core Scales Database(SM). Participants were recruited from general pediatric clinics, subspecialty clinics, and hospitals in which children were being seen for well-child checks, mild acute illness, or chronic illness care (n = 2,603, 30.3%), and from a State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in California (n = 5,988, 69.7%). RESULTS: Items on the PedsQL™ 4.0 Generic Core Scales had minimal missing responses for children as young as 5 years old, supporting feasibility. The majority of the child self-report scales across the age subgroups, including for children as young as 5 years, exceeded the minimum internal consistency reliability standard of 0.70 required for group comparisons, while the Total Scale Scores across the age subgroups approached or exceeded the reliability criterion of 0.90 recommended for analyzing individual patient scale scores. Construct validity was demonstrated utilizing the known groups approach. For each PedsQL™ scale and summary score, across age subgroups, including children as young as 5 years, healthy children demonstrated a statistically significant difference in HRQOL (better HRQOL) than children with a known chronic health condition, with most effect sizes in the medium to large effect size range. CONCLUSION: The results demonstrate that children as young as the 5 year old age subgroup can reliably and validly self-report their HRQOL when given the opportunity to do so with an age-appropriate instrument. These analyses are consistent with recent FDA guidelines which require instrument development and validation testing for children and adolescents within fairly narrow age groupings and which determine the lower age limit at which children can provide reliable and valid responses across age categories

Addressing social issues in a universal HIV test and treat intervention trial (ANRS 12249 TasP) in South Africa: methods for appraisal

Background: The Universal HIV Test and Treat (UTT) strategy represents a challenge for science, but is also a challenge for individuals and societies. Are repeated offers of provider-initiated HIV testing and immediate antiretroviral therapy (ART) socially-acceptable and can these become normalized over time? Can UTT be implemented without potentially adding to individual and community stigma, or threatening individual rights? What are the social, cultural and economic implications of UTT for households and communities? And can UTT be implemented within capacity constraints and other threats to the overall provision of HIV services? The answers to these research questions will be critical for routine implementation of UTT strategies. Methods/design: A social science research programme is nested within the ANRS 12249 Treatment-as-Prevention (TasP) cluster-randomised trial in rural South Africa. The programme aims to inform understanding of the (i) social, economic and environmental factors affecting uptake of services at each step of the continuum of HIV prevention, treatment and care and (ii) the causal impacts of the TasP intervention package on social and economic factors at the individual, household, community and health system level. We describe a multidisciplinary, multi-level, mixed-method research protocol that includes individual, household, community and clinic surveys, and combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Discussion: The UTT strategy is changing the overall approach to HIV prevention, treatment and care, and substantial social consequences may be anticipated, such as changes in social representations of HIV transmission, prevention, HIV testing and ART use, as well as changes in individual perceptions and behaviours in terms of uptake and frequency of HIV testing and ART initiation at high CD4. Triangulation of social science studies within the ANRS 12249 TasP trial will provide comprehensive insights into the acceptability and feasibility of the TasP intervention package at individual, community, patient and health system level, to complement the trial's clinical and epidemiological outcomes. It will also increase understanding of the causal impacts of UTT on social and economic outcomes, which will be critical for the long-term sustainability and routine UTT implementation. Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov: NCT01509508; South African Trial Register: DOH-27-0512-3974

A Forecasting Model to Predict the Demand of Roses in an Ecuadorian Small Business Under Uncertain Scenarios

[EN] Ecuador is worldwide considered as one of the main natural flower producers and exporters ¿being roses the most salient ones. Such a fact has naturally led the emergence of small and medium sized companies devoted to the production of quality roses in the Ecuadorian highlands, which intrinsically entails resource usage optimization. One of the first steps towards optimizing the use of resources is to forecast demand, since it enables a fair perspective of the future, in such a manner that the in-advance raw materials supply can be previewed against eventualities, resources usage can be properly planned, as well as the misuse can be avoided. Within this approach, the problem of forecasting the supply of roses was solved into two phases: the first phase consists of the macro-forecast of the total amount to be exported by the Ecuadorian flower sector by the year 2020, using multi-layer neural networks. In the second phase, the monthly demand for the main rose varieties offered by the study company was micro-forecasted by testing seven models. In addition, a Bayesian network model is designed, which takes into consideration macroeconomic aspects, the level of employability in Ecuador and weather-related aspects. This Bayesian network provided satisfactory results without the need for a large amount of historical data and at a low-computational cost.Authors of this publication acknowledge the contribution of the Project 691249, RUC-APS ¿Enhancing and implementing Knowledge based ICT solutions within high Risk and Uncertain Conditions for Agriculture Production Systems¿ (www.ruc-aps.eu), funded by the European Union under their funding scheme H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015. In addition, the authors are greatly grateful by the support given by the SDAS Research Group (www.sdas-group.com)Herrera-Granda, ID.; Lorente-Leyva, LL.; Peluffo-Ordóñez, DH.; Alemany Díaz, MDM. (2021). A Forecasting Model to Predict the Demand of Roses in an Ecuadorian Small Business Under Uncertain Scenarios. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 12566:245-258. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64580-9_21S24525812566Asociación de Productores y Exportadores de Flores: Inicio – Expoflores. https://expoflores.com/Palacios, J., Rosero, D.: Análisis de las condiciones climáticas registradas en el Ecuador continental en el año 2013 y su impacto en el sector agrícola. Estud. e Investig. meteorológicas. Ina. Inst. Nac. Meteorol. e Hidrol. Ecuador, 28, p. (2014)Hidalgo-Proaño, M.: Variabilidad climática interanual sobre el Ecuador asociada a ENOS. CienciAmérica 6, 42–47 (2017)Ritchie, J.W., Abawi, G.Y., Dutta, S.C., Harris, T.R., Bange, M.: Risk management strategies using seasonal climate forecasting in irrigated cotton production: a tale of stochastic dominance. Aust. J. Agric. Resour. 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Syst. 106, 33–45 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2011.10.005Scott, S.L., Varian, H.R.: Predicting the present with bayesian structural time series. Available SSRN 2304426 (2013)Prudhomme, C., Shaffrey, L., Woollings, T., Jackson, C., Fowler, H., Anderson, B.: IMPETUS: Improving predictions of drought for user decision-making. International Conference on Drought: Research and Science-Policy Interfacing, 2015. pp. 273–278. CRC Press/Balkema, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom (2015)Wiles, P., Enke, D.: A hybrid neuro-fuzzy model to forecast the Soybean complex. International Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Management 2015, ASEM 2015. pp. 1–5. American Society for Engineering Management, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Department, United States (2015)Hansen, B.G., Li, Y.: An analysis of past world market prices of feed and milk and predictions for the future. Agribusiness 33, 175–193 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1002/agr.21474Johnson, M.D., Hsieh, W.W., Cannon, A.J., Davidson, A., Bedard, F.: Crop yield forecasting on the Canadian Prairies by remotely sensed vegetation indices and machine learning methods. Agric. For. Meteorol. 218, 74–84 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2015.11.003Chen, J., Yang, J., Zhao, J., Xu, F., Shen, Z., Zhang, L.: Energy demand forecasting of the greenhouses using nonlinear models based on model optimized prediction method. Neurocomputing 174, 1087–1100 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2015.09.105Fodor, N., et al.: Integrating plant science and crop modeling: assessment of the impact of climate change on soybean and maize production. Plant Cell Physiol. 58, 1833–1847 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1093/pcp/pcx141Chapman, R., et al.: Using Bayesian networks to predict future yield functions with data from commercial oil palm plantations: a proof of concept analysis. Comput. Electron. Agric. 151, 338–348 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2018.06.006Lara-Estrada, L., Rasche, L., Sucar, L.E., Schneider, U.A.: Inferring Missing Climate Data for Agricultural Planning Using Bayesian Networks. LAND. 7 (2018). https://doi.org/10.3390/land7010004Abdelaal, H.S.A., Thilmany, D.: Grains production prospects and long run food security in Egypt. Sustain. 11 (2019). https://doi.org/10.3390/su11164457Kusunose, Y., Ma, L., Van Sanford, D.: User responses to imperfect forecasts: findings from an experiment with Kentucky wheat farmers. Weather. Clim. Soc. 11, 791–808 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1175/wcas-d-18-0135.1Kadigi, I.L., et al.: Forecasting yields, prices and net returns for main cereal crops in Tanzania as probability distributions: a multivariate empirical (MVE) approach. Agric. Syst. 180 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2019.102693McGrath, G., Rao, P.S.C., Mellander, P.-E., Kennedy, I., Rose, M., van Zwieten, L.: Real-time forecasting of pesticide concentrations in soil. Sci. Total Environ. 663, 709–717 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.01.401Yang, B., Xie, L.: Bayesian network modelling for “direct farm” mode based agricultural supply chain risk. Ekoloji 28, 2361–2368 (2019)Zaporozhtseva, L.A., Sabetova, T. V, Yu Fedulova, I.: Assessment of the uncertainty factors in computer modelling of an agricultural company operation. International Conference on Information Technologies in Business and Industries, ITBI 2019. Institute of Physics Publishing, Voronezh State Agrarian University, Michurina Str. 30, Voronezh, 394087, Russian Federation (2019)Box, G.E.P., Jenkins, G.M., Reinsel, G.C., Ljung, G.M.: Time series analysis: forecasting and control. Wiley (2015)Hanke, J., Wichern, D.: Business forecast. 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Recognition of Face Identity and Emotion in Expressive Specific Language Impairment

Objective: To study face and emotion recognition in children with mostly expressive specific language impairment (SLI-E). Subjects and Methods: A test movie to study perception and recognition of faces and mimic-gestural expression was applied to 24 children diagnosed as suffering from SLI-E and an age-matched control group of normally developing children. Results: Compared to a normal control group, the SLI-E children scored significantly worse in both the face and expression recognition tasks with a preponderant effect on emotion recognition. The performance of the SLI-E group could not be explained by reduced attention during the test session. Conclusion: We conclude that SLI-E is associated with a deficiency in decoding non-verbal emotional facial and gestural information, which might lead to profound and persistent problems in social interaction and development. Copyright (C) 2012 S. Karger AG, Base

Attentional Processing in C57BL/6J Mice Exposed to Developmental Vitamin D Deficiency

Epidemiological evidence suggests that Developmental Vitamin D (DVD) deficiency is associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia. DVD deficiency in mice is associated with altered behaviour, however there has been no detailed investigation of cognitive behaviours in DVD-deficient mice. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of DVD deficiency on a range of cognitive tasks assessing attentional processing in C57BL/6J mice. DVD deficiency was established by feeding female C57BL/6J mice a vitamin D-deficient diet from four weeks of age. After six weeks on the diet, vitamin D-deficient and control females were mated with vitamin D-normal males and upon birth of the pups, all dams were returned to a diet containing vitamin D. The adult offspring were tested on a range of cognitive behavioural tests, including the five-choice serial reaction task (5C-SRT) and five-choice continuous performance test (5C-CPT), as well as latent inhibition using a fear conditioning paradigm. DVD deficiency was not associated with altered attentional performance on the 5C-SRT. In the 5C-CPT DVD-deficient male mice exhibited an impairment in inhibiting repetitive responses by making more perseverative responses, with no changes in premature or false alarm responding. DVD deficiency did not affect the acquisition or retention of cued fear conditioning, nor did it affect the expression of latent inhibition using a fear conditioning paradigm. DVD-deficient mice exhibited no major impairments in any of the cognitive domains tested. However, impairments in perseverative responding in DVD-deficient mice may indicate that these animals have specific alterations in systems governing compulsive or reward-seeking behaviour

Fine sediment reduces vertical migrations of Gammarus pulex (Crustacea: Amphipoda) in response to surface water loss

Surface and subsurface sediments in river ecosystems are recognized as refuges that may promote invertebrate survival during disturbances such as floods and streambed drying. Refuge use is spatiotemporally variable, with environmental factors including substrate composition, in particular the proportion of fine sediment (FS), affecting the ability of organisms to move through interstitial spaces. We conducted a laboratory experiment to examine the effects of FS on the movement of Gammarus pulex Linnaeus (Crustacea: Amphipoda) into subsurface sediments in response to surface water loss. We hypothesized that increasing volumes of FS would impede and ultimately prevent individuals from migrating into the sediments. To test this hypothesis, the proportion of FS (1–2 mm diameter) present within an open gravel matrix (4–16 mm diameter) was varied from 10 to 20% by volume in 2.5% increments. Under control conditions (0% FS), 93% of individuals moved into subsurface sediments as the water level was reduced. The proportion of individuals moving into the subsurface decreased to 74% at 10% FS, and at 20% FS no individuals entered the sediments, supporting our hypothesis. These results demonstrate the importance of reducing FS inputs into river ecosystems and restoring FS-clogged riverbeds, to promote refuge use during increasingly common instream disturbances

Increased incidence of postoperative infections during prophylaxis with cephalothin compared to doxycycline in intestinal surgery

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The antibiotics used for prophylaxis during surgery may influence the rate of surgical site infections. Tetracyclines are attractive having a long half-life and few side effects when used in a single dose regimen. We studied the rate of surgical site infections during changing regimens of antibiotic prophylaxis in medium and major size surgery.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Prospective registration of surgical site infection following intestinal resections and hysterectomies was performed. Possible confounding procedure and patient related factors were registered. The study included 1541 procedures and 1489 controls. The registration included time periods when the regimen was changed from doxycycline to cephalothin and back again.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The SSI in the colorectal department increased from 19% to 30% (p = 0.002) when doxycycline was substituted with cephalothin and decreased to 17% when we changed back to doxycycline (p = 0.005). In the gynaecology department the surgical site infection rate did not increase significantly. Subgroup analysis showed major changes in infections in rectal resections from 20% to 35% (p = 0.02) and back to 12% (p = 0.003).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Doxycycline combined with metronidazole, is an attractive candidate for antibiotic prophylaxis in medium and major size intestinal surgery.</p

Bioavailability in soils

The consumption of locally-produced vegetables by humans may be an important exposure pathway for soil contaminants in many urban settings and for agricultural land use. Hence, prediction of metal and metalloid uptake by vegetables from contaminated soils is an important part of the Human Health Risk Assessment procedure. The behaviour of metals (cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, lead and zinc) and metalloids (arsenic, boron and selenium) in contaminated soils depends to a large extent on the intrinsic charge, valence and speciation of the contaminant ion, and soil properties such as pH, redox status and contents of clay and/or organic matter. However, chemistry and behaviour of the contaminant in soil alone cannot predict soil-to-plant transfer. Root uptake, root selectivity, ion interactions, rhizosphere processes, leaf uptake from the atmosphere, and plant partitioning are important processes that ultimately govern the accumulation ofmetals and metalloids in edible vegetable tissues. Mechanistic models to accurately describe all these processes have not yet been developed, let alone validated under field conditions. Hence, to estimate risks by vegetable consumption, empirical models have been used to correlate concentrations of metals and metalloids in contaminated soils, soil physico-chemical characteristics, and concentrations of elements in vegetable tissues. These models should only be used within the bounds of their calibration, and often need to be re-calibrated or validated using local soil and environmental conditions on a regional or site-specific basis.Mike J. McLaughlin, Erik Smolders, Fien Degryse, and Rene Rietr

Willingness to volunteer in a Phase I/II HIV vaccine trial: a study among police officers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Background: As HIV infection continues to be a public health problem, development of an effective preventive HIV vaccine is a priority. For the ultimate development of an AIDS vaccine, clinical trials are being conducted throughout the world. However, the process of developing the vaccine does not only depend on identification of suitable trial candidates, but also requires knowledge of incentives to participate in the community where the trial is being conducted. Therefore, the studies presented in this thesis are components of a HIV/AIDS and HIV vaccine trial project in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to address motivations and deterrents of participating in an HIV vaccine trial. Aim: To examine the motivations and deterrents for participating in preventive HIV vaccine trials. Methods: Data were collected from participants and volunteers who were considered for participation or participated in a phase I/II HIV vaccine trial. Four studies with different designs were conducted. In Study I, a semi-structured interview administered questionnaire was used to assess willingness to volunteer for a phase I/II HIV vaccine trial. A convenience sample of 329 individuals from the police force cohort was recruited for the study in 2005-2006. In Study II, focus group discussions were conducted to explore factors that would influence participation in an HIV vaccine trial among members of the police force in 2006-2007. In Study III, face-to-face interviews were used to identify reasons for declining to enrol in an HIV vaccine trial among those who agreed to enrol at the start and were randomized for the trial in 2007-2009. In Study IV, we used focus group discussions to evaluate the experiences of those who participated in the phase I/II trial in 2009. Results: Willingness to volunteer for an HIV vaccine trial was associated with intention to tell others, positive outcome of the trial, personal decision and expectation of obtaining protection against HIV infection. Participation in an HIV vaccine trial would be negatively influenced by sexual partners, friends, family members, relatives or parents (significant others) and fear of vaccine side-effects. Personal fears and negative influences from significant others were the main reasons for declining to enrol in an HIV vaccine trial. Despite the negative comments from significant others, volunteers in the HIV vaccine trial managed to stay on until the end of the trial as a result of personal decision and trial-related interventions. Conclusion: Personal decision is both a motivation to participate in an HIV vaccine trial and a reason to stay on until the end of trial. On the contrary, significant others are the deterrents to participation in the HIV vaccine trial and the reason for declining to enrol in the HIV vaccine trial. Awareness of these issues before trial implementation may help to maximize resource use and enhance retention of those who volunteer in the HIV vaccine trials