Developing a GamePlan: Libraries and Campus Athletic Departments

At a number of academic libraries, librarians have begun partnering with Athletic Departments to deliver information literacy to freshman athletes. This breakout session will present three different endeavors designed to meet the needs of the incoming student athlete. UCLA’s College Library has recently expanded collaboration with their athletic department from an annual one-shot for incoming football players to an ongoing partnership integrating library instruction and awareness into the freshman football and basketball teams’ total academic experience. Arizona State University faced two challenges: help student-athletes learn to use the Library\u27s resources, and train their tutors and mentors. Every ASU freshman athlete takes a one-credit Life Skills course, and working in collaboration with the Office of Student Athlete Development, the Instruction team had the unprecedented opportunity to help design the curriculum for a library-focused unit that would not only teach the athletes and their academic coaches about the available resources, but also require the students to write a reflective essay on the experience of searching for relevant information in a library resource. At Willamette University, the librarians have worked with the Athletic Department to create a program called “GamePlan”. The program, which now includes football, crew, basketball, soccer and volleyball teams, is in its third year. Each Fall semester is treated as an “information challenge”, broken up into seven different 20-minute sessions. The sessions, held in the evenings, are focused on individual topics with explicit objectives

AI is a viable alternative to high throughput screening: a 318-target study

: High throughput screening (HTS) is routinely used to identify bioactive small molecules. This requires physical compounds, which limits coverage of accessible chemical space. Computational approaches combined with vast on-demand chemical libraries can access far greater chemical space, provided that the predictive accuracy is sufficient to identify useful molecules. Through the largest and most diverse virtual HTS campaign reported to date, comprising 318 individual projects, we demonstrate that our AtomNet® convolutional neural network successfully finds novel hits across every major therapeutic area and protein class. We address historical limitations of computational screening by demonstrating success for target proteins without known binders, high-quality X-ray crystal structures, or manual cherry-picking of compounds. We show that the molecules selected by the AtomNet® model are novel drug-like scaffolds rather than minor modifications to known bioactive compounds. Our empirical results suggest that computational methods can substantially replace HTS as the first step of small-molecule drug discovery

Introducing Undergraduates to Research Datasets

This spring semester at Willamette University we had our first course on campus integrate research dataset deposits in an Environmental Science senior thesis class. To help with this process, the library worked with the faculty member to create a metadata template for a README file, provided instructions to the students on how to fill out the README file, and then created a customized submission process for the new collection in our Academic Commons (DSpace institutional repository) specifically for Student Research Datasets. In our session we will go over, the creation of the template file and instructions, the creation of the customized workflow, and describe how we will manage permissions on the datasets. We will also summarize how this first semester with undergraduate student researchers went, the issues we encountered (e.g. quantitative and qualitative datasets), and how they were resolved

Relation between sequence and structure in membrane proteins

Motivation: Integral polytopic membrane proteins contain only two types of folds in their transmembrane domains: -helix bundles and b-barrels. The increasing number of available crystal structures of these proteins permits an initial estimation of how sequence variability affects the structure conservation in their transmembrane domains. We, thus, aim to determine the pairwise sequence identity necessary to maintain the transmembrane molecular architectures compatible with the hydrophobic nature of the lipid bilayer. Results: Root-mean-square deviation (rmsd) and sequence identity were calculated from the structural alignments of pairs of homologous polytopic membrane proteins sharing the same fold. Analysis of these data reveals that transmembrane segment pairs with sequence identity in the so-called ‘twilight zone’ (20–35%) display high-structural similarity (rmsd51.5A° ). Moreover, a large group of b-barrel pairs with low-sequence identity (520%) still maintain a close structural similarity (rmsd52.5A° ). Thus, we conclude that fold preservation in transmembrane regions requires less sequence conservation than for globular proteins. These findings have direct implications in homology modeling of evolutionary-related membrane proteins

Health And Quality Of Life Of Aboriginal Residential School Survivors, Bella Coola Valley, 2001

Aboriginal health, comparative analysis design, inequality, residential schooling, quality of life,