Intention of Collaboration among Dental Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Interpersonal communication skills (ICS) are crucial for effective dental practice and interprofessional collaboration. The current study aimed to assess the attitudes of Greek dental undergraduate students towards team working and their cooperation abilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. One-hundred and twenty-seven fourth-semester dental students (N1 = 127) out of 145 (N0) filled in the online survey placed on Google forms. The “Dental Students Cooperation Questionnaire” (DSC) consisted of 49 questions and was available for completion for one week during April 2020. Bivariate (ANOVA) and linear regression analysis of data revealed that mean scores of the questionnaire increased as the parents’ educational level also increased. Data analysis showed that dental students had the required ICS and the intention to collaborate with each other. Many participants managed to achieve group goals, were willing to support other members to fulfill the project’s goals, and there was no competition among them. They acknowledged the importance of feedback, the reward at the end of a group project and social media as a tool for teamworking communication. The students reported that the most important characteristics of an academic teacher were patience, willingness to cooperate, friendliness, politeness, willingness to help, accessibility and availability. It is suggested that group work should be included in the curriculum of dental schools to enhance the integration and evolution of students’ ICS, and the DSC questionnaire can be an effective tool to assess these skills

Nuclear Isoforms of Neurofibromin Are Required for Proper Spindle Organization and Chromosome Segregation

Mitotic spindles are highly organized, microtubule (MT)-based, transient structures that serve the fundamental function of unerring chromosome segregation during cell division and thus of genomic stability during tissue morphogenesis and homeostasis. Hence, a multitude of MT-associated proteins (MAPs) regulates the dynamic assembly of MTs in preparation for mitosis. Some tumor suppressors, normally functioning to prevent tumor development, have now emerged as significant MAPs. Among those, neurofibromin, the product of the Neurofibromatosis-1 gene (NF1), a major Ras GTPase activating protein (RasGAP) in neural cells, controls also the critical function of chromosome congression in astrocytic cellular contexts. Cell type- and development-regulated splicings may lead to the inclusion or exclusion of NF1exon51, which bears a nuclear localization sequence (NLS) for nuclear import at G2; yet the functions of the produced NLS and ΔNLS neurofibromin isoforms have not been previously addressed. By using a lentiviral shRNA system, we have generated glioblastoma SF268 cell lines with conditional knockdown of NLS or ΔNLS transcripts. In dissecting the roles of NLS or ΔNLS neurofibromins, we found that NLS-neurofibromin knockdown led to increased density of cytosolic MTs but loss of MT intersections, anastral spindles featuring large hollows and abnormal chromosome positioning, and finally abnormal chromosome segregation and increased micronuclei frequency. Therefore, we propose that NLS neurofibromin isoforms exert prominent mitotic functions