Risk of Performance and Behavioral Health Decrements Due to Inadequate Cooperation, Coordination, Communication, and Psychosocial Adaptation within a Team

A team is defined as: "two or more individuals who interact socially and adaptively, have shared or common goals, and hold meaningful task interdependences; it is hierarchically structured and has a limited life span; in it expertise and roles are distributed; and it is embedded within an organization/environmental context that influences and is influenced by ongoing processes and performance outcomes" (Salas, Stagl, Burke, & Goodwin, 2007, p. 189). From the NASA perspective, a team is commonly understood to be a collection of individuals that is assigned to support and achieve a particular mission. Thus, depending on context, this definition can encompass both the spaceflight crew and the individuals and teams in the larger multi-team system who are assigned to support that crew during a mission. The Team Risk outcomes of interest are predominantly performance related, with a secondary emphasis on long-term health; this is somewhat unique in the NASA HRP in that most Risk areas are medically related and primarily focused on long-term health consequences. In many operational environments (e.g., aviation), performance is assessed as the avoidance of errors. However, the research on performance errors is ambiguous. It implies that actions may be dichotomized into "correct" or "incorrect" responses, where incorrect responses or errors are always undesirable. Researchers have argued that this dichotomy is a harmful oversimplification, and it would be more productive to focus on the variability of human performance and how organizations can manage that variability (Hollnagel, Woods, & Leveson, 2006) (Category III1). Two problems occur when focusing on performance errors: 1) the errors are infrequent and, therefore, difficult to observe and record; and 2) the errors do not directly correspond to failure. Research reveals that humans are fairly adept at correcting or compensating for performance errors before such errors result in recognizable or recordable failures. Astronauts are notably adept high performers. Most failures are recorded only when multiple, small errors occur and humans are unable to recognize and correct or compensate for these errors in time to prevent a failure (Dismukes, Berman, Loukopoulos, 2007) (Category III). More commonly, observers record variability in levels of performance. Some teams commit no observable errors but fail to achieve performance objectives or perform only adequately, while other teams commit some errors but perform spectacularly. Successful performance, therefore, cannot be viewed as simply the absence of errors or the avoidance of failure Johnson Space Center (JSC) Joint Leadership Team, 2008). While failure is commonly attributed to making a major error, focusing solely on the elimination of error(s) does not significantly reduce the risk of failure. Failure may also occur when performance is simply insufficient or an effort is incapable of adjusting sufficiently to a contextual change (e.g., changing levels of autonomy)

Guidelines to support HIV-affected individuals and couples to achieve pregnancy safely: Update 2018

No abstract available

The Use of Phage-Displayed Peptide Libraries to Develop Tumor-Targeting Drugs

Monoclonal antibodies have been successfully utilized as cancer-targeting therapeutics and diagnostics, but the efficacies of these treatments are limited in part by the size of the molecules and non-specific uptake by the reticuloendothelial system. Peptides are much smaller molecules that can specifically target cancer cells and as such may alleviate complications with antibody therapy. Although many endogenous and exogenous peptides have been developed into clinical therapeutics, only a subset of these consists of cancer-targeting peptides. Combinatorial biological libraries such as bacteriophage-displayed peptide libraries are a resource of potential ligands for various cancer-related molecular targets. Target-binding peptides can be affinity selected from complex mixtures of billions of displayed peptides on phage and further enriched through the biopanning process. Various cancer-specific ligands have been isolated by in vitro, in vivo, and ex vivo screening methods. As several peptides derived from phage-displayed peptide library screenings have been developed into therapeutics in current clinical trials, which validates peptide-targeting potential, the use of phage display to identify cancer-targeting therapeutics should be further exploited

A communal catalogue reveals Earth's multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world's importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth's microbial diversity.Peer reviewe

A communal catalogue reveals Earth’s multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world’s importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth’s microbial diversity