Data

Project data file in SPSS format, redacted for sharin

Human milk oligosaccharides reduce Entamoeba histolytica attachment and cytotoxicity in vitro.

Human milk oligosaccharides (HMO), complex sugars that are highly abundant in breast milk, block viral and bacterial attachment to the infant's intestinal epithelium and lower the risk of infections. We hypothesised that HMO also prevent infections with the protozoan parasite Entamoeba histolytica, as its major virulence factor is a lectin that facilitates parasite attachment and cytotoxicity and binds galactose (Gal) and N-acetyl-galactosamine. HMO contain Gal, are only minimally digested in the small intestine and reach the colon, the site of E. histolytica infection. The objective of the present study was to investigate whether HMO reduce E. histolytica attachment and cytotoxicity. Our in vitro results show that physiological concentrations of isolated, pooled HMO detach E. histolytica by more than 80 %. In addition, HMO rescue E. histolytica-induced destruction of human intestinal epithelial HT-29 cells in a dose-dependent manner. The cytoprotective effects were structure-specific. Lacto-N-tetraose with its terminal Gal rescued up to 80 % of the HT-29 cells, while HMO with fucose α1-2-linked to the terminal Gal had no effect. Galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS), which also contain terminal Gal and are currently added to infant formula to mimic some of the beneficial effects of HMO, completely abolished E. histolytica attachment and cytotoxicity at 8 mg/ml. Although our results need to be confirmed in vivo, they may provide one explanation for why breast-fed infants are at lower risk of E. histolytica infections. HMO and GOS are heat tolerant, stable, safe and in the case of GOS, inexpensive, which could make them valuable candidates as alternative preventive and therapeutic anti-amoebic agents

Understanding and mapping the psychosocial wellbeing support needs of veteran family members across the UK: a multi-methods study

The UK Veterans Family Study (UKVFS) is a cross- institutional, multi-stage, collaborative research project aimed at better understanding the psychosocial health and wellbeing needs of family members of veterans throughout the UK. The first published report of the UKVFS was a systematic review of studies,1 designed to provide a comprehensive picture of research conducted so far with this demographic amongst 5-Eyes alliance countries. This report, the second produced by the UKVFS, aims to address existing research gaps, in the veterans family space. It does so by firstly mapping the landscape of psychosocial wellbeing support provisions for family members of veterans across the UK. The mapping exercise was conducted in three sequential stages – a) searches of multiple databases of military and veteran charities and word-of-mouth referrals, b) searches of the web presence of each organisation, and c) searches of the Charity Commissions for England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland and Companies House websites to determine size, location and structure of each organisation including the size, location and number of organisations actively providing services to this demographic in each of the four nations. Qualitative interviews with family members and service providers across the UK then offered in-depth perspectives on how family members’ psychosocial wellbeing needs are currently being supported. Perceptions of accessibility and availability of existing support services, the degree of structure and formality of support services and how support services were meeting un/under met needs and preferences of family members were also explored

Computational and Statistical Analyses of Insertional Polymorphic Endogenous Retroviruses in a Non-Model Organism

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are a class of transposable elements found in all vertebrate genomes that contribute substantially to genomic functional and structural diversity. A host species acquires an ERV when an exogenous retrovirus infects a germ cell of an individual and becomes part of the genome inherited by viable progeny. ERVs that colonized ancestral lineages are fixed in contemporary species. However, in some extant species, ERV colonization is ongoing, which results in variation in ERV frequency in the population. To study the consequences of ERV colonization of a host genome, methods are needed to assign each ERV to a location in a species’ genome and determine which individuals have acquired each ERV by descent. Because well annotated reference genomes are not widely available for all species, de novo clustering approaches provide an alternative to reference mapping that are insensitive to differences between query and reference and that are amenable to mobile element studies in both model and non-model organisms. However, there is substantial uncertainty in both identifying ERV genomic position and assigning each unique ERV integration site to individuals in a population. We present an analysis suitable for detecting ERV integration sites in species without the need for a reference genome. Our approach is based on improved de novo clustering methods and statistical models that take the uncertainty of assignment into account and yield a probability matrix of shared ERV integration sites among individuals. We demonstrate that polymorphic integrations of a recently identified endogenous retrovirus in deer reflect contemporary relationships among individuals and populations